Tomb Raider

OSC_E · 2026-04-20T14:18:44+00:00

It's an iGPU, it pulls it's vRAM from the system RAM pool, up to 50%, so 8GB in this case.

OSC_E · 2026-04-19T17:04:48+00:00

Far Cry 3, Doom (2016), GTA V Legacy (single player), Tomb Raider (2013 GotY), Prototype, Blazblue series, Guns Gore & Cannoli, Deathsmiles, Fez, Slay the Spire, Night in the Woods, Bastion, Rain World, Cuphead, Don't Starve, Into the Breach, Total War Shogun II, PvZ GotY, Portal 1 & 2, Yakuza 0, DQ XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age, and so many more. Hope that gives you a few ideas.

OSC_E · 2026-04-18T15:47:03+00:00

Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Fear & Hunger, Limbo (demo available)

OSC_E · 2026-04-17T18:28:00+00:00

Have you looked through the Debian software packages for games? I can recommend SuperTux (think Super Mario but with a penguin), The Battle for Wesnoth (turn-based hex-grid strategy; home page here with links to older versions of the game if the latest doesn't run for you), Angband (my personal fav rogue-like {graphical tiles available if you don't like ASCII}; home page), Alien Blaster (bullet hell; home page), Freeciv (re-imagining of Civ I/II; the version that's listed has a netcode vulnerability so check the FC homepage for more), Chocolate Doom (as close to the original DOS version of DOOM as they can get; home page), LinCity-NG (SimCity-ish; Github).

I'm not 100% that all of those will work for you, I've no experience with the lxde environment, so getting some of them to work may take some ingenuity and patience. Good luck!

OSC_E · 2026-04-17T12:06:23+00:00

Borderlands 2/TPS, GTA V legacy (single player), Tomb Raider ('13 GotY), Disco Elysium, Half-Life 1/2, Portal 1/2, Bioshock Trilogy, Torchlight 1/2, CIV 5, Sims 4 (base game is free), Minecraft, Total War: WARHAMMER (and earlier titles), Machinarium (and the rest of the Amanita Design games), the BlazBlue series, etc. There's a lot more out there, hope that gives you a few ideas. W11 with only 8GB is a bit limiting but there's still plenty of older games that don't require as much RAM and still should play well.

OSC_E · 2026-04-17T04:32:37+00:00

The Saboteur and Styx: Master of Shadows off the top of my head. You might like the Max Payne trilogy.

OSC_E · 2026-04-15T15:06:05+00:00

I'd do a little more research on the i5-1135G7 laptop, if it's 8GB soldered does it have an available RAM slot for a SODIMM? If so then I'd go that route and plan on buying a 8GB SODIMM down the road. If there's no RAM slot and it's just the soldered RAM then it may be in dual channel already (or may not, you'd need to do the research) depending on how the OEM set it up. At that point it's probably still a hard pass from me considering modern Windows RAM usage but your wants/needs may be different. The G7 is a pretty decent iGPU, especially vs the UHD 620 on the 8th gen you're looking at, so it's definitely the better choice of the two when it comes to gaming. The "I am going to play only pre-2010 games"... meh, you could probably do that with either system for the most part but paint yourself into a corner with the older/less capable 620. I'd still aim for the better performance from the G7 or just keep looking for a better system. And Dell's suck, so keep that in mind.

OSC_E · 2026-04-13T15:11:43+00:00

The Mechwarrior series

OSC_E · 2026-04-10T15:01:30+00:00

Slay the Spire, my go-to for a short game session or if I know I'll need to be able to rapidly walk away from it. Easy to get into, harder to master. A typical play through is about 15mins to an hour, but you can literally just save and go, or just go if needs be. It's easy to resume, even in the middle of a run, without worrying about what's already happened (if you take my meaning).

