Minimum

Minimum is the kind of game a benchmark database keeps records for out of respect for history: a free-to-play third-person shooter released in June 2014, built by TimeGate Studios on Unreal Engine 3 and published by Atari, wrapping MOBA-style lanes, craftable weapons, and rampaging Titans inside a blocky, minimalist art style. It never found its audience. TimeGate collapsed while the game was still finding its feet, Human Head Studios inherited development, Atari eventually pulled it from sale, and the official servers have been dark for years. What remains is a cult curiosity and, in our database, 3,712 measured CPU and GPU combinations worth of performance data. That data turns out to be surprisingly instructive: the average system records 108 FPS at 1080p Ultra, 70 FPS at 1440p Ultra, and 38 FPS at 4K Ultra, with a ceiling of 594 FPS at 1080p Low and a floor of just 28 FPS at 1080p Ultra. For one of the lightest games we track, that roughly 20x spread between the slowest and fastest results says more about the hardware people actually own than it does about Minimum itself.

Unreal Engine 3 and the lightest art style in the library

Everything about Minimum's hardware behavior follows from two facts: it runs on Unreal Engine 3, and its visuals are deliberately primitive. UE3 is an engine from the single-thread era. It leans on one or two fast cores for game logic, physics, and draw submission, which means per-core speed sets the ceiling far more often than core count. A modern six-core processor will mostly idle through a Minimum match, but a legacy dual-core from the early 2010s will feel every one of its years. This is the first thing our data confirms: the 28 FPS floor at 1080p Ultra comes from exactly that class of hardware, old low-core-count CPUs paired with entry-level graphics from before 4K was a retail category.

The GPU side is the opposite story. The minimalist aesthetic, flat colors, simple geometric models, small textures, uncomplicated materials, was an artistic choice that doubles as a performance gift. There is simply very little for a graphics card to do. Modern cards from even the budget tier are so overqualified for this renderer that they spend most of their time waiting on the CPU, which is why the fastest combinations in our data reach 594 FPS at 1080p Low. Memory requirements are equally modest. Minimum shipped into a world where 8 GB of RAM was generous, and the game is comfortable well inside that. Storage demands are trivial by 2026 standards; the install is small enough that an NVMe SSD turns load screens into blinks, though this is one of the few games where even a SATA drive would cost you almost nothing.

The practical summary: at 1080p, Minimum is a CPU-bound game on any reasonably modern graphics card, and it only becomes GPU-limited at 4K on older hardware. The 108 FPS average at 1080p Ultra, taken across more than 3,700 combos that span a decade of hardware, tells you the median gaming PC has this game comfortably beaten.

1080p: 108 FPS average, and what the extremes mean

The 108 FPS average at 1080p Ultra needs context, because it is an average across an enormous spread of hardware rather than a target any single machine should expect. On one end, the 594 FPS ceiling at 1080p Low shows what happens when a strong modern CPU meets an engine this light: frame rates that would feed a 240Hz monitor twice over. On the other end, the 28 FPS floor at 1080p Ultra represents legacy hardware, the kind of machine that was already dated when Minimum launched, and the honest news for that hardware is that the settings menu is the fix. UE3's Low preset strips out exactly the work that weak systems struggle with, and the gap between the 28 FPS floor at Ultra and the 594 FPS ceiling at Low is mostly a settings story.

For anyone on a mainstream gaming PC built in the last several years, 1080p in Minimum is a solved problem. You will sit above the 108 FPS average at Ultra, which makes a 144Hz monitor the natural pairing if you have one. Competitive-minded players who drop to the Low preset, the traditional move in arena shooters for clarity and consistency, push well into 240Hz territory on strong processors, which is faintly absurd for a game whose competitive scene no longer exists. But the data is the data: if you want triple-digit frame rates for whatever reason, Minimum at 1080p will supply them on hardware that costs very little used.

1440p and 4K: pixels finally cost something

At 1440p Ultra the average falls to 70 FPS, a drop of about 35 percent from 1080p. That is a steeper scaling curve than you would expect from such a light engine, and it reveals the composition of the dataset: a large share of the tested combinations are older cards with small frame buffers and limited memory bandwidth, the parts that suffer first when pixel counts rise. On any current mid-range card, 1440p in Minimum is as solved as 1080p, and you should expect to land far above the 70 FPS average.

The 4K Ultra average of 38 FPS looks alarming until you apply the same context. Four times the pixels of 1080p is where legacy hardware genuinely breaks: cards with 2 GB of VRAM, pre-2015 architectures, and entry-level parts that were never meant to drive 3,840 by 2,160 in anything. The average is dragged down by that cohort. A modern graphics card, even a modest one, renders Minimum at 4K without drama, because the workload underneath the resolution is still a UE3 game with simple geometry and cheap shaders. There is no upscaling to lean on here: Minimum predates DLSS and FSR entirely, so every frame is rendered at native resolution. The good news is that brute force is all you need. If 4K matters to you, the rule is simple: any card modern enough to have been sold alongside 4K monitors will handle this game at 4K, and the 38 FPS average is a warning about old hardware, not about the game.

