System requirements (Graphic card type versus sum of its parts)

After nursing my old desktop into the ground after its 7th year of faithful service, I’ve bought myself a shiny laptop to replace it. Gaming is not a huge priority for me but there are some PC-only games out there I’d like to try. I used the program at srtest.com to help me work out if I could play them, and they all seem to fail on the graphics, although it passes all the individual graphical abilities comfortably. Examplehere. Does the fact it puts “Fail” by the Graphic card, and by extension the entire game, mean that it really won’t run, or is the fail bit a screwup because the program doesn’t recognize the card by name, however as it passes all the components it should run fine?

I would say it will probably work as all the stated requirements of the graphics card seem to be met. You of course risk it not working. Email the game distributor to be 100% sure about the graphics card compatibility.

On board graphics are not always as fully functional as add in cards. The graphics cards listed as a minimum in that screen shot are low end cards now.

I can’t answer your question specific to the video card (although I wonder about your DirectX version), but in general software makers have two approaches to minimum requirements:

A. They give the minimum requirements as a warning. If you don’t meet the requirements, the program may still run OK, or run badly, or crash, or something else. Your risk.

B. They give the minimum requirements and enforce them at install time or runtime (I ran into this with Fallout 3 and ended up building a new computer as a result) to avoid having underpowered customers say they installed the game but it sucks.

So the software might run but I second the suggestion to check with the publisher.

Which games do you wish to run and what graphics chipset does your laptop use?

Laptops are generally not much cop for the latest games.

You appear to have integrated graphics. This is a big no-no for any recent (released in the last 5 years or so) 3D games. You can try to install them, but don’t expect them to work:

A) anything better than “poorly” (640x480 resolution, low framerate, no lighting, bad textures)
B) at all.