He narrowed it down to a couple of models, found reviews with all specifications and 3dmark benchmark results and what not. We still can't understand how we are supposed to figure out whether those specific laptops be good at running specific games.
All those laptop hardware designations are weird and fucked. What is even AMD Radeon Graphics?
Is there a site or something I can hardware specifications or 3dmark scores in to see if the laptop will run the game?
If a laptop comes with a newish dedicated graphics card (gpu) then it should be able to run modern games without too many issues.
If not then AMD cpu's generally comes with a better integrated gpu than Intel ones so it can still run some games but you may need to turn the graphics down. Older games should be fine though.
idk anything but ignoring all bideo ganes and just getting a refurbished lenovo laptop from 4 years ago is okay for browzing teh interwebz and watchin goldin gorls
Every game on Steam or Epic or whatever will have recommended hardware specs somewhere near the bottom of the store page. Look at those specs and then use a website (found this by Google search: https://www.hwcompare.com/gpu/ actually this one doesn't seem to list general performance) to find an equivalent for AMD/NVIDIA if you're looking at a specific computer. Laptops have laptop GPUs which may be a bit less powerful than their desktop variant although I think they are pretty similar these days (they used to put "M" after the number to indicate mobile, but it appears they don't any more since they're basically equivalent).
NVIDIA's naming scheme is basically that their consumer GPUs are either called "GeForce GTX" or if they're released in the last couple years "GeForce RTX", the bigger the number the better. They used to bump the number up by about 100 every yearly release (i.e. 7XX, 8XX, 9XX, 10XX, etc.) and now I think they got by a couple hundred or a thousand: 1600, 2000, 3000. I think for the most part the newer generation ones are basically just faster than the older ones. "Ti" cards are even faster than their non Ti counterpart.
I guess generally you should look at when a given video game was made and when a given graphics card was released. A gaming graphics card can probably play any game on the max settings released something like a year before the graphics card was released (this is just a gut feeling). That being said, I have a desktop GPU from the 10XX series and it basically runs every new video game flawlessly on almost the max settings except for like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Metro: Exodus. Same should probably go for laptops but they might not run every game since they have to deal more with heat and power consumption constraints.
Note: I haven't shopped for computer parts for a number of years so I don't know if this is all correct info.
A lot of this isn't correct at all. Usually the higher end games can only be ran at max by the most expensive stuff available, like the $800+ graphics cards. Oftentimes literally nothing that currently exists can max out current games without issue. This doesn't matter in practice because new games suck anyways. The most demanding game worth playing is Bannerlord, which is insanely resource intensive. The second most demanding game worth playing can be played flawlessly on ten year old mid tier hardware with only some settings lowered.
The laptop version of a gpu is always extremely gimped compared to the desktop version. Usually they perform equivalent to 1-2 cards below their model number. So a laptop 1080 is only a bit better than a desktop 1060 in practice.
Maybe I'm just not playing the latest games, might be the difference between desktop and laptop too. I've found that I can still play basically any game that has high end graphics. Maybe not at the absolute max if it has some cutting edge thing like ray-traced reflections or something like that. But I can still play games like Borderlands 3 (okay actually I turned the graphics down, but it still looks great), Control (without raytracing stuff), or Death Stranding at max settings on my GPU that is now a couple generations old. They aren't necessarily like Frostbite level graphics (but Frostbite tends to be pretty well optimized anyways). You're right, max settings on brand new games are usually more intensive but nobody is trying to run those anyways or buy a $900 graphics card. They're future-proofing more than anything.
Borderlands 3 is graphically an extremely old game. Mid tier stuff from 2013 could run it perfectly near max. I know cuz my PC is from 2013 and does so.
But that just proves the point, in the last eight years or so nobody has managed to make very many games worth playing that need anything better than that. All the money is in selling trash to the widest audience possible, which means dumbing down the graphics. All the good stuff takes a long time to make, and is made by people who generally aren't going to spend a lot of time trying to make it use the latest tech, so by the time it comes out it's extremely easy to run.
It seems like the era of big budget games using all the latest tech to wow people and draw people in is over. There are very few games in that category anymore. The few that exist don't work because they didn't wanna spend the money to actually make a game on top of the tech demo.
yeah ive had to buy some new computer parts recently myself and its so fucking exhausting, like you need to have a degree in all this shit just to not get completely ripped off by some charlatan shit, yes the X10500XT runs at a BLAZING 1488Ghz but have you considered that the X10400XXT has onboard BOFA-DZ linkage through the quad-channel v5.0 XLXTGXX bus (all the x's are for XTREME of course), yes thankyou i as a consumer definitely know exactly what to do with that information to make rational choices in our glorious free market
theres this userbenchmark site where you can plug in the components and estimate how good it is at normal desktop stuff and games and shit, and it seems to give estimates for a bunch of specific games, i guess you could extrapolate for other games from there?
who knows how accurate any of that is though
edit: dont use this, see response below
lol naive of me to think anything relating to computers wouldnt be bought and paid for
