Friday, October 26th 2018
Fallout 76 PC System Requirements Outed: 4-Thread CPUs Minimum, 8-Thread CPUs Recommended
Bethesda has revealed the official minimum and recommended specs for gamers looking to dive once again into a post-apocalyptic game setting with Fallout 76. Interestingly, the system requirements call for at least an Intel Core i5-6600K or an AMD Ryzen 3 1300X CPU, both of which are four-core, four-thread processors from yesteryear, paired with 8 GB of system RAM. On the graphics side of the equation, an NVIDIA GTX 780 3GB or an AMD Radeon R9 285 2GB are enough. Storage space continues to be hefty as with most games coming out recently, with this asking for 60 GB on your PC.
The recommended specs are more in-line with what one would expect, even though this game certainly won't be a resource hog by any definition