@mischievoustomato @Pawlicker the definition of reasonably old can be extended to hardware released sometime after 2010 and into early 2011. my thinkpad just so happens to fall into that range

i have about 8 gigs of ram and an i5 that wouldve probably been considered "okay" at the time. seems like the sort of hardware your average all in one has today. except all modernish games run like shit because they werent exactly developed with the mindset of "how can we squeeze the most performance out of the hardware we're running on?" that games like doom or quake had.

seems like a pc that should be able to run a lot of things fine, but can barely handle a web browser starting up without an ssd upgrade.

of course hardware being too old is definitely a thing, i don't think anyone wants to deal with pcs released in the stone age that have Pentiums and 512 mb of ram. that era has long gone.

point being, why did developers not keep this mindset into a new era.