I know a guy that is thinking about buying pa. Can a laptop with 8gb ram windows 8.1 and amd radeon HD 8650 run PA.
You could show him this FAQ and see if it fits the minimum requirements: http://support.uberent.com/kb/faq.php?id=11 Just make sure he updates his graphics card's driver. That's the most common issue.
I run PA on my i5 Laptop (first gen 2.4 ghz) which has 8gb of ram and a rather old nVidia GT 420m gpu (I'm pretty sure slower than the 8650m gpu). So long as the drivers are up to date (can be an issue with laptops if laptop vendor uses modified drivers) then it will run the game fine at 1366 x 768 (I get a stable 30+ fps on low settings, native resolution without downscaling). Just note a system like that would struggle to drive PA well at 1920 x 1080p at reasonable frame rates.
I've had no issues on my Q6600 machine with 8GB of system RAM, and it runs ok overall. My only concern would be that the 8650 is "APU" Graphics if I remember right. Meaning you don't have access to all of those 8GB. Should be fine though as long as you're not playing insanely large games. If your friend runs into issues with the game crashing, try raising swapfile size rather than letting the system allocate it or try capping CoherentUI process count to save memory. Eg, add something like this to the startup: --coherent-options="--renderer-process-limit=8"