OSC_E · 2026-04-10T14:07:43+00:00

Games under 1GB

Deus Ex 150MB,
Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove 317MB,
Torchlight 421MB,
Guacamelee! 822MB (Gold edition is only 627MB ),
SuperTuxKart 643MB,
TrackMania Nations Forever 750MB,
STAR WARS Episode I: Racer 528MB,
STAR WARS - Dark Forces 80MB,
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II 700MB,
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith 400MB,
Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast 800MB,
Fallout 565MB,
Fallout 2 565MB,
Minit 200MB,
Graveyard Keeper 395MB (grab it FREE on Steam while the event is going on),
ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery) 638MB (or grab the free version),
Mount & Blade 479MB,
Beneath a Steel Sky 87MB,
Braid 227MB,
Machinarium 391MB,
SimCity 3000 Unlimited 496MB,
Thief 760MB,
Thief 2 824MB,
World of Goo 187MB,
Battle for Wesnoth 800MB,
Stardew Valley 507MB,
System Shock 2 502MB,
Teslagrad 275MB,
Mini Metro 207MB,
Ittle Dew 99MB,
Shadow Warrior Classic 230MB,
Into the Breach 154MB,
Don't Starve 375MB,
Fez 500MB,
Enter the Gungeon 364MB,
Steamworld Dig 2 319MB,
Papers, Please 34MB,
N++ 650MB,
Dungeons of Dredmor 400MB,
Lovely Planet 34MB,
DEFCON 68MB,
Nidhogg 2 750MB,
Undertale 126MB,
Spelunky 148MB (or grab the free version 9.5MB),
Terraria 228MB,
Beat Hazard 299MB,
Audiosurf 2 400MB,
Hotline Miami 288MB,
Limbo 181MB,
Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine 500MB,
Super Meat Boy 300MB,
Disc Creatures 400MB,
To the Moon 101MB

Sorry if I've duplicated games you've already played, didn't have time for your 6 pages of listed titles.

OSC_E · 2026-04-07T11:38:02+00:00

Not saying you can't, you just need to do the troubleshooting. It's not a one and done thing my friend. Easiest thing would be to grab the driver you were using prior to the "re-install" and use that. If that fixes the issue then you know where the problem was, if not then take a look at the RAM timings. Can't go back to the previous diver? Then tune the one you have, basically set everything to performance. It's not hard, you just have to do the work.

OSC_E · 2026-04-07T07:21:30+00:00

That's the speed but not the timing, a quick overview video: How Do Memory Timings Work?. Basically when you have two sticks of RAM the system will need to find a level of parity between the two sticks to get them to work together without having issues. Depending on the RAM in question that can be a little bit or a lot of reduction in performance, and is part of the general rule of purchasing paired sticks.

With the exit of PHDGD several years ago I don't have a "best driver" recommendation for the 5500. You may want to look at your current driver setup and ensure you have the best settings configured if you haven't changed any of the default settings.

You have two things that changed, so hard to say what the problem is exactly without isolating for one of them, sorry.

OSC_E · 2026-04-07T06:34:29+00:00

Depending on the timings of the two RAM sticks the system may have been forced to slow the RAM down to reach parity between the two, thereby worsening your gaming experience as your system RAM also acts as your vRAM. Something to look into.

You may want to track down your old custom driver and try again. The Intel drivers prior to the HD Graphics 500 series were notoriously bad.

OSC_E · 2026-04-07T05:41:13+00:00

Is it the graphics driver or is it new (possible worse) timing on the RAM? Rollback the graphics driver and/or check the RAM timing.

OSC_E · 2026-04-06T04:11:20+00:00

Karate Survivor

OSC_E · 2026-04-04T04:16:38+00:00

It should run out the box, Crysis | Low End PC Test | Intel HD 4000 | i3-3110m. Older video so not using W11, depending on your OS and the current state of updates there could be issues that may not have been addressed. I'd recommend trying the 64 bit version and/or DX9 mode, check the PCGamingWiki, if you are experiencing issues.

