Hi guys, I have a friend who wants to try speedrunning his game, but I don't think his PC will be able to accommodate the game and the streaming. So I was wondering about what's the MINIMUM specs requirement for a PC to at least get a smooth speedrun for a game, say Mario or Minecraft?

8GB of ram is typically a safe bet for most games, I don’t know about Mario, but I think that Minecraft can smoothly run on 4GB of ram. The specific communities will probably know better than me though.

@Bob-chicken Thanks, I appreciate your answer.

@M_CBL_ streaming can be fairly lightweight on a PC. I currently run my games in a windows 10 virtual machine with gpu-passthrough, and an allocated 8gb of ram with 4 cpu cores. I've had no difficulties with any games, and I've ran some hardware intensive games on there (partially unfair because I have a decent laptop graphics card). I would suggest taking a look at the steam / winstore/game page and see what the minimum specs are to run whatever games you plan on running. Like @Bob-chicken said, 8gb ram is good for most games, as for other specs, I'm not an expert at recommending hardware, but referring to min specs charts for games like mentioned before, this should steer you in the right direction.

You can do a lot with like 0 hardware (I know a good amount of people run on the raspberry pi). If your issue is running recording software, you can always just record on an external camera or phone.

Elden Ring for example. The game requires a 4 year old Intel CPU or 2 year old AMD CPU. Very demanding. There's some that met that requirement and had issues when streaming or recording the game via OBS. Found it was the CPU that was being hit too hard. Minecraft isn't as demanding. I wanted to emphasize, like above, streaming is a hit on performance. There's ways around it.

video capture card, like the one you would hook up to a console, takes HDMI input. smartphone streaming, you can do this. combine video capture card + smartphone streaming. this way you're not hurting your cpu, ram or gpu. make sure your phone is on wifi though.

there's lots of ways to setup stuff like that. if you want to test, and not buy a video capture card. you can try not using OBS and instead use something like moonlight or parsec or steam link, to stream to your phone and then have the phone re-stream that stream. it should be less work on the pc, but if the pc can't do it, get creative. https://www.majorgeeks.com/content/page/less_memory_with_steam.html

"but referring to min specs charts for games like mentioned before, this should steer you in the right direction." That's good advice. check there first. if you're between the minimum and recommended, or playing Elden Ring, only then streaming should be something you worry about.

8gb ram might be enough for speedrunning, but make sure that many applications are not running in the background otherwise you would suffer fps loss.