If I'm running a game where my computer doesn't quite meet the system requirements, I always make sure that only the game is running and I disable anything running in the background. In the game itself, I disable any unnecessary video options like V-sync or anti-aliasing. I usually go for the "custom" settings to turn everything either to "Low" or off.

Lower resolution, windowed.

add more gerbils

For some reason people always go for generalities when posting such things. Instead of saying "I have an Inspiron 1720 laptop with a Core 2 Duo T7500 with 4GB of DDR2 RAM and a GeForce 8600m GT with 256MB of RAM, and Windows 7, and The Witcher 2 is barely playable on minimum settings" they say "I have this laptop and a game, and the game is just barely playable".

Yes, it takes a bit more effort to post the spec, and it might not help solve the problem, but on the other hand, someone might say "oh, that's a GPU that's known to be be overclockable without issue, so try that" or "you can tune this game further in the ini file, here are some options" or "have you tried setting Windows to basic mode instead of Aero Glass?" or "for this card you would get better performance if you use driver 270.61".

It's a long shot, but it makes it easier all around when there are more details.


Windowed is typically a tad slower, due to vsync and needing to copy instead of flip.

The question wasn't referring to a particular game or genre. I know a 15 year old pc won't run a AAA 2015 title. I'm just enquiring what others would (or wouldn't for that matter) do where the a pc just falls short of minimum specs

well I bought Two Worlds for my old laptop. It was unplayable. So I just waited until I had a chance to buy a better computer. Waited about a year. Bought the most mad hardcore laptop I could find.
Things happen like that to everyone, if you think about it.
On my old computer even the later versions of Tales of Maj'Eyal, an old-school roguelike, would not run properly (that was even before it was released on gog.com.)
In the meantime, I played a lot of other great games.
But some people like the tweakin' & overclockin'...
up to you! *ducks*

I believe that you have a particular PC and you want particular games to run, and you're asking this because you hope that the answer might help you, and not out of idle curiosity. If that's the case, you're likely to get a better answer if you provide more details and don't just ask a general question.

If you're just wondering what people do in this case, I think that the general answers are: play the game as is, or play another game.

I know you're trying to help and I am grateful. I have had some games i.e. The Witcher 2, Divinity 2, Two Worlds 2 that I purchased that didn't run smoothly. However, rather than looking at those specific games, I wanted to generalise the question to see if there were universal steps that could be taken with any titles.

The overwhelming responses are: No, buy a new pc.

Lower the resolution. Your screen has a native resolution of 1920x1080? Try to run the game in 1600x900. This can make a huge difference already! And if you're not too sensitive, you could even run it in 1280x720 which is less than 50% of 1920x1080 ;)

When Final Fantasy XIII got it's PC release it had a fixed resolution of 1280x720. The whole internet started complaining about "shitty console ports" and stuff like this, while I just enjoyed the game and didn't find the low resolution that annoying (it was a bit blurry, but... well... I've seen worse things).

To run on an underspecced rig;
1.Turn down resolution from 1080p
2.Lower graphics texture resolution settings
3.Disable AA or use an AA injector
If all that doesn't work; an upgrade will be needed

Other than buying new hardware, I have an old rig now, mine is from 2009.... a old single core AMD Sempron LE -1300 CPU, but what I did was upgrade the PSU from a 250w to 430w Thermaltake, that way it has more power, upgraded the RAM from 2 GB to 4 GB, (max my mobo supports), and put my older GeForce GT 220 GPU inside as well, until I can buy a new PC.

Now, if you can't buy new hardware, in game options can be tweaked to allow better performance. For one, turn down the resolution, say your running at 1600x900, well turn the game down to 1280x720 or somewhere lower than current, than turn down visual settings if game has down to medium/low.

I can run games that are for Dual core CPUs and whatnot, such as Dear Esther, Amnesia etc. on my single core, sure the GPU fan speeds up, but nothing too drastic, stays at 87 degrees Celsius under load, than cools off to 50-55 C idle, and the game runs fine. Some newer games might not run, at all, but most of the time, just lowering resolution, and low visual settings helps FPS in most games, you could also tweak the GPU settings in the NVidia control panel. Like select instead of best quality, lower the settings down to "Performance" and turn off AA and other GPU intense features.

just to add as a side note something I learned from years of watching the demoscene and reading some tech code manuals myself (oh so long time ago)... The skills of the coders do matter a bit at least. That is to say, how well did the coders of the game optimize their code has a correlation with how much the game (engine) demands techywise.
NOT too big a deal perhaps in trying to help you run your games... But you could try to pick a game while considering the developer's code fame at least. If you get into that you might learn that some games run better on older machines than others, even if the graphical end-user stuff were about the same. I mean, I have witnessed some 3D effects on a Commodore 64 many years after the whole C64 gaming scene died (aside from retro culture) - stuff that nobody saw back in the day. Mind over matter and such...

/end of hangover rant :)

Hangover, eh?

<Shouts> THANK YOU FOR YOUR REPLY!!!

There are rarely universal steps with work with any hardware and any game. It depends on the bottleneck of the specific hardware and game. Overclocking is pretty good for many cases though.

Other semi-game-dependent solutions:

Try another OS. Some games are smoother on Windows 8.1 than on Windows 7, some the other way round (it may also be hardware dependent), some as mentioned could work better on Linux.

Try other drivers. If you don't have the latest drivers, try that. If you do, and you have older hardware, sometimes older drivers work better.