DE-MASTERED

The art of running games on rigs below their minimum specs is thriving

- Phil Iwaniuk

It isn’t just graphics cards that cost a lot more today than they did recently. It’s the same story for basically every other consumer purchase, from the games we run to make those GPUs sweat, to the teabags that sustain us during that vital scientific testing, and the electricity used to boil the kettle—as has been well documented, it’s all gone through the roof.

But this is PC gaming. A subculture whose very origins are founded in the art of bending hardware to our will, making it do things it wasn't designed for. The first home computers weren't for gaming, they were for doing boring things, like looking at numbers. If they were meant for fun, they wouldn't have manufactured them all in hearing-aid beige.

Playing games on PCs was a subversion of their purpose, and many decades later you can almost hear the echo of that original sin as we subvert our hardware once again—this time to run games on components below the minimum requirements. That's not a comprehensive answer to the current and ongoing cost of living crisis, but in the absence of any sensible price adjustments from component manufacturers (or any particularly bright fiscal stimulation strategies from national governments), running the Battlefield 6 beta on an old laptop is the best answer we have at this time.

A LOW BAR

Head over to Reddit and go on /r/lowendgaming and you'll be struck by a few things. Firstly, that a community of people has been helping each other to run games on inexpensive and outdated PC hardware for many years, long before all the insidious price hikes we're enduring today. And secondly, members of that community have been doing so with no small amount of ingenuity.