Most compatibility checks give you a single answer: a percentage, a thumbs up, a "yes" or "no." That is comforting, but it throws away the information that would actually help you. A PC is not one thing; it is a set of parts, and a game or application stresses each of them differently. The useful question is not "how good is my PC" but "which of my parts is the tight fit for this specific title," and that is the question our verdict is built around.
The method starts with your components and the title's real requirements. We take what your machine actually has, the processor, graphics card, memory, video memory, storage, and compare each one against what the title asks for. The named parts, processors and graphics cards, are placed on a rough performance order derived from benchmark data, so that "or better" becomes something we can reason about rather than a vague phrase. The plain amounts, memory and storage, are simpler: you either have the gigabytes or you do not.
Each component gets its own assessment. Then, crucially, the overall verdict is decided by the weakest relevant part, not by an average. This matters because averaging hides the thing you need to know. A machine can look fine on average while failing badly on one component, and that one component is what will actually determine your experience. So the tightest part sets the verdict, and we tell you which part that is, in plain language, as a labelled field: CPU, GPU, RAM, VRAM, or storage.
That labelled bottleneck is the single most useful output. A percentage tells you roughly how much headroom you have. The bottleneck tells you where you have the least, which is what you would act on. If the verdict is borderline and the bottleneck is the processor, you know a new graphics card will not save you. If the bottleneck is video memory, you know the problem is capacity, not speed. The same calculation produces both the score and the label, so they never contradict each other.
We are deliberately strict about where the numbers come from. Every figure in a verdict is derived from the title's published requirements and from benchmark data, not invented and not guessed. If we do not have data for a specific part, we leave that part out rather than fabricate a result, because a confident wrong answer is worse than an honest gap. This is especially true for laptop hardware, where a mobile chip is a genuinely different part from the desktop chip it shares a name with, and treating them as the same is the most common way these checks go wrong.
We also try not to overstate what a verdict means. A passing result means the tightest component clears the bar, not that every setting at every resolution will be flawless. A failing result on one component means that component is below the requirement, which is specific and actionable, not a blanket judgement on your whole machine. And where the data cannot support a claim, about a resolution, a frame rate, or a specific upgrade, we say nothing rather than guess.
The reason to prefer this approach is that it turns a yes-or-no into a decision you can make. If you can run it, you know by how much and where your margin is thin. If you cannot, you know exactly which part is in the way, which is the difference between a useful answer and a shrug. A score is a summary. The component-by-component reasoning behind it is the part you can actually use.
