Are you ready for Fallout 4? Announced at E3 2015, it has been one of the most hotly anticipated titles of the year. It’s also very pretty, so it will likely take a pretty powerful system to run it — or so you might have thought. As it turns out, the graphical requirements for this game aren’t so hefty that it locks all but the uber-rich out of its high-end settings.
Of course you can’t expect to run this at full tilt on a decade old graphics card and processor, but neither do you need a Titan X just to turn on anti-aliasing. As usual, the minimum specifications are quite tame, requiring as little as four year old Core i5 CPU and a graphics card that wasn’t even the best of the best three years ago.
- Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required)
- Intel Core i5-2300 2.8 GHz/AMD Phenom II X4 945 3.0 GHz or equivalent
- 8 GB RAM
- 30 GB free HDD space
- NVIDIA GTX 550 Ti 2GB/AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB or equivalent
See? You can handle that. What about the recommended specifications though? Those are obviously a little more taxing, but even then you don’t need anything top of the line. Sure, an i7 CPU is recommended, but it’s a 4790. That’s powerful, but it’s not a Broadwell or Skylake part. You don’t have to worry about having the absolute latest gear to play it.
Likewise the GPU recommendation is a few years old; it’s practically pedestrian by some people’s standards.
- Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required)
- Intel Core i7 4790 3.6 GHz/AMD FX-9590 4.7 GHz or equivalent
- 8 GB RAM
- 30 GB free HDD space
- NVIDIA GTX 780 3GB/AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB or equivalent
Again, none of this is bargain-bin hardware, but neither does it mean you need to throw your whole PC out and spend thousands on a new system.
There’s no guarantee that running a PC matching those specifications will allow you to play the game at full tilt, but it probably won’t take a lot more.
How ready is your system for Fallout 4 when it launches on November 10?