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?
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.