Comment by rdujdjsjehy 2 days ago
This seems like that useless definition of "need" that completely discards any real standards for the sake of an argument. A 200 dollar computer at best is going to let you play low demand indie games and things with garbage mode settings for running on potatoes.
Would you say that your laptop can get 120fps on non-minimal settings while playing the current Call of Duty? What about Grand Theft Auto V or Overwatch?
I don't get 120fps on non-minimal settings with a PlayStation or Xbox, yet 150+ million people do all their gaming on those consoles (including almost half of Overwatch's player base according to some polls). That's not the test.
Would you say you can get 60fps on non-minimal settings on the current call of duty then?
> A 200 dollar computer at best is going to let you play low demand indie games and things with garbage mode settings for running on potatoes.
That's not true. I still regularly use an old Dell Latitude from almost 15 years ago sometimes - it cost under $150. I can do everything I need on it, even compile Firefox. I can't run most new AAA games, but can play a bunch of FPS games from about up until when it came out. It still plays CSGO just fine, for example.
The real advances in performance the last decade has been in GPU performance, not general performance.
What settings do you play CSGO on? And is it just CSGO or can you play Counterstrike 2?
Low to be fair, it depends how hot the laptop gets, but usual around 800x600 or 1024x768 and everything low quality. Not great compared to modern hardware, but not as useless as you were suggesting either.
Can't play CS2 because of it needing DirectX12 and the last driver for the video card not supporting it. I've wondered if it would work on Linux since DirectX isn't a factor but haven't tried yet.
$200 on eBay will get you a used laptop with a Core i7, 16GB RAM and SSD; essentially the same specs as my year-old $1000+ laptop, other than having a newer generation CPU. It'll play many brand new games at 720p or better and acceptable framerates.
I still use an original Microsoft Surface Pro pretty often, and can barely tell the difference between using it and that year-old PC for web browsing, document editing, and tablet-style gaming. The Surface Pro came out in 2013.