Settings and the recommended configuration

Minimum's options menu is sparse, as UE3 titles tend to be: resolution, texture quality, shadow quality, anti-aliasing, vertical sync, and a frame smoothing toggle. There is very little to optimize because there is very little that costs anything. Our recommended configuration for modern hardware is everything at maximum, shadows included, with anti-aliasing on for cleaner edges on the blocky geometry. That is the full optimization guide, and it will still put a mid-range machine above the 108 FPS average.

Two adjustments are worth making outside the menu. First, UE3's frame smoothing, which holds the frame rate near a fixed cap by default, should be disabled in the engine configuration file if you have a high-refresh monitor; it is the reason some players see the game stuck near 60 FPS on hardware capable of five times that. Second, mouse smoothing is enabled by default in most UE3 games and adds a floaty, dampened feel to aim; turning it off in the input configuration transforms how the game handles, and it costs nothing. Players who want maximum frame rate regardless, for a 240Hz panel or simply on principle, should use the Low preset, which is where our 594 FPS ceiling comes from. Visibility in Minimum is excellent at every preset thanks to the art style, so unlike most shooters, the competitive settings argument is purely about frame rate, not about spotting enemies.

What hardware do you need?

Entry level: If your machine is in the cohort that produces our 28 FPS floor at 1080p Ultra, meaning a legacy dual-core or a pre-2015 entry graphics card, the game is still playable via the Low preset, which is precisely what the floor-to-ceiling gap in our data demonstrates. Anything assembled in the last decade, including office-grade desktops with basic discrete graphics, clears 60 FPS at 1080p without effort. Minimum is one of the rare games where "can it run" is almost always yes.

Mid-range: A mainstream gaming PC build, a current Ryzen 5 or Core i5 class processor with a mainstream graphics card, sits comfortably above the 108 FPS average at 1080p Ultra and drives a 144Hz monitor without touching the Low preset. This tier is the honest sweet spot, and it is also wildly more machine than the game requires. Buy for the rest of your library; Minimum will tag along.

High-end: At this tier the conversation shifts to resolution. Strong modern cards treat 1440p as identical to 1080p in this game and push 4K Ultra far past the 38 FPS dataset average, which, as covered above, reflects legacy hardware rather than what anything current will do. Paired with a fast processor, this tier also unlocks the silly end of the spectrum, triple-digit frame rates at max settings across every resolution.

Flagship: The combinations approaching the 594 FPS ceiling at 1080p Low are flagship-class CPUs feeding an engine that cannot get enough of them. At 4K, flagship hardware renders Minimum at frame rates that make the 38 FPS average look like a different game, because statistically it is: the average includes machines from another era. If you own hardware at this level, Minimum is a screensaver that happens to be playable.

Laptop playability

The floor numbers in our data, 28 FPS at 1080p Ultra, are the profile of old laptop hardware: mid-2010s ultrabooks with early integrated graphics, weak dual-core processors, and single-channel memory. If that describes your machine, the Low preset is your path to a playable frame rate, and expectations should stay modest.

Modern laptops tell a completely different story. Current integrated graphics handle UE3 titles comfortably at 1080p, because a decade of iGPU progress was aimed squarely at workloads like this one. The single most important variable on an integrated-graphics laptop is memory bandwidth, since the GPU shares system RAM: a machine with dual-channel DDR5, meaning two memory modules rather than one, delivers dramatically smoother frame rates in engine-era games than the same chip with a single stick. Any gaming laptop with a discrete GPU from the last several generations is comically overqualified, will hold triple-digit frame rates at 1080p, and will do it quietly, because Minimum barely spins the fans. Battery life and thermals, usually the laptop caveats, are non-issues here; this is one of the least demanding 3D games a laptop will ever run.

Streaming and content creation

Nobody is building a streaming career on Minimum in 2026, but the game has a genuine archival niche: delisted games attract documentary-style videos, retrospectives, and "games you can't buy anymore" content, and that footage has to come from somewhere. The good news for creators is that this is the easiest game in our library to broadcast. The engine is so light that even CPU x264 encoding at a quality-focused preset runs alongside it without touching frame rates on a modern six-core processor. If you want the zero-cost option, a hardware encoder is the right call for any streaming setup: NVENC on GeForce cards and AMF on Radeon cards both produce clean 1080p60 output of this game with no measurable performance impact, and the simple, flat-color visuals compress beautifully, so streams and recordings look crisp at modest bitrates.

On the production side, Minimum footage is as undemanding to edit as it is to capture. Clean 1080p60 clips of flat-shaded geometry are light work for any machine that can run a timeline, which makes this one case where the gaming PC versus workstation debate is entirely moot: whatever you already own is enough for the video editing, the capture, and the game simultaneously.

