For years, PC games have stagnated in the hardware requirements department. In both and effort to have mass market appeal, and often the ability to port the game to older consoles, developers haven’t really been pushing graphics limits on PC, until recently that is.
Over the last few months, maybe a year, game requirements have really started to creep up there. Gone are the days were you 4 your old PC with mid range GPU can play all the latest games decently.
Arkham Knight demands some beefy specs. You need a bare minimum of 6GB of ram to play the game. And the bottom level GPU accepted is a Geforce GTX 660 wiht 2GB of ram. You’ll also need an i5 or Phenom II X4 – no dual core chips for this game.
Minimum System Requirements
- OS: Win 7 SP1, Win 8.1 (64-bit Operating System Required)
- Processor: Intel Core i5-750, 2.67 GHz | AMD Phenom II X4 965, 3.4 GHz
- Memory: 6 GB RAM
- Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 | AMD Radeon HD 7870
- Graphics Memory: 2 GB
- DirectX®: 11
- Network: Broadband Internet Connection Required
- Hard Drive Space: 45 GB
Just before Christmas many build guides suggested using a Pentium Anniversary dual core. If you bought into that, I’m sorry you were mislead, but you’ll be needing an upgrade to play this game.
Keep in mind, this is simply for the bare minimum. If you’ve ever played a game at minimum setting, you know how much you miss out on. To really get the experience the developers had in mind, you’ll want to have at least the recommended specs.
Recommended System Requirements
- OS: Win 7 SP1, Win 8.1 (64-bit Operating System Required)
- Processor: Intel Core i7-3770, 3.4 GHz | AMD FX-8350, 4.0 GHz
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760
- Graphics Memory: 3 GB
- DirectX®: 11
- Network: Broadband Internet Connection Required
- Hard Drive Space: 55 GB
These are some pretty beefy specs, but unless you know hardware well, it’s hard to get the full story. If you look at Graphics Card recommendation, it stats a GTX 760, but right below the recommended memory is 3GB. GTX 760’s never came with 3GB of VRAM. They were available with 2GB and 4GB. Most GTX 760 owners do not meet the suggested requirements. And then of cours there’s the CPU, which is asking for an i7-3770 or and FX-8350. It seems Arkham Knight will heavily favor the extra threads these CPU’s offer.
Nvidia has gone further than Steam and have listed requirements for Ultra Settings as well. Surprisingly it really isn’t much higher than the recommended specs, only needing a better GPU. You’ll need a 980 or better, but I would say a GTX 780ti will do just as good considering they only ask for 3GB of VRAM still.
ULTRA System Requirements
- OS: Win 7 SP1, Win 8.1 (64-bit Operating System Required)
- Processor: Intel Core i7-3770, 3.4 GHz | AMD FX-8350, 4.0 GHz
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980
- Graphics Memory: 3 GB
- DirectX®: 11
- Network: Broadband Internet Connection Required
- Hard Drive Space: 55 GB
If you are still unsure if the game will run on your computer, Nvidia has a tool that will scan your system and let you know.
Batman: Arkham Knight comes out on PC, Xbox One and PS4 on June 23, 2015. Will you be picking this one up? Do you need an upgrade to run it? Let us know in the comments below
