Well known Demanding games...

Max Payne 1 and Giants: Citizen Kabuto were always a killer on my good ol' Celeron 333mhz, Voodoo 2 3000 PCI.
 
doom3, fear and quake 3 arena before that, i also remember trying to get the original medal of honor running better on my athlon 1200 & 64mb graphics card i think :D
can also recall upgrading for enemy territory years back
 
Kotu said:
lemmings 2, spent a few days reading up on how to use memmaker so I could get enough free conventional memory so the game would actually run!

in terms of performance, doom was rather choppy on a 386 :D
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Was fine on my 486 sx 25 ;) But the AI turn on Battle Isle 2 would take 10 mins or more...

Quake was the first game that made my PC overheat and crash :p But by then I was running a Cyrix CPU.

The Settlers (1) on my 486 could slow down on big maps.

But the idea of a game that would "bring your PC to its knees" is a relatively modern one. Older games were designed to be played on very simple hardware, and generally ran well.
 
Last few years: Metro 2033, GTA4, Crysis, Arma2*
Mid noughties: Halo (looked mediocre but still ran slow), FS X*, Sims2*, SupCom*, Doom3, EQ2*, Planetside*
Late 90s-early noughties: Q3A, Carma2, Unreal, Morrowind*, GTA3, Daikatana, SiN
Mid-90s: Doom2, GP2*, Championship Manager, Quake

* = by reputation only, haven't played these myself

To be fair, some of these like Q3A, GTA3, Crysis and Unreal weren't necessarily bad engines or bad performers relative to graphical quality per se, just maybe a year or two ahead of their time so you needed to have the right kind of hardware.
 
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System Shock was hugely demanding when it came out - it supported SVGA resolutions but nothing available at the time could run the game greater than 320x200 with a small window without it turning into a slideshow.

You wouldn't believe it when you look at it now, but Thief was also hugely demanding when it came out. Level loads used to take ages - several minutes, and the game ran very slowly on some levels. Nowadays one of the biggest problems is trying to get it to run slow enough!
 
Xink said:
age of empires demo, I couldn't run it because my display couldn't meet the min resolution requirement :S
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Stangely, the whole Age of series I have never had any issues running. Even on my very very very old laptop AoM worked fine.
 
Shove lotro on ultra high in DX 11, get yourself down to the moors and feel the pain.
 
Geo-Gamer said:
what about arma 2 vs crysis 2?
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Arma 2 is much more demanding. It's simulating dozens of things that don't even exist in crysis-land. With the editor, its pretty much infinitely scalable as well. If you dump down enough units in the editor you could theoretically lag out any computer...... not just home PC's.

For oldschool stuff....descent and magic carpet are the ones I really remember being system-killers.

I remember being shocked with Broken Sword as well. It wasn't demanding as such, but for the full install it required over 200mb of space, when most people were using 512mb hd's.
 
Tactical Fighter Experiment (TFX).


Had this as my first real game, besides Doom on a floppy disc!

Came with a pullout for all the keyboard shortcuts. Some I still remember to this day. [ for engine power down, ] for engine power up etc :D
 
For me Morrowind, got it free with a GF4MX man did chug along with that and only 256meg of ram:o

I also remember playing Dues Ex on a 16MB TNT had to stick it in 16bit colour to make it run smoothish.
 
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