2 Ways To Test If Your PC Can Run That Game [MUO Gaming}

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2 Ways To Test If Your PC Can Run That Game [MUO Gaming}

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Started 11 years ago by Anonymous
Latest reply from Buzz

Anonymous
Unregistered

I am going to post this article from makeuseof. I did a test for Diablo III which I (gasp) still haven't purchased. I couldn't get it to work in Firefox but it worked fine in Chrome. (Can you run it) Very impressive all the data given and help to update things. I didn't do the second one yet. Please go to the website to read the article for the graphics,charts, ect. yes, it requires an ActiveX/Java component.

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2 Ways To Test If Your PC Can Run That Game [MUO Gaming]

August 14, 2012
By Craig Snyder

can my pc run itFor the everyday, off-and-on PC gamer, knowing how to match your specifications to those that are recommended for playing certain games isn’t always the easiest task. How should you know if your GTX 550 is above or below a Radeon HD 6950? Problems like this, coupled with laziness, have probably cost some of us some cash that we wish we had back while we’re running a game at 10 FPS.

PC gaming is on the rise and has been for years. More and more of us are sitting down in front of our desktops thanks to games like Minecraft and services like Steam. Digital distribution hit the PC first and is slowly beginning to phase its way into the world of consoles. Not to mention, some games are just meant to be played using PC peripherals. Playing a first-person shooter without a mouse? That’s not for me!

When you buy a Nintendo Wii, you know that every game you buy will run perfectly on the console. We can’t say the same for the PC. We all have a different beast. In this post, I want to show you guys how you can know if your PC can run a game before you even buy it.
Can You Run It?

can my pc run it

CYRI is a web service brought to us by System Requirements Lab. It runs in the browser through an ActiveX/Java component (that is completely safe) and works on Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome. It’ll work on any version of Windows: XP, 2000, 2003, Vista, 7, etc. None of your information is collected and the analysis is extremely fast and accurate.

can my pc run that game

CYRI will test your computer for both the minimum and recommended requirements, which is really a great feature. Passing or failing the analysis based on just one of those benchmarks alone could definitely mislead the user.

can my pc run that game

Aside from your grade, CYRI also shows you how you score based on individual benchmarks like your CPU, RAM, video card, and more. Another great feature that could help you and I gauge if a game is at a playable level.

can my pc run that game

CYRI is the premiere service in this field and it’s never done me wrong. They do a great job of always adding new games and keeping the specifications and requirements of current games up to date.
YouGamers Game-o-Meter

can my computer run it

If CYRI won’t work on your system for some reason, or for any other reason that you’d like to try an alternative, give Game-o-Meter a try.

While the benchmarking isn’t as extensive as what CYRI has to offer, Game-o-Meter definitely gets the job done. Like CYRI, you’ll be prompted to install an ActiveX component in the browser.

can my computer run it

Running this component will allow the application setup to begin downloading in the background, and it should eventually pop up.

can my computer run it

Game-o-Meter is directly affiliated with FutureMark, so you know that the benchmarks are on point. The end result is a page like this:

can my pc run it

Below your analysis is also a link that you can use to share your results. This is especially useful if you’re looking for tech support or something like that. Here’s my link to the results above.

Which of these two services is your favorite? Let me know in the comments!

article

Posted 11 years ago #
mikiem2
Moderator

I'm not a gamer -- that part of my brain's broken -- so this is only an observation, rather than personal experience...

Forums/discussions about individual games &/or specific hardware, e.g. forums about ATI graphics cards drivers, can have invaluable info... you should at the least be able to find what other people are running & their experiences.

You do need to know if you can run a game on your hardware, but beyond that there are all sorts of gotcha's. One example was early on when ATI's 7xxx series was 1st released, & very high end cards that were certainly more than capable of playing several popular titles would/could not because of driver bugs. Something else I very often see reported -- games like Diablo III give you a different level of, I guess I'd call it visual experience, depending on your hardware & drivers. A setup meeting minimum specs is not going to show you anything like a top end rig running 4 $500+ graphics cards, yet that top end experience is what you'll most often see advertised. And once again, even if graphics hardware is up to the task, hardware &/or drivers may make many visual enhancements impossible for a particular game.

Posted 11 years ago #
Whiterabbit-uk
Games Guru

I've recently managed to fix two games that either wouldn't run on my new computer or ran appallingly badly. They were Fallout 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV. I have what most would consider a very good computer and it should run any game available at this time and should for at least three or four more years. Both games ran absolutely fine on one of my earlier computers with only a dual core 3.2GHz cpu, 6GB RAM and 875MB vRAM (though I wasn't able to max out the graphics on either game) I was having major problems running Fallout 3 on the new computer despite it being much faster, having almost three times as much system RAM and several times more vRAM. That is until I found out that it wouldn't run on quad core computers without a fix. The fix was actually very simple. A few lines in the config document (found in the My Games section of My dDcuments) needed to be changed so that the game saw my computer as a dual core (which I'd previously been using when I first purchased the game when it was released in 2008).

The second game, GTA IV did work, but for some reason the graphics were appalling. I have two decent graphic cards with a total of 6GB ofvRAM, massive overkill for any game at this time. Yet when I checked the graphics it was running on minimum settings. View distance was set to 17 (which equated to around 170 or 1700 meters I think). The maximum setting is 100. all the others such as shadows, water quality, textures etc were set to low and the resolution to 800x600. It stated that I had only 253MB of memory. Whenever I tried to reset it wouldn't let me.

After checking the Rockstar Social Club forums I discovered that the game didn't recognise any NVIDIA card with more than 1GB of vRAM. Again there was a simple fix that entailed me writng a simple line telling the game to read my video cards as 6GB. It worked like a treat and I'm now able to play the game with all settings maxed out for the first time since I purchased the game back in 2008.Yeaaah.

Posted 11 years ago #
mikiem2
Moderator

Glad to hear of your success, WR. Enjoy!

I know every time they release a new ATI driver there's all sorts of reports on which games are now broken, which are now fixed, which previous fixes or hacks were still needed & so on. I've gotta get back at it -- I've been backing everything up before the Tuesday updates, now with those done I'm backing everything up again prior to the ATI drivers they released early today.

Posted 11 years ago #
Buzz
Member

Thanks for the info, WR.

Posted 11 years ago #

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