I played Half-Life on a P233MMX with 64MB of RAM and a Voodoo 1 back in November 1998; not too bad, it did slow down a bit on large areas with lots of soldiers and/or aliens but still very playable (running at 512x384 also helped quite a bit). The long loading times were bothersome, though.

F2bnp wrote:

Unreal II - Released February 2003

Minimum Requirements: PIII or Athlon 733, 256MB RAM, 32MB GeForce 2MX
Recommended Requirements: PIII or Athlon 1.2GHz, 384MB, 64MB GeForce3/Radeon 8500

I ran this game on my Athlon XP 2000+, a friend brought it over to try it since he only had a PIII 700 at the time. At 640x480 it was ok for the most part, some slowdowns on outside areas and during heavy fights; at 800x600 it began to struggle quite a bit (around 28fps average); didn't bother trying out 1024x768. Gameplay was just so-so, but I might just get it from GOG and give it a second chance.

I remember with Doom 3 the whole "Ultra Quality requires 512MB VRAM" thing around the time the 6800U 512MB "edition" came out, and while my 6800GT struggled with that game in Ultra (did fine in HQ, which looked fine), my 256MB 7900GS could run it in "Ultra" without problems. Go figure.

I would also add NWN2 - I remember it running pretty poorly on my 6800GT, despite the 6800 being in the "recommended requirements" box. Can't imagine running it on the Radeon 9500 or whatever the minimum was...

MDK 2 released mid 2000:

Required:
Pentium (or compatible) 200 MHz
16 MB RAM
Windows 95 with DirectX 5.0 or later
250 MB of Hard Drive Space
CD-ROM
3D Accelerated Video Card with at least 4 MB of video RAM
DirectX Certified Sound Card
Keyboard, Mouse

Recommended:
Pentium II (or compatible) 300 MHz
32 MB RAM
250 MB (or more) of Hard Drive Space
CD-ROM
3D Accelerated Video Card with at least 8 MB of video RAM

Notes on Video Cards:
While you can still run MDK2 with a 4MB video card, performance may be poor
depending on the texture quality setting in game. If performance is a
problem try a lower quality setting. We recommend that you obtain the
latest OpenGL drivers for your video card by running GLSetup which is
provided on the MDK2 cd.

These are taken straight off the readme on the CD. The box has a bit higher minimum requirements, saying that the game requires a Pentium 2 233 and at least 24MB RAM. I agree!
MDK 2 is an extremely CPU bound game. Pentiums and K6 CPUs are certainly not recommended in any capacity. Once you reach the speeds of a Pentium III 500/600 you get diminishing returns and the game becomes fillrate limited. Certainly not the craziest system requirements, but those minimum ones stated in the readme are just a joke. Pentium 200 and 16MB in 2000? Yeah, right!

MDK2 was rather light compared to something like GIANTS: CITIZEN KABUTO in the same year.

Also a K6 is fine for it.

Giants Citizen Kabuto and Sacrifice are indeed 2 games from 2000 which have some pretty steep requirements, even on my Athlon 1000/V5500 machine , the 2 games typically run at 30-40fps, and thats not even at the maxed settings.

No One Lives Forever is the same, even that has its moments of slowdown with this machine.

Hmm, I thought Giants was a 2001 game, interesting.
I wouldn't play MDK 2 on a K6, unless you've got one with L2 cache and >=450MHz.

F2bnp wrote:

Hmm, I thought Giants was a 2001 game, interesting.
I wouldn't play MDK 2 on a K6, unless you've got one with L2 cache and >=450MHz.

I actually played MDK2 on a K6-III 450 and a Voodoo3, it was playable, usually hovering around 30fps , but youre right in that it wasn't ideal , it often dropped into the low-mid 20s. it most certainly wasn't the V3 since generally speaking the frame rate wasn't affected by resolution increases at 1024X768 or below.

at that point you may as well play it on a Dreamcast.

Darkman wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

Hmm, I thought Giants was a 2001 game, interesting.
I wouldn't play MDK 2 on a K6, unless you've got one with L2 cache and >=450MHz.

I actually played MDK2 on a K6-III 450 and a Voodoo3, it was playable, usually hovering around 30fps , but youre right in that it wasn't ideal , it often dropped into the low-mid 20s. it most certainly wasn't the V3 since generally speaking the frame rate wasn't affected by resolution increases at 1024X768 or below.

at that point you may as well play it on a Dreamcast.

I tried to play it on the Dreamcast once, but the controller is pretty bad. It makes this game insanely hard and of course there's the lack of saved games...

Just remembered that Hitman and Mafia were some serious ressource hungry games at their time.

