Pixel shader question

[Poobah Gorg]

My video adapter on my OK-enough-for-most-gaming laptop supports pixel and vertex shaders version 4.1. The canirunit.com site keeps telling me I can't play games that require 3.0.

Is this something like when your driver supports DirectX 10 but not 9? It seems to me that by having something with the number 4.1, I should be fine with something that only requires 3.0. Is there no backwards compatibility? Or is the site just wrong about this stuff?

This is starting to get a bit frustrating, I'm tending to just get the games where I'm good on everything else but the 3.0 shaders.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

"Can I run it" sites are not always accurate results either. Depends what they are looking at in your system. Especially inaccurate when comes to laptops because most have two GPUs (onboard + dedicated). And often only the onboard one is seen due to being the default one.

Best way to answer any questions u have would be:
- What are you trying to run?
- What are your system specs; or at the very least, what is the brand+model of your laptop?

[Poobah Gorg]

I've got a Toshiba A505 running Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit.
4GB RAM, Intel i7 Q 720 dual core 1.60GHz.
It's got an onboard Nvidia GEForce 310M.
I realize that the specs they claim are the minimum on that site are an estimate based upon what the developers claim they'll run on.

My problem is as follows. When I run the script on the site, it very often tells me I cannot run a game because the minimum spec for the video controller is 3.0 pixel shader and 3.0 vertex shaders with some amount of VRAM that's either exactly the 512MB mine has, or something lower.

Mine has 4.1 pixel shader and vertex shader, and 512MB VRAM. My system EXCEEDS the stated requirements as far as I can tell. Other times it sees that my system is better than the stated specs, which might even be the same.

I'm guessing that sometimes they go with = instead of >=? Seems like this would have all sorts of folks getting bad feedback from them.

[Poobah Gorg]

Ah, I found this after poking aorund a bit in their Help section:
"Why does the video card requirement fail when CRYI shows that all the video card features (i.e. VC RAM, Pixel Shader, etc) pass?
This means that your video card failed the model test. The individual features that we show an analysis for are not the only important parts of the video card. An example would be if you had the GeForce 8500 and the requirement was set at the GeForce 8600. The 8600 is more powerful than the 8500, so in this situation the test would fail, even though VC RAM, Pixel shader, Vertex shader all pass."

I'm leaning towards "This will probably work well enough, but not great." I can live with that, really. If I needed a killer gaming set-up, I'd go build a desktop from parts.