Extreme under the requirements gaming

Games
1

Its often joked that system requirements for games are misleading in that you need much more of a computer than what is reported on the box to play. Well, this isn’t always true.

The system requirements for Railroad Tycoon 3 are a P3 450 (700 recommended), Direct X 8 compatable videocard with 16 megs of ram (32 megs recommended), 128 megs of ram

Last night I help get RRT3 running on the following system:
Pentium 2 250 mhz system
S3 virge adapter with an 8 meg voodoo 2 card
96 megs of ram

And amazingingly it RAN and ran ok. Now all the options were turned down to their lowest setting but amazingly enough, it ran. We went through the first two maps.

2

That might be the thing – RTS games, for example, often run great below the requirements. Then you get ten missions in, and the game has to draw lots more units at once, and the maps are bigger, and it becomes a pain to play.

3

I played EU2 fairly painlessly on my P166 with 48MB ram? Apart from the intro movie stuttering it was playable.

Still for some of the more modern/recent(3D) titles i’ve tried, it seems best to be over the minimum recomended specs.