COD:Advanced Warfare And AC:Unity PC Requirements Released

This week has seen the announcement of the system requirements of two of this years most hotly anticipated games, Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and Assassin’s Creed: Unity.

Advanced Warfare will be released in November and is boasting a new engine with truly next gen graphics, and a style of gameplay not yet seen before in the Call Of Duty franchise. However, the requirements leave no clues as to whether this is going to be a fantastic looking game, making use of all the various technologies that AMD and Nvidia have to offer, or if it will instead be a repeat of Ghosts – a game where even a GTX Titan couldn’t keep 60FPS. The requirements are as follows:

Recommended:

• OS: Windows 7 64-Bit / Windows 8 64-Bit / Windows 8.1 64-Bit
• Processor: Intel Core i5-2500K @ 3.30GHz
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 @ 4GB
• DirectX: Version 11
• Network: Broadband Internet connection
• Hard Drive: 55 GB available space
• Sound Card: 100% DirectX 9.0c Compatible 16-bit
• Additional Notes: Field of View ranges from 65-90

Minimum:

• OS: OS: Windows 7 64-Bit / Windows 8 64-Bit / Windows 8.1 64-Bit
• Processor: Intel CoreTM i3-530 @ 2.93 GHz / AMD PhenomTM II X4 810 @ 2.80 GHz or better
• Memory: 6 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 @ 1GB / ATI Radeon HD 5870 @ 1GB or better
• DirectX: Version 11
• Network: Broadband Internet connection
• Hard Drive: 55 GB available space
• Sound Card: DirectX-compatible

A few interesting points to note, that 4GB of VRAM recommended seems very high, and unless it’s running some seriously detailed scenes or high texture quality then 2 and 3GB cards should (the current trend seems to be that recommended requirements are taking 4K users into consideration, hence the very high VRAM requirements) be fine. A huge 55GB install would support the idea of high quality textures and audio, but we’ll just have to wait and see if that is indeed the case. And finally it’s nice to see an FOV option in there, something that a lot of shooters on the PC have struggled with including in recent years.

Assassin’s Creed: Unity however is even more interesting in terms of what it requires. The fact that it will run at 30FPS at 900P on the next gen consoles suggests that the game needs a lot of grunt to run well both on the CPU and GPU front, and on the PC this looks to be more true as the game has a minimum requirement of a 7970. With Ubisoft’s track record and general attitude towards the PC over the last few years though I’d be very wary of it being extremely unoptimised, and thus that being the reason why the requirements are so high.

Minimum:

• 64-bit operating system required
• Supported OS: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8/8.1
• Processor: Intel Core i5-2500K @ 3.3 GHz or AMD FX-8350 @ 4.0 GHz
• RAM: 6 GB
• Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 or AMD Radeon HD 7970 (2 GB VRAM)
• Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card with latest drivers
• Hard Drive Space: 50 GB available space
• Peripherals Supported: Windows-compatible keyboard and mouse required, optional controller
• Multiplayer: 256 kbps or faster broadband connection

Recommended:

• 64-bit operating system required
• Supported OS: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8/8.1
• Processor: Intel Core i7-3770 @ 3.4 GHz or AMD FX-8350 @ 4.0 GHz or better
• RAM: 8 GB
• Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 or AMD Radeon R9 290X (3 GB VRAM)
• Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card with latest drivers
• Hard Drive Space: 50 GB available space
• Peripherals Supported: Windows-compatible keyboard and mouse required, optional controller
• Multiplayer: 256 kbps or faster broadband connection

• Supported Video Cards at Time of Release: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 or better, GeForce GTX 700 series; AMD Radeon HD7970 or better, Radeon R9 200 series
• Note: Laptop versions of these cards may work but are NOT officially supported.

Personally I will have to wait and see how well they are optimised and how good they look before I judge them, but 50GB seems to be the new size of choice for AAA game developers, so the continuing drops in prices of both SSD’s and large storage drives could prove very helpful to gamers in the next few months as we hit release season. But what do you think, is the requirement of high end hardware just to get around poorly optimised code, or are these next gen games really pushing current technology to its limit? Let us know.