The Evil Within, Bethesda’s reimagining of survival horror from the bloke who did Resident Evil, is a beast. It holds absolutely no truck with “minimum system requirements”. Instead, Bethesda have said this is what PC you should play it on. Anything less, and you’re on your own, kiddo.
The VRAM requirements, are quite the thing. There are few affordable cards with 4 Gigs of video memory; notably the new GTX 970 and GTX 980 from Nvidia. Older cards – even good ones like the GTX 780 Ti – only ship with 3GB. Whether this will be an issue for those wanting the prettiest of gore on that sort of hardware is unclear.
“On the heels of our Gone Gold announcement, we’ve put the final touches on the recommended PC requirements for The Evil Within.” stated Bethesda. “These specifications are listed as “recommended” as they are the settings we’ve determined ensure that your gameplay experience plays as intended by the development team.”
“Note: We do not have a list of minimum requirements for the game. If you’re trying to play with a rig with settings below these requirements (you should plan to have 4 GBs of VRAM regardless), we cannot guarantee optimal performance.”
When challenged by commenters on the blog about the absent minimum requirements, Bethesda replied, saying they’re only “looking to share requirements that show the game the way it was meant to be played”, and that you should only try and run it with less at your own risk.
Recommended PC System Specifications
- 64-bit Windows 7/Windows 8
- i7 with four plus cores
- 4 GBs RAM
- 50 GB of hard drive space*
- GeForce GTX 670 or equivalent with 4GBs of VRAM
- High Speed Internet Connection
- Steam account and activation
The game will take a good 50GB chunk out of your hard drive for installation, coming to rest at just over 40GB for the actual installed size. Bethesda have also stated that they’re working on SLI and Crossfire support.