That sort of situation actually happened very rarely for me.
I do remember some specifics though:
- My first ever PC, wasn't quite "gaming ready" at the time; was also pre-built. It had a regular, Non-Express PCI GPU. That PC could barely run Solitaire. However, at that specific point in time I only got that PC to 'introduce' myself to the whole PC stuff in general. I mostly used it just to browse the web. I was still a console gamer then (that was around 2002).
- Then I did make an 'upgrade' to that PC, the only thing I could change, the GPU. Not knowing what I was doing or what I really needed, I went to a Future Shop and bought myself the MX-440SE (yes, that does stand for 'Sucky Edition', I only learned it the hard way soon after). With that card I could 'run' some games, but most of the game settings had to be tuned down a lot in order to get any amount of performance. The first PC game I purchased was SWAT 3. I did try to run it on that PC, and it sucked, real hard. It didn't just run slow, the game itself barely wanted to start up.
However, in late 2003 (going by memory, could have been very early 2004) I finally got my first ever "gaming ready" PC, self-built, with each separated components I had chosen, and so on. That one had an Intel Pentium 4 CPU, and an ATi Radeon 9600 (regular, non-Pro). With THAT system, my gaming spree on the PC platform really started.
BUT... the whole "reduce graphics settings of all types in order to get performance" thing remained with me for many years. I never really hesitated in doing that and wasn't trying to force 'Max Settings' onto my systems when I knew they couldn't handle it for specific games (whichever it may have been over the years, regardless of how many system upgrades I made). So, generally-speaking, when my system happened to run a game slow I usually just tuned down some settings and it was all around just fine and playable.
With this said though, of course, there's been some exceptions; trying to go in order as I try to remember them one by one (probably missing a few titles overall):
- SWAT 3 (as mentioned above, was my first ever PC game, anything I tried to run it on at first was worst than a slide show, but I did eventually run the game fine on my first true gaming PC).
- Battlefield 1942 (I recall, being the first time I ever saw such huge maps for multiplayer, along with so many players at once with some many vehicles and just lots of action happening on the screen, it often ran pretty slowly; but I managed to find some good in-game settings to get extra frames and it was alright in the end)
- Around the 2006, '07, '08 years (or so), when DirectX was getting more features and the advent of 'God Rays' started to pop everywhere. A lot of games tried it (some better than others), and I remember two games in particular that were surprisingly getting 'hit' by slow performance when activating those then-new visual effects; Half-Life Coast (the demo map showcasing those visuals) and one of the STALKER games... I think it was Clear Sky at the time that got those effects. I'm probably not thinking of a few others here but year around that time some games didn't have a good implementation of God Rays and it showed.
- The original Crysis, obviously. I think that one gave a giant collective slap to just about everyone. Not even the 'best' hardware avaiable within the generation that was ongoing when the game came out could truly run it 'well' (at maximum or near maximum settings, that is). I DID, however, run the game at reasonable frames; but like about 95% of the players base, I had to reduce a bunch of visual settings down in order to achieve that.
After the whole "The Gaming Industry Just Got Kicked In The Balls By Crysis" thing happened I think that one of the 'side effects' of that was a sort of wake up call for a lot of [PC] gamers to better prepare themselves for new games. In terms of how well their PC _might_ run something new, or not. I do think that Crysis made more PC gamers "hardware conscious" in the following years. Because truly, before Crysis happened we barely ever had any similar moments where 'current Gen' couldn't run something new. The only one that comes to mind was DOOM 3, but that was definitely not on the level of the performance hits that Crysis caused (and on a side note, I never really had any slow performance in DOOM 3, now that I think of it).
In the years that followed Crysis we started to get less and less 'PC exclusive' sort of games that pushed the hardware to their limits. Instead, PC gaming was sort of pushed further into the Console Ports period; which I sometimes refer (for myself) to the "Dark Ages" of PC gaming. Basically, from the release of the XBOX360 and PS3 (and Wii), nearly everything on PC was a console port. So IF a game ran slow, it was usually for just a few reasons: 1) The port was very badly executed and poorly optimized, which was VERY frequent around those years, or 2) Your PC was extremely outdated and would have benefited from an upgrade long ago; because the common denominator console hardware was VERY quickly surpassed by PC components, yet the ports kept on getting just worst during that period. So in the 'defence' of PC gamers of that period, your PC most likely wasn't at fault for many years... with the exception of cases where you SHOULD really have updated long ago.
Genuinely, when it comes to games running too slow because my PC 'wasn't ready' I suppose I have to consider myself lucky because it didn't happen many times.
However, that a game runs slowly because it's poorly optimized, has too many bugs / crashes (while your PC is stable for everything else you play) would be a completely different story; that one did happen quite a lot over the years. I'll say this to conclude though, because there IS a recent game that does require a lot from PCs, in general (again, only if you really want to run it at maximum settings, especially if you're trying it at 1440p or 4k) and that is - of course - Cyberpunk 2077. However, for me, Cyberpunk 2077 is actually the first game since the original Crysis to be doing this. I'd argue that this is the case in general for most people and truly, none have done this since Crysis 1 back in 2007.
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