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.
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.