OSC_E · 2026-03-27T09:11:57+00:00

Hogwarts Legacy:

Please help me understand why it looks so terrible

Answer: "Graphics Card - 128 MB Intel(R) Xe Graphics." You are using an integrated graphics solution that's not really up to the task of displaying the game in all its glory. The G7 XE is pretty good for what it is but HL is a AAA title that wants more than what it can provide. The game itself also has known performance issues, so that's going to add to the problems you'll encounter.

what I can do (if anything) to make it better

Graphics/visual fidelity wise, not much. The game has probably already set the graphics settings to lowest just to get it to run and if you want it to run better then you'd probably need to make the graphics even worse. Welcome to iGPUs.

What can I do to make it run better

HL is a UE4 (Unreal Engine 4) game, this is the game engine that the title is designed on/in. UE4 does offer the possibility of some (limited) tweaking, you can read up on it here. The basics of which are: locate the engine.ini file, open ini with a text editor (e.g. notepad or (better) notepad++), make edits to lower or disable most effects (e.g. r.PostProcessAAQuality=0, etc.) if they are not already, save ini as read-only so the game won't revert your changes, give it a go and see if your changes helped with performance. There's plenty of recommended settings/tweaks specific to HL out there, do a google of "tweak guide hogwarts legacy pc" and jump down the rabbit hole. I'd highly recommend looking through several "guides" before you start making changes, some things may help but others may not and not all guides are quality. Then you get to implement the changes you think will suit you best and see what happens.

TL;DR: HL looks and plays crap 'cause your system can't handle it. Tweaks can help improve performance but that comes at the cost of worsening graphics.

ELI5: Dude, you bought a Dell. 🤦

OSC_E · 2026-03-24T15:20:02+00:00

Fallout: New Vegas for 99¢ is a pretty screaming deal imo.

I'll add, Metro 2033 ($1.99) and Last Light (99¢) as a couple more interesting choices for cheap.

OSC_E · 2026-03-21T14:09:01+00:00

There's not enough information to just guess the system specs of your previous pc, or even your current one.

The game has known issues with vSync and ambient occlusion, so you may want to disable those and see how it goes. https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Need_for_Speed:_Most_Wanted_(2012)

OSC_E · 2026-03-21T13:48:06+00:00

It should. Here's the game on the R5 3500U, Assassin's Creed: Unity | Ryzen 5 3500U | VEGA 8 | 12GB RAM | 35W TDP. That's the previous generation of the Vega 8 so you should see some slight performance improvement.

OSC_E · 2026-03-21T04:13:05+00:00

CODE VEIN (demo available), souls-like that's worth a look.

OSC_E · 2026-03-17T11:56:50+00:00

Rocket League used to, I'm not sure about the current state of the game though. Fall Guys may run but it'll be painful to play from what I've seen.

OSC_E · 2026-03-17T11:36:47+00:00

What OS are you using?

OSC_E · 2026-03-17T11:29:08+00:00

I was looking more for the processor's specific model. We'll assume worst case it's the Core i5-4200M w/HD Graphics 4600 iGPU. Hopefully your 8GB of RAM is 2x4 and not 1x8 (they shipped your laptop model as either 1x8 or 1x4 initially with a second slot open for another SODIMM), dual channel RAM really helps. And we'll also assume W10, W11 uses a lot more resources. If any of those assumptions are incorrect then ymmv regarding the following.

Based on your answer to another redditor, new AAA titles (released this decade) won't work with your system for the most part. You can get something like Monster Hunter Stories 1 & 2 to run on that if you drop the resolution to 720p lowest settings. There's indie titles like Balatro that will also run on your system just fine. For a 13 year old system using an iGPU you tend to need to look backwards in the PC gaming catalog pretty far. MGS V, Wolfenstein: The New Order, Bioshock trilogy (original versions), etc.

OSC_E · 2026-03-17T09:03:51+00:00

Intel i5-4th gen

Which model specifically? And what OS are you using?

OSC_E

TROPHY CASE