Common problems and fixes

The game will not launch on a modern Windows install: UE3-era titles depend on bundled redistributables that a fresh Windows install often lacks. Run the included DirectX and Visual C++ installers in the game's redistributables folder, then retry. This single fix resolves most launch failures for games of this vintage.

Multiplayer is dead: This is not a bug. Official matchmaking has been offline for years and the game is delisted from sale, so bot matches and custom games are what remain. Community hubs and fan groups occasionally organize sessions; check them before assuming the game is broken.

Frame rate is stuck near 60 on fast hardware: UE3's frame smoothing cap. Disable smoothing in the engine configuration file, and make sure vertical sync is off if you are using a high-refresh monitor.

The mouse feels floaty or delayed: Default UE3 mouse smoothing. Disable it in the input configuration file. The difference in aim feel is immediate and costs nothing.

Crashes when alt-tabbing or when overlays are active: DX9-era renderers tolerate modern overlays poorly. Disable Discord, GeForce, and Steam overlays if you hit instability, and prefer borderless windowed mode over exclusive fullscreen for alt-tab habits.

Poor performance on genuinely old hardware: That is the floor cohort showing up exactly as our data describes. Use the Low preset, cut shadows first, and confirm the game is running on your discrete GPU rather than integrated graphics if the machine has both.

Upgrade priorities

The honest opening line: if Minimum is the game you are shopping for, do not upgrade anything. The average across 3,712 combos is 108 FPS at 1080p Ultra, and the overwhelming majority of functional PCs from the last decade play it well. Spending money on hardware specifically for this game is spending it wrong.

If your machine genuinely lands in the 28 FPS floor cohort, that machine is old enough that a single-component upgrade is the wrong tool. A balanced, budget gaming PC build replaces the whole problem at once and modernizes everything else you play. If you are on older hardware but otherwise happy, and your library includes other UE3-era titles, a CPU upgrade matters more than a graphics card for that entire class of games, because the engine family's single-thread appetite is the common bottleneck. A graphics card is the last thing Minimum itself will ever ask for. The most sensible purchase for this game, if you insist on buying something, is a monitor you will enjoy across your whole library, because Minimum at 144Hz is genuinely pleasant and a good panel outlives every other component.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Can my PC run Minimum?

A: Almost certainly, if it was built in the last decade. Across 3,712 measured combinations the average is 108 FPS at 1080p Ultra, and even the slowest legacy systems in our data record 28 FPS at Ultra, with the Low preset offering dramatic relief.

Q: Is Minimum still playable in 2026?

A: Yes, but as a single-player or custom-game experience. Official servers are long dead and the game is delisted from sale. If you own it, bot matches work fine; community groups organize occasional sessions.

Q: What is the best graphics card for Minimum?

A: Whatever modern card fits your budget, because all of them are overqualified. Even the 38 FPS average at 4K Ultra is a legacy-hardware artifact; any current mid-range card runs the game effortlessly at every resolution. Choose your GPU for the rest of your library.

Q: Does Minimum support DLSS or FSR upscaling?

A: No. It predates the upscaling era entirely, and it does not need it. The engine is light enough that native-resolution rendering is trivial for modern hardware at every resolution including 4K.

Q: Is Minimum more CPU or GPU intensive?

A: Neither by modern standards, but relatively it leans CPU: UE3 depends on one or two fast cores, so per-core processor speed sets the frame-rate ceiling at 1080p. The GPU only becomes a real factor at 4K on older cards.

Q: Why is my FPS low in a game from 2014?

A: You are likely in the floor cohort, meaning very old or very weak hardware. Confirm the game is using your discrete GPU, install the bundled redistributables, and drop to the Low preset. The gap between our 28 FPS floor and 594 FPS ceiling is a settings and hardware-age story.

The bottom line in 2026

Minimum is a footnote, but a good one. It was a genuinely unusual shooter, MOBA structure, Titan showdowns, weapon crafting, an art style that looked like nothing else in 2014, that arrived at the wrong time under a collapsing studio and never got the runway its ideas needed. What it left behind, besides a small fond community, is one of the more interesting datasets in our library: 3,712 measured combinations whose 108, 70, and 38 FPS averages at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K Ultra say less about the game than about the enormous spread of hardware still in active use.

Its hardware story in 2026 is simple. Minimum runs on everything. The floor of 28 FPS at 1080p Ultra belongs to machines that were already old a decade ago, and the ceiling of 594 FPS belongs to modern flagships jogging. If you are assembling a budget machine for a library of retro and indie games, Minimum defines the floor of your requirements, not the ceiling. Build for the heaviest game you actually play, keep the redistributables installer trick in your back pocket for the UE3 era, and Minimum takes care of itself. It deserved better than it got, and the least we can do is measure it properly.