First, big kudos to Andy for writing most of this page years and years ago, lol. Pinning a kind of objective measure to 3DMark06 scores is very reasonable¹. It was widespread back in the day (with notebookcheck still using it once in a while), lots of results online one could easily check even without installing it, and it's free too now. It's also old enough to be D3D9 based², so basically every card that isn't straight away retrogaming works, but also new-ish enough not to easily hit odd hardware limitations (at least if we start from the assumption we are benchmarking markedly slow one). For as much as it's a double edged sword for the Score usually flaunted not to separate between CPU and GPU performance (two axes very important to keep independent)
6000 is also funnily the score a desktop HD4000 manages to overtake, so even though it would have never come to my mind "pre-ivy bridge" to be anything special, in an oddly elegant way it manages to dodge the lingering question of whether low-end is just a function of "pure speed", or *also* somewhat the features supported.
The "state of affairs" as per game requirements and hardware availability is ever changing though, and I was posting this because in addition to the usual steam hardware survey, it just came to my attention Mozilla's (which put aside some slight way earlier bias in cutting off XP and Vista, on the other hand could be seen as a worst case scenario of systems all over the world)
Btw while I'm generally quick to recommend linux left and right, the truth is that if you are craving for the last drop of performance on <dx12 gpus there's no way you are gonna get it³. Not because I think Vulkan is a *physical necessity* like most other illiterate people, but wined3d still is incredibly unoptimized for the moment. Opengl and nine (if you can run it) are total golden though.
¹but I wonder how the always forgotten Unigine Sanctuary compares
²though, in 2019 even as a person with very strong "nobody with the slightest hope left behind" attitude, I'm asking how far we are till dx10 or dx11 becomes an owed premise
³let alone if you are very low on RAM (either since it's actually very little, or because it has to be eventually shared with the igp), where XP really is the king