Hitman minimal specs :

-PII 266 Mhz
-64 MB RAM
-12 MB Video Card with DX 7 support (12 MB? what a joke)

Damn my poor K6-2 350 with 192 MB of RAM and a Kyro 3D Prophet 4000 XT 32 MB was crawling to death with it 🤣

I received a free copy of Giants with my GeForce3 card

2fort5r wrote:

I received a free copy of Giants with my GeForce3 card

yeah the game was updated later to use the Geforce3 with some new textures and effects. The original was I suspect really intended to show off the Geforce2 , although the game is pretty CPU heavy.

ODwilly wrote:

All of these reported issues with Doom 3's hardware requirements make me really appreciate how good it looked and how well it ran on my original Xbox back in the day 🤣

And considering the XBox only used a 733mhz P3, 512mb RAM and a hybrid GF 3/4 video chip, it's funny how so many people with fast Pentium 4's, more memory and more powerful video cards can't run it smoothly.

No one mention GTA 3 GTA 4

Both had poor optimization o none
Gta 3 had that famous problem with geforce and Windows xp that required a patch

Gta 4 couldnt even run decent in a quad core with 8800gtx 320mb

Good thing about Doom3 is that it looks fine even at 640x480. I was quite an anti-aliasing zealot at the time, but D3 visuals had strange polish to it- or the lighting imersion blurred my mind.

Living wrote:

No one mention GTA 3 GTA 4
Both had poor optimization o none
Gta 3 had that famous problem with geforce and Windows xp that required a patch

Yeah I remeber trolling friends using GeForce 4 Ti with my Radeon 8500LE doing fine in GTA3 or NFSHS2, which they could not play. Vice City was OK on both though.

Living wrote:

Gta 4 couldnt even run decent in a quad core with 8800gtx 320mb

IIRC I played it with that hardware after some tweaking, but it was hard to find good balance. Even with Radeon 4850 I had to make some compromises. It was my first game running clearly better under 64 bit OS.

Far Cry would have been worse than Doom 3, it was released early 2004 before the Nvidia 6 Series were available(not sure what ATI cards were available), Doom3 played quite well on the new nvidia cards at the time.

Living wrote:

No one mention GTA 3 GTA 4 […]
Show full quote

No one mention GTA 3 GTA 4

Both had poor optimization o none
Gta 3 had that famous problem with geforce and Windows xp that required a patch

Gta 4 couldnt even run decent in a quad core with 8800gtx 320mb

The worst part was, it was not compatible with Radeon x1k series causing severe flashing textures and lightning problems. I trolled my friends having 8500 as well, and they were avenged once gta 4 came out.

GTA3 caused 2 caps to fall off on the only Geforce 4 I own (back when it was new), a Gainward TI 4400 model.
I managed to solder them back on but one of them fell off again, during another play session of the same game 🤣 .
I don't remember it running really bad... but it must of been stressful on that card.
Happy to say that card still runs OK with that missing cap.

AlphaWing wrote:

GTA3 caused 2 caps to fall off on the only Geforce 4 I own (back when it was new), a Gainward TI 4400 model. I managed to solder […]
Show full quote

GTA3 caused 2 caps to fall off on the only Geforce 4 I own (back when it was new), a Gainward TI 4400 model.
I managed to solder them back on but one of them fell off again, during another play session of the same game 🤣 .
I don't remember it running really bad... but it must of been stressful on that card.
Happy to say that card still runs OK with that missing cap.

Ive never heard of that happening before...you sure that GF4 wasn't on its way out anyways?

GTA4 was really bad in terms of optimization , I had to dial back the settings back on my Phenom II X6 / Radeon 6870 system , and even then it was struggling at even reaching 35fps in alot of cases.
now that I have an i5 3570k/GF770 system it runs fine, but it really shouldn't have been that bad. Only other similar game I can think of that did this was the original Crysis.

I remember reading that Myst II requires 48MB of ram, which is funny since my mid-1997 Compaq Presario Pentium MMX 233MHz computer maxes out at 48MB!

Well I still have the card, and it works without that cap still.. the 4400\4600 have a lot of extra caps on them compared to the 4200, gonna guess alot of them are not really needed.
I have actually attempted to once re-solder that cap back on a 2nd time, but it fell off shortly after again.... I'm not good at re-soldering those types of caps that do not go through the board. I keep putting off fixing my V5-5500 because of that.

Also I got a Copy of Ecco the Dolphin yesterday.
It lists Pentium 60, Windows 3.1 as the min req.
Mind you this is a port of a SEGA CD game, it should require a 486 at most.
It runs great @ 133mhz P55c on win98 tho, so I dunno how accurate this MIN actually is.
I wish I had a 486 to test it on still 🤣.