Minimum hardware requirements are really not any one thing, and impossible to determine in a general sense.
In principle, on Windows, we require a GPU that offers D3D11 support (which is mostly about the OS and the driver), with Feature Level 9_1 or better hardware support. That said, Feature Level 9_1 is extremely old and has very limited features only, so I would personally set the limit to a DirectX 10 compatible GPU (Feature Level 10 or 10_1)
For hardware decoding on Windows, we also require a certain level of D3D11 support, as well as running on Windows 8 or newer, if that is not available hardware decoding will fail, which can lead to its own performance issues.
Thats one of the major differences to Red October Standard, which is build on D3D9 instead. While JRVR can be more efficient, it'll only be able to if a certain feature threshold in the hardware is achieved (as well as using a modern OS, Windows 7 is no longer fully supported).
As an alternative, we also support Vulkan 1.1+, with certain mandatory extensions. On Windows, there is usually no reason to use it though, as when Vulkan is available, D3D11 will also be.
If neither D3D11 or Vulkan are usable, the third option is OpenGL 2.1+, although I would strongly recommend at least OpenGL 3.2.
Vulkan and OpenGL are used on Linux, while Mac only has access to OpenGL.
On ARM devices, like the RPi4, we require OpenGL ES 3.0 support. This is functional, at least with reasonable videos.
To put an idea of time to this, the first Direct3D 10-class graphics cards came out in 2008, 13 years ago. So I think we can comfortably say anything released in the last 10 years should be capable, at least on a feature level, and even hardware from before that should be able to run with limited features.
These requirements above don't speak anything about performance though, as performance is a rather hard thing to classify. It depends on so many factors, the resolution of the video you are playing, the resolution of your screen, and your hardware. And even in hardware you have multiple vendors, multiple generations of GPUs, so coming up with a "minimum" is not entirely practical.
If you want to post a log of your laptop trying to play a video with JRVR, we could check in which of the categories above it falls, and perhaps determine if it is indeed a performance issue, and maybe where, or something else.
Author
Topic: JRVR performance question (whoareyou) (Read 1089 times)