Ubisoft's upcoming multiplayer open-world game, Watch_Dogs, has been set for a May 27 release date and just had its system requirements and recommended specs detailed.
Watch_Dogs Creative Director Jonathan Morin recently tweeted that the requirements are as below; we'll analyze the Watch_Dogs minimum system requirements & recommended system specs, hopefully providing some insight as to why the game requires so much RAM.
Watch_Dogs Minimum System Requirements
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 2.66GHz; AMD Phenom II X4 940 3.0GHz or better.
- Memory: 6GB RAM.
- GPU: "1GB VRAM" and compatibility with DirectX 11, Shader 5.0. No specific card details.
- Audio: DirectX 9 compatibility.
- Storage: 25GB
It's a breath of fresh air to see 25GB of storage required after Titanfall's 48GB, though that's still certainly nothing to laugh at for SSD users; it is, however, pretty standard these days (even a little on the low-end).
For those who've been system building for a while, you'll remember the Q6600 and Q8400 as some of the first quad-core CPUs available to consumers. The LGA775 Q6600 debuted in 1Q07 on 65nm fab process and was often associated with the P45 chipset, operating at 2.4GHz stock. The Q8400 boosted clock speeds to 2.66GHz, but was otherwise on similar architecture, comparatively.
In short, the CPU requirement isn't all that impassible and should make for playability on modern dual-cores without issue, in theory. A last-gen i3-3220 would blow the Q6600 away in a lot of tasks that aren't heavily multithreaded, which games are not.
The RAM requirement, though, is pretty damn big. That's the most RAM I've seen required for a game yet. Titanfall can push 3.5GB at times, but 6GB is nuts -- this is almost definitely a result of the game's open world nature, and will hopefully mitigate hits to storage as we store relevant files in memory. The thing is, RAM is so abundant now that 6GB isn't unheard of for almost any gaming machine -- the bare minimum for most builds is 8GB these days, so it'd frankly be better to utilize as much of that as possible. Using the RAM more intensively means we can offload from physical storage which, again, means decreased load spikes when transitioning from one open world cell to another (or "zoning," if there are "zones" in the game).
Because the game will only require 1GB of video memory and 6GB of system memory, it is my guess that the texture resolution should either scale in an optimized fashion or will be pretty modest to begin with. Textures and other graphics-specific elements will be stored on video RAM, not system memory (unless using an APU or IGP), so it seems more likely to me that the game will be accessible graphically but will store heavy information / world data to system memory.
Our latest PC builds will easily run Watch_Dogs, so check there if you need some guides on system building.
- Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke.