It’s going to be a cruel Christmas. Over in the console kingdom, developers have tired of pulling along owners of older machines, content to let customers slide backwards down the hill on their sleds if they won’t buy a new box. And in the PC province, system requirements have taken a sudden and uncomfortable lurch upwards, like so much rum butter in your oesophagus.
To Shadow of Mordor and The Evil Within add Assassin’s Creed Unity, which is calling for the head of your ageing graphics card to be separated from its body.
These specs come courtesy of Intra Games, a distributor working with Ubisoft Korea. The GPU requirements are particularly high – asking for a GTX 680 or Radeon HD 7970 as minimum, and 2GB of memory.
- OS: Windows® 7 SP1, Windows® 8/8.1 (Only 64-bit support)
- CPU:
Minimum – Intel Core® i5-2500K @ 3.3 GHz or AMD FX-8350 @ 4.0 GHz or above
Recommended – Intel Core® i7-3770 @ 3.4 GHz or AMD FX-8350 @ 4.0 GHz or above
- RAM:
Minimum – 6GB or above
Recommended – 8GB or above
- GPU:
Minimum – NVIDIA GeForce® GTX 680 or AMD Radeon HD 7970 or above
Graphic Memory minimum – 2GB
Recommended – NVIDIA GeForce® GTX 780 or AMD Radeon R9 290X or above
Graphic Memory Recommended – 3 GB
- Sound Card: DX9.0c-compatible
- HDD: above 50 GB
- Multiplayer: 256 kbps Upload bandwidth or Higher
Maybe this is what we can expect from the new generation of cross-platform games unshackled by the consoles of old. Or perhaps Ubisoft are still getting their heads around what’s soldered to what in the new machines. What do you reckon?