You Learn Something New Every Day.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Most of the games I've looked at list minimum and recommended - But then, I don't look at very many.

[AgentZero]

I've yet to see a game that didn't list both, and I look at a good few. Personally though, I always just look at the Recommended spec and take that as the minumum, since I've always figured that the way minimum and recommended specs get onto a box goes something like:
Devs pass minimum specs to Marketing.
Marketing cuts the specs by 25-50% and puts those down for minimum spec.
Devs find out and raise hell.
Marketing 'compromises' by adding the devs minimum spec in as the 'recommended spec.

Either way, I usually just read the review in something like PC Gamer where they tell you what spec they recommend, so you know what you need in order to run it and have it look like it does on the back of the box.

[Raging Deadstar]

Personally I just give into the giant monsters like Gamespot and IGN for a couple of minutes.

Sure they rarely list niche games but for new/popular games it's rare I can't find the recommended specs on there.

[Renegade 13]

AgentZero said:
I've yet to see a game that didn't list both, and I look at a good few.

Just bought Doom 3. It only lists Minimum specs.

[luke_slovakian]

LoL...i just got age of empires 3. I CANT PLAY it!!! it requires windows xp, i love that bloody microsoft company. Oh well i guess i can live without it.

But if u want good card get an ati 9800, its cheap 2:-)...i have 9600 xt and i can run doom3 or half life 2 w/ nothing bad, note at high setting. Friend has 512 more ram n runs at full setting.

[kerensky]

I have found that in general, ATI cards are more stable and run better than NVidia cards. I'm not sure if this is true overall, but I have found this true with like eight different cards.

For example, in my old desktop, I used to have a game that should not have run on the ATI card that I had, but it would run on low settings. A few months later I got an NVidia card that more than exceeded the games requirements, but the game would only run well at low or medium settings.

[Xrati]

False advertising for the sake of selling product. What's in a little white lie anyhow? RIGHT? Just get used to the fact that we are all left on our own to get these products we buy, to run. I've had some games that require you to overhaul your computer to run them. It's ridiculous that you should have to go through all that to get something to run and then undo it to get back to where you started. I had an Apple (many many years ago) and they specified all hardware requirements for their systems (the original plug n play). Microsoft has failed to set down hardware requirements for it's software (like DirectX) and now we pay the price trying to get things to work on our computers.

[AgentZero]

Speaking of overhauling your computer to get games to run... I got Civ4 & AOE3 as early Christmas presents, and both of them required some work to get going. AOE3 wasn't too bad, I just needed to run a patch since I couldn't get passed the first mission because a bit of audio wasn't playing which was preventing the trigger for the events that let you win to go off.
Civ4 on the other hand... When I try to start it, it doesn't work, but there's a post on the forum about how to fix my particular error. First they tell you to uninstall Civ4, then uninstall your video drivers, then RE-install Civ4, install the newest video drivers and if (read: when) that doesn't work, you have to download an unpacker program and unpack one of the big artwork files (which takes about 25 min), then backup the artwork file somewhere and try again. Now, this works, but it's a PITA to have to go through all that to get a game to work. And apparently this bug only affected ATI cards. Did they not bother testing it on an ATI equipped machine? Gah!
Still, both good games once they're working.