When making a release and trying to find minimum requirements, what do you do to work things out when your base PC is so powerful?
Hacky way:
You can see how much RAM and VRAM is used to make a guess on that.
Maybe enable vsync to see a percentage of CPU and GPU usage and make a guess on that.
Proper way:
Get a testbench (ryzen AM4 is great for cross generation testing) and test it or hire a company to do the testing
I feel like there should be ways to limit CPU usage or whatever per program :<
On desktop if you have a decent motherboard you can disable cores or CCXs, as well as change clock speeds.
But know that IPC is a thing. A 3GHZ intel 2500 is slow but a 3GHz intel 13900 is still decently fast (even if it has the same core count)
At this point you’re really more likely to be GPU limited than you are CPU.
I got a cheap $400 laptop to test PC (the types they sell at shopping malls). But also test on some old devices with previous gen GPUs etc.
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Build or buy a device that has the minimum specifications you want to target.
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Ultimately, this will always be the best option and it also doesn’t have to be nearly as expensive as it first seems. Laptop prices especially depreciate in value very quickly, so it’s often worth seeking out a used one for this sort of thing.
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I once bought a “Volks-Notebook” that was about the lowest-end device you could get for around €300 back then and it served me an my company well to determine speed of apps on the lower-end business notebooks many companies have plenty of.
If that thing ran the app with two-digit fps then performance was absolutely fine! 
As a low-end solution, you can get real dirty and nasty with BIOS settings. Underclocking is a thing. If your app uses multiple cores you can assign it to use only one or two using Task Manager alone. You could also try to put heavy load on your computer using Prime95 and Furmark. However, the issue with all that is that you do not know how that scales down and how it relates to minimum specs.
At a minimum you will want to get a GPU for less than $200 and test it out with that, most games I’d say are GPU bound. But even better would be testing on an integrated graphics processor on the CPU (IGP), ie most notebooks use that.
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If you’re on a desktop you can hunt down some older mid/low range GPUs and just install them for testing.
Simulating a lower end CPU is harder to do accurately, but you can at least try down clocking your CPU and disabling cores. However, that won’t show differences in cache performance. But unless you are making games with hundreds or more AI entities running around or hardcore physics simulations, CPU is unlikely to be your bottleneck on PC.
You can also enlist some friends’ or relatives’ PCs.
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If possible, this is the best way since you’re testing on actual low-end devices. Look for local game dev or gamer meetups. (Meetup.com is a good place to start.) Don’t expect objective feedback on gameplay; most people are uncomfortable giving negative feedback face-to-face. But they’ll certainly be able to show you if your game lags on their device. Barring in-person meetups, you could set up a discord server or some other way to run closed tests – or even open tests of a small demo build on a site like itch.io.
got to find some people with potatoes and get them to play it. This way has two benefits:
- Requires no money
- somebody else spending time on testing (teamwork, dreamwork)
Also, in development builds it’s possible to record profiling data to a file via scripts, so you can prepare a benchmark/profiling build to give to your testers and have tem send back the files, which can be opened in the profiler.
buy a used laptop or desktop pc. Most users that have super low end devices have heavily used devices so a used device with low end specs (as low as you want to go) is always a great and very cheap option.
Good luck! 
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