[w0utert]

Uhm, no? Even a PC video card from 10 years back can literally render millions of textured polygons (=basically sprites) at a steady 60 fps. Any modern card with programmable shaders would be able to do all the transforms and effects on the GPU with virtually zero CPU overhead at the same time.

There really is no excuse whatsoever for a 2D game like sonic mania to run badly on even low-end PC hardware even with built-in graphics hardware.

[Lorkki]

Note that they actually did set the minimum requirement to "a PC video card from 10 years back": http://store.steampowered.com/app/584400/Sonic_Mania/

Memory bandwidth is the main concern when blitting several layers of pixels 1:1, unless you have some kind of crafty system in place for avoiding overdraw. Although Sonic Mania seems to genuinely use a 320x240-ish internal framebuffer, so my wild guess is that the bottlenecks relate to scaling and post-processing, or possibly some funky driver use causing sync issues.