Quote Originally Posted by Avatar View Post
As someone running an older rig (Phenom II 935, with a Radeon 5850), this really grinds my gears.

I'm reasonably clued up about pc's, but I have no idea off the top of my head what the i3 (or i5) equivalent of my CPU is.. Because my CPU has a name of its own. Often the graphics card requirements are the same, i.e. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 or AMD equivalent. I mean, really, now I've got to go and do research on hardware testing sites to determine what my hardware is equivalent to? And hope that the site applied decent logic to determine their answers? Developers really should be able to guide minimum requirements a bit better than the current norm, because God forbid I should try the game before buying to see if it actually runs on my machine, then they get all upset.

Ffs.

/rant
The reality is that it's extremely difficult, but there could be a potential middle ground. However it's still not quite right. Microsoft tried something with WinSAT to give your CPU, Memory, etc a "score" out of 9.9 (5.9 on Vista and 7.9 on Win7) this has however been canned completely in Win10. But I would much rather prefer to see minimum requirements that state something like:

CPU : Score of xxxx on SomeGenericBenchmaking tool v1.0
GPU : 2GB RAM and xxxx score on GPUBenchMarkTool v1.0

The issue however is to get publishers and devs to agree on a tool. Also when the tool gets updated or needs to get updated due to architectural changes in hardware some old scores will get skewed.