Posted June 11, 2017
CPUs haven't made any massive leaps in terms of IPC or clock speed in the past 7 years or so. There's been some change in ISA extensions but it's not as simple as "newer is better", or "more expensive is better."
A Pentium G4620 (~$100) is much beefier than a i7-5500U (RCP ~$400). The former is a "budget" desktop chip, while the latter is found in expensive ultrabooks & slim PCs of yesteryear. Still, the latter has some extensions the former does not have (e.g. AVX2). So which is better? The one with AVX2, obviously, if you need that extension. But the cheaper one is both newer and more performant (on common workloads anyway) so it's better in its working capacity if you don't need AVX2. It simply makes no sense to put things as "model X or better."
It gets only gets worse with GPUs. Games depend on features that are not inherently hardware features, but driver features. So some cards may get additional features after launch, or they may already have them on another OS. Or, indeed, you can have an older GPU that has more than enough power but certain GL extensions are not supported by the driver. Sometimes it's only because the vendor doesn't care enough to patch it in. In other cases, it's because the extension needs to be backed by something special in the hardware. Even then, it could usually be emulated. It's complicated.
What annoys me to no end is that Intel GPUs are practically never mentioned in system requirements, or if they're mentioned, they're mentioned as being not supported. Even if they work perfectly fine for the game.
