Considering the Switch 2 (with those pretty joystick well covers to protect from drift, omg) and the Ryzen Z2 Go announcements, the low cost and availability of Steam Deck & parity level APU machines for purchase now, and the giant 1080p gaming install base represented by current gen consoles, it sure seems like low spec & 1080p gaming is going to have a pretty sunny future. I am hoping this gives small and medium sized development teams a chance to show up what is left of AAA gaming.
What are your favorite low spec gaming setups right now? I'm enjoying a 5700g APU system the most these days. Mainstream wise, I've been playing Elden Ring and Injustice 2 and Vampire Survivors. The last Indie I played is this beat-em-up / horde survival game An American Werewolf in LA which was pretty cool.
Don't forget Intel's latest GPU launches either! For custom PCs, there are some really affordable and relatively powerful GPUs available now (for the price). Despite their performance otherwise, Intel is killing it in the GPU space now.
For a lower spec build, you could definitely put together something with a 12100F (or other cheap CPU) and a battlemage GPU. Depending on where you get all the parts, you might be able to hit sub-$500 and get great 1080p performance, or for sure sub-$1k 1080p and likely 1440p performance.
Handhelds also have a lot of good options available too. To save some cash, you can get low end Steam Deck and swap the hard drive yourself. Got myself the cheapest LCD variant and swapped the tiny drive in it with a 2TB drive off Amazon.
I would recommend against pairing Battlemage with a low-spec CPU. As shown by Hardware Canucks, Hardware Unboxed, and others, Intel's Arc graphics driver overhead is currently much higher than competitors, which means they're disproportionately affected by having a weaker CPU. This causes the B580 to lose significantly more performance when paired with low-end CPUs than a roughly equivalent Nvidia or AMD card. At the very low end, the difference is especially stark. In some games, the B580 goes from neck-and-neck with a 4060 on a high-end CPU to losing half its performance with a low-end older CPU, while the 4060 only loses about 25%.
If you're really stuck with a lower-end CPU, it would be far better to get a used midrange AMD or Nvidia GPU from an older product generation for the same price and use that.
Intel is not a good idea if you want to play older games or emulators though, due to poor driver support for both.