Even in 2024, it’s a blessing if a developer reveals more than just the minimum and recommended specs for a game, and perhaps some upscaling tech details before a game’s release. Nightingale developer Inflexion Games has adopted a much more valuable approach, though, and provided a performance expectations breakdown that should be the new standard for PC games moving forward.
It’s sometimes a risk buying any of the best PC games without knowing exactly how your rig will perform. The only real way to know is using a tool like PCGamesBenchmark, or buying the game and refunding if it’s poor.
The Nightingale system requirements are already out in the wild, and we expected to hear very little else about the game before it enters early access on February 20.
However, Inflexion Games released a post to its website simply titled ‘Performance Expectations’. In the process, it’s created what I believe should be the new standard for any PC game, at least those where performance is going to be critical to players’ enjoyment of the game.
Within this article, we not only get extended system requirements that offer ‘High’ and ‘Ultra’ specs, but Inflexion even give tips on how to improve performance, much like we offer in our best game settings articles.
Some of the information that Inflexion has listed is not necessarily related to the game, such as updating GPU drivers, but this is well worth suggesting nonetheless, as outside impact needs to be considered before playing around with in-game options.
Going on to break down the aspects of Nightingale that could impact performance is also fantastic insight. These issues could be read like a list of excuses if revealed post-release when players encounter them, but here it reads like an open book of what could happen, and then you can still refer to the above advice to improve performance.
The only missing data that we could spot was a lack of suggested AMD CPUs in the system requirements, which is a small oversight when compared to how much useful data is present otherwise.
While we’re yet to see any games released in 2024 with major performance issues, with 2023 being a particularly terrible year for PC gaming in this aspect, we need to see more developers posting these kinds of transparent articles for player benefit.
The Nightingale release date is almost here, and if you want to shoot for ultra performance, you’re going to need one of the best graphics cards in your gaming PC.