HI! I do most of my gaming on an Asus laptop (IntelCore i3-4030u 1.9 GHz, 8GB memory, Geforce 840M). Since I got it for free and it looked like a fun game I tried out Spelunky just for fun, even though it requires a processor with 2.8GHz, or an equivalent (seemed quite outlandish to me for a basic platformer). And it worked just fine with my 1.9 GHz machine.

I stopped paying attention to computers around the start of the century when I was happily banging away with a 800MHz Pentium 2, so I'm not sure how these things work nowadays. Can greater memory somewhat compensate for a lesser CPU, or what?

What I'm really wondering is that is it fruitful to take some chances in cases like FlatOut 2, where all other requirements are clearly passed, but CPU lacks 0.1 GHz? Will it properly work, any ideas?

System requirements are minimum spec, and they tend to be a bit cautious on that. Whilst your system running at below the spec may run it there may be lags and such like at places. For instance, you could run a game way under the specs for 90% of the game, however in big firefights, or when lots is happening, then the burden increases on the machine - its rarely ever a flatline for performance. So its easier just to give minimum specs which are higher than necessary at the heaviest load point to cover all of it. So, possibly, but its a risk although prices are quite cheap with sales on...

fallout 2 will be fine
raw cpu speed stopped being an issue several years ago
you have an i3 which is a dual core cpu and has more then enough muscle to handle a game that needs a pentium 4
( the i3 is 3 generations removed from the p4 )
the geforce 840 m and the 8 gig of ram also help a lot

I had to manage with a really awful laptop with integrated graphics for a couple of years until quite recently, and I found that a lot of games that shouldn't have run at all according to the sys reqs were in fact quite playable.

The main problem I found, however, was that the machine would get very hot when stressed by gaming, which is obviously not good for its longevity, so keep an eye on how hot your lappy is getting as you play.

I would say that CPU requirements can be unreliable. There were some games I managed to run with my processor (Intel Core 2 Quad at 2.5 Ghz per core) although official system requirements claimed otherwise (requiring for example something like i5 at 3.5 Ghz). Witcher 3 runs really well on my system (but I do have the Radeon R9 280 card).

I cannot remember trying to play a game that claimed to require more RAM/a better graphics card than I had, because I never questioned such things (and by the way, I never really lacked games to play, so didn't care much), so I cannot say anything on that front. But I have to say that as far as RAM goes, in almost 30 years of computers, RAM has been the least troublesome component, always had enough despite never itching for the strongest rig, and that is an understatement.

He said FlatOut, not Fallout. ;)

Thanks for the replies! I'll throw my two euros at it and see, it's not going to destroy my budget anyway. I'm sure it won't be as bad as playing Vice City back in the day with a machine that barely reached the minimum requirements. I remember it took ages to pass that bank job mission with the SWAT team crashing in, it was one frame per second max for a long stretch of the mission.

Errr... the OP was asking about FlatOut 2, not Fallout 2. :P

I don't own it so I cannot talk from experience. Plus, note that the system reqs are quite different for the Windows or the Linux version (as the latter is actually a Wine bottle and hence its requirements are higher).

typo
flatout 2's system requirements are so low his laptop wil have no problem handeling it
hell my laptop has a intel hd 4000 and it can handle it

This might be due to the fact that clock speed is not a good indicator of actual performance, leading to the megahertz myth. CPU clock speed is a measure of the speed of which the processor can execute the instructions given to it but not how fast those instructions can be executed. A simplified example of this is that if processor A can perform a specific instruction (like a division) in 8 cycles and processor B can do that in 4 cycles then processor B would only need to have half the clock speed of processor A in order to be just as fast. According to Moore's law processor speed increases roughly sesquiannually which means that the clock speed of processors one and a half year ago corresponds to roughly half the performance of a processor with the same clock speed today.

Of course, the reason could just as well be that the game haven't been tested on lower clock speeds or the developer / GOG slightly inflates the system requirements in order to be on the safe side.

Edit: Considering that FlatOut 2 was released in 2006 you shouldn't have any trouble running it.

New generations of processors tend to be more efficient and have better clockrate to performance ratio so frequency of processor is only really relevant if you compare it to other same generation chips. In most cases the graphics card power is more relevant to game performance, especially with 3D games (there are ofcourse exeptions like highly processor reliant strategy games). So if system requirements list core due/quad or older (or AMD equivalent) and you have i3/i5/i7 or newer (or AMD equivalent), game is likely to run fine as long as you fullfill graphics and memory requirements.

It's pretty rare that your processor actually preverents you from playing game though some older games don't like to play nice with multi core processors for example. But there are workarounds for most such cases.

If I remember correct, the system requirements are based on the hardware that GOG is testing the games on.

I'm pretty sure the developers provide the system requirements.
That's why they might be inaccurate as they don't have the ability to test it on every kind of system.

Ah, interesting.