A game's system requirements look simple until you try to compare an "Intel Core i7-10700K" against the processor in your own PC. Run through these five checks before you buy a game, or before you buy a PC to play one.
1. Look up your own specs
You need four details, and Windows shows all of them in two places.
- Open Settings, then System, then About. Write down your Processor and Installed RAM.
- Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager and click Performance.
- Click GPU for your graphics card's name and its Dedicated GPU memory. That second number is your VRAM.
- Click each Disk entry to see whether it's an SSD or an HDD.
2. Check the hard requirements first
Some requirements work like a locked door. A fast PC won't get you past them. The game refuses to launch, or the anti-cheat keeps you out of online matches.
- Ray tracing hardware. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Doom: The Dark Ages need a graphics card with built-in ray tracing. That means an NVIDIA RTX 20 series card or newer, or an AMD Radeon RX 6000 series card or newer. A GTX 1080 Ti still has plenty of muscle, and neither game will run on it.
- TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot. Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 require both for their anti-cheat. Most PCs from the last several years have them, and many ship with one or both switched off.
- An SSD. A growing list of games names an SSD as a requirement. On a hard drive they load slowly and stutter as you move through the world.
3. Compare performance, not model numbers
Model numbers mislead. A newer card with a lower number can beat an older card with a higher one, and a laptop GPU runs slower than the desktop card with the same name. Use a chart that ranks real performance. TechPowerUp's GPU Database gives nearly every graphics card a relative performance score, and PassMark does the same for processors.
Find the card the game lists, then find yours. If yours ranks at or above it, you meet that requirement.
4. Read "minimum" and "recommended" the right way
Minimum specs usually mean the lowest settings at 1080p, often around 30 frames per second. Recommended specs tend to target medium or high settings at 1080p and 60 frames per second. Read the fine print under the chart, because many publishers now assume you turn on upscaling like NVIDIA DLSS or AMD FSR to hit those numbers.
Video memory matters more every year. If the game recommends 12 GB of VRAM and your card has 8 GB, plan on lowering texture quality.
5. Let a tool double-check
The Can You Run It site from System Requirements Lab scans your hardware and compares it against thousands of games. It asks you to download a small detection app first.
Steam gives you a safety net too. You can refund a game within 14 days of purchase as long as you've played it for less than two hours, so launch it soon after you buy and see how it runs.