Transport tycoon on my 486sx-25. (Original version, not deluxe).
The game was fine up to a dozen vehicles or so but started lagging badly after that. I hit the vehicle limit and played for 100 game years, but it got to the point where a year would take 3 hours to pass. The monorails, fastest vehicle in the game, would move a single pixel every few seconds.

Some weird stuf happened in that game, like a steel mill that made 2000 tons of steel without any iron ore being supplied.

I played heaps of Xwing in that PC but it ran pretty well with the detail turned down a bit. Transport tycoon was the only game I remember that PC really struggled with.

After that we got a P2-266 with an S3 Virge. Most games around that time started requiring 3d accelerators, so games simply wouldn't run on that machine. There was no option to grin and bear the stutters or low framerate.

NFS: Most Wanted, The Gun, Ex Machina on a Celeron 1.7GHz with Radeon 8500. It was the time when I considered 12 fps playable. Now at 25 fps I often feel the conrols are a little off.

Too many to list really. I remember running Windows 95A (installed from floppy) on a 486SX/33.

I could have sworn I played Wolfenstein 3D in CGA but a quick Google search couldn't confirm that game supporting CGA. I do remember playing Sierra's Codename: Iceman in CGA.

Doom was the reason for upgrading to VGA 😀

Like you I was behind the curve for much of my childhood. Still had fun though 😀

XT laptop, 640k, CGA, PC Speaker, no HDD - PGA Tour Golf, LHX Attack Chopper, World Class Leaderboard
286 laptop, 1MB, VGA, PC Speaker - X-Wing, Lucasarts adventures, Wolf 3D
486 DX-33 and DX4-100 - Quake, Outlaws, Wing Commander III, System Shock
Cyrix 200 - Half Life, Quake still sucked too
K6-3+ w/Voodoo 3 - DX8 games didn't like the Voodoo much

By the time I got the 486 I had enough money to buy some awesome games on budget re-release though so it was all good (e.g. Bioforge).

Pentium 133 + TNT2 M64 PCI.

Half Life - 1024x768 playable in small areas with few enemies, basically unplayable at 640x480 in large areas or some enemies.

Having a OpenGL card did help a lot!

My very first PC was an 8Mhz XT. So, pretty much every thing I tried to run on it was pretty slow. Still I managed to play through Monkey Island and Ultima VI on it.

After that, every computer I bought was at the target range for all the latest games. Often, a little ahead of the curve. I still remember the day I first played GLQuake on my freshly released VooDoo 1, it was mind blowing! After all the generations of graphics I've seen, I still get giddy at each new leap in tech evolution.

We were always behind the curve, but then again, it was expensive to keep up in the mid-90s. Not like today where you can buy a system and use it for a decade with a reasonable upgrade here and there.

I also played Doom on a 386 SX-33 with 4MB of RAM. Version 1.1 chugged but version 1.666 was much better. Syndicate ran fine. Under a Killing Moon got very pixelated during walking. OMF 2097 turned into a slideshow at times. I seem to recall playing System Shock on that machine but I guess maybe not. Later we had a 486DX4/100 that chugged a bit on Syndicate Wars and was fine for Crusader but my friend's Pentium-90 was noticeably snappier.

Pentium 100, Trident 9440 2MB, Aztech sound card: Descent & Quake had problems above 320x240 (very choppy, laggy controls, dropped pixels). Warcraft 2 had "frozen sprite" syndrome at 640x480. Descent 2 was choppy even at 320x200.

Pentium 233MMX, Voodoo 1 4MB, SB16: Quake 2, Half-Life & Unreal worked fine at 640x480 until large levels/battles, then it was chop-chop city.

Athlon XP 2000+, GeForce 3 Ti 200 64MB AGP, SB Live! Value: It ran Doom 3 at 640x480 with lowest settings, but it wasn't pretty (blurry, bad level lighting, went into slow-motion every time a monster attacked). Even a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz Northwood / GeForce 6600 256MB AGP wasn't enough (only ran smooth at 640x480 with high settings until it got very busy - then it got very choppy).

