You can speedrun PC games. For video games, better hardware can speed up things like loading times (which also happens if you put an SSD in your PS4) and increase the framerate but the actual gameplay won't become faster beyond the threshold necessary to play the game smoothly.

This particular speedrun is much more tied to the hardware, but that's part of the fun for these people. It might make more sense if you compare it to something like car racing. Both the hardware and the person matter a lot to the outcome.

Speedrunners have built tools for some games (most Valve games if I'm recalling correctly) that monitor times, while excluding loading screens. Obviously this is a separate category, and both curiously exist for games with a built-in timer (GDQ ignores in-game timers, for example).

There's actually a whole scripting language for reading values from games' memory and extract events for timing and progress:

https://github.com/LiveSplit/LiveSplit/blob/master/Documenta...

Plus if you're using VMs you can manipulate it even further. For example, "lie" to the simulated OS about file-writes, and return files already on the visualized image.

Rules would have to be carefully written.

Most games run a time-limited simulation, so better hardware will only reduce lag and load times, as well as let you dedicate more computing power toward graphics calculations. An in-game timer can be made to ignore all of these.

A lot of the time, for PC games, someone will have made a plugin that integrates into both the split and the game that removes loading screen times, turning it into an "in-game time" run