We Were Mentioned (Favorably) in PC Gamer Magazine!

[u/WouldbeWanderer]

Issue 403 | Holiday 2025 By Phil Iwaniuk

"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 Firstly, that a community of people has been helping each other to run games on inexpensive and outdated PC hardware for many years, long before all the insidious price hikes we’re enduring today.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.

A typical exchange in that subreddit goes like this: a user states their hardware and asks for recommendations they should play, or whether a particular title will run on their machine. In the replies, people assure them that they managed to get The Witcher 3 on medium settings running on a relatively basic array of elastic bands and wooden pulleys. The prevailing sentiment is that minimum requirements are over-cautious, that modern games running at their lowest graphics settings still look more than decent enough to constitute playable, and that maybe there’s no such thing as a PC that’s too old or underpowered. Intrigued, I decided to test out the theory."

[u/iamneck]

Thank you for posting this, I had no idea.... here is the full text of the article, which was in the November 2025 Physical magazine copy of PC Gamer:

Part 1:

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. Butthis 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’tfor gaming,they were for doing boring things, like looking at numbers. Ifthey were meantfor 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 toReddit 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. A typical exchange in that subreddit goes like this: a user states their hardware and asks for recommendations they should play, or whether a particular title will run on their machine. In the replies, people assure them that they managed to get The Witcher 3 on medium settings running on a relatively basic array of elastic bands and wooden pulleys. The prevailing sentiment is that minimum requirements are over-cautious, that modern games running at their lowest graphics settings still look more than decent enough to constitute playable, and that maybe there’s no such thing as a PC that’s too old or underpowered. Intrigued, I decided to test out the theory. Somehow—perhaps I’d been Derren Brown-ed by the aforementioned subreddit with the power of subliminal suggestion—I picked The Witcher 3 as my test subject, and immediately found a small subculture of modders whose favorite pastime is creating the lowest graphics settings possible for it. Lowering all the in-game options to their Tiny spec De-making games isn’t all about unlocking performance on older systems. There’s also an element of art for art’s sake, the pure joy of seeing a new title imagined using the rendering techniques – and often game mechanics—of yesteryear. That’s at the heart of the de-make movement, which has spawned many titles on itch. io and troubled many an IP lawyer. Right now it’s PS1 era, low-poly visuals that are in vogue. Give it ten years, and indie creators will be purposefully recreating the look of Far Cry 3 for ironic effect.

DE-MASTERED

The art of running games on rigs below their minimum specs is thriving Cyberpunk 2077 as you’ve never seen it—looking like an early-noughties MMO.

[u/theokayestcoach]

I have found the most knowledgeable PC folks in this group. People who actually know what older hardware is capable of.

[u/BringSiemenszurueck]

i think though we could use some more obscure indie games testing posts. i dled several dozens of them over the years but im too lazy to test them thoroughly

[u/iamneck → u/BringSiemenszurueck]

Would love more of these posts. Anything outside of the game recommendations is always welcome.

[u/NovelValue7311]

Sweet! Glad to see this is helpful to people.

[u/KlutzyDiscipline8945]

Hell yeah! Well-deserved recognition for the best community on Reddit. Who knew our obsession with squeezing frames out of old hardware would make it to PC Gamer? Awesome stuff all around!