I upgraded to play the C&C series through Generals with a P4 HT. 😀 Never short on $ really but always self built with Asus / Abit but generic S3s (never branded). My first PC was an OEM Philips 286.

Quake II on Pentium 133, S3 Virge. 320x200 software mode, slow but playable.

I had two GeForce FX cards (FX 5200 and later 5900) when they were current-tech - lots of DX9 games at 640x480 or 800x600 at a BLISTERING 20-40 fps with low IQ. 😵 I remember the first time I saw Half-Life 2 on "good" hardware (a GeForce 6800 Ultra) - it was a different game. 🤣 That's probably the only system I ever really had major quibbles about the performance. I'm not remembering any of my previous machines having trouble with games from their relative time.

I have far too many to mention all, so I'll list two of my favorites: Need for Speed: High Stakes on a 486 (or was it a 5x86) Cyrix based CPU @ 80MHz. Even at lowest settings, it was a slideshow. Also ran Need for Speed III on the same system. I'm not sure how it even worked since it supposedly required Pentium instruction sets or w/e.

First computer that i considered mine was an old HP micro-atx system that mom gave me when she upgraded to a newer HP (with an Athlon XP). It started out with a Coppermine Celeron at 1.1GHz, 128mb RAM and onboard everything.

Later it was upgraded to 512mb RAM (max for the 810 chipset) and a PNY Geforce 2 MX 400 (PCI). I believe this was to play either Halo or Trainz Simulator. (That was round 2003 when i was in Junior high). Later on it got a geforce 4 MX4000. I played Doom 3 on that rig. Now that i think about it i'm suprised it even ran but, it did!

So many memories on that machine, dial up days of messing around in the internet and playing Starcraft with direct dial. Age of Empires, the Medal of Honor series... I think it might have even ran CoD 1.

Barton xp3200+ , 1gb dual channel ddr400, radeon 9700 pro, audigy2, Asus a7n8x deluxe.

Ran crysis in directx 9 and was extremely difficult to make playable. Very choppy, lots of pausing and memory swapping. Did get it finally playable at 10-20fps @ 800x600 with low resolution shadows. Biggest problem was amount of memory (would've been way better with 2gb system ram). Was great to see Radeon 9700 pro finally fall to its knees after so many years.

Counter-Strike on Pentium 200MMX, 32MB of RAM and a Voodoo2 12MB.

FPS was so bad that I died more often from that then from bad play.

Shogo: MAD on Pentium 100 MHz, 32 MB RAM (or 24?), onboard S3 Trio32. Lowest resolution, software mode. That was extremely painful. 🤣

I played through most of the SCI sierra games on a friends Everex 12MHz 286. Games like KQ6 and Dagger of Amon Ra were pretty darn slow even with the ESDI hard drive, and ugly in EGA as well (these were the EGA/VGA versions).

Just finished Simon The Sorcerer on my 386SX-25. Wondering what to play next to be honest...

Tie Fighter and X-Wing on my 486SX/25 with 512K VGA card and 100MB Seagate Hard Drive....🤣

Also used doublespace to gain more HDD space and was running Windows 95 (installed from floppy disk set since I did not have a CD-ROM drive).

I also used the PC speaker for the longest time until I finally bought a Sound Blaster Pro 2, which made gaming much more enjoyable....I remember that moment being a huge turning point for me....after hearing real sound from my games, I was hooked on PC games and my NES and Sega genesis began collecting more dust.

Things ran so slow on a 486SX25, and it was not until I went to University that I finally got my hands on a pentium class machine (albeit a P75) with a CD ROM drive to boot! Once I had this, I thought I was invincible and quickly realized that that was not that fast either, but certainly had a greater life span and much more versatile than my 486SX system.