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I know that the Steam client will download and install to my laptop with minimum requirements, but do the games still require a powerful/gaming computer or can I run the games sufficiently with my laptop?

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What is your laptop model and system specs? – Force Flow Oct 19 '10 at 23:15
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When you say Minimum Requirements do you mean the Minimum Requirements for Steam to run, or the Minimum Requirements of the game? Keep in mind that each game has its own requirements, which can usually be found on the games page in the store. – AkkA Oct 19 '10 at 23:39

migrated from superuser.com Oct 20 '10 at 7:14

3 Answers

up vote 12 down vote

It'll depend on the hardware requirements for each individual game.

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Are any of them really that much, or will most work? Like Left 4 Dead, would that work on most? – gaurdingnome815 Oct 19 '10 at 21:08
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It varies very widely based on game. store.steampowered.com/app/500 the bottom of that page lists the system requirements for L4D (the first one) - you'd have to compare that to the laptop's hardware. – Kara Marfia Oct 19 '10 at 23:49
up vote 2 down vote

It depends on what you mean by "work". Pretty every game will "work", but many of them won't play with a decent framerate unless you turn the graphics way down, or unless your laptop is a model with a discrete graphics chip.

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I have a Dell Ispiron(or something like that I think)it's not brand new or has any really good graphics card, but it met all of the minimum requirements that it said, but i guess I'm wondering if the game reqiures any more major hardware(excpet the graphics thing you mentioned) for it to play in a decent way, including multiplayer. My internet conection is good too. – gaurdingnome815 Oct 19 '10 at 21:22
As Kara answered, it depends on the game. Games like Plants vs. Zombies or the original Half-Life will probably be fine. A brand new game like Fallout Las Vegas will probably look terrible, if it runs at all. – Velociraptors Oct 19 '10 at 21:27
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"the graphics thing" isn't minor - it's the most important part for a game to play well. – Joel Coehoorn Oct 19 '10 at 21:27
There is Oddworld game available in Steam. It was developed back in 1997, and worked on Pentium 1 (0.13Ghz, 0.016Gb video card). (also it used lots of assembler-level code to run fast with unsupported tricks, but that's not related) – mhambra Oct 19 '10 at 21:55
This is ridiculous, games on Steam run a wide gamut, including games like XCom (1993) and Doom (1993). Those two are so old that steam actually installs a copy of DOSBox for you and sets the games up to run in it so they'll work on modern computers. I think it reasonable to assume that if the steam client will run at all, at least some of the games it offers will run. – CodexArcanum Oct 21 '10 at 6:15
up vote 0 down vote

In the store page of every game there is a section say minimum/recommended system requirements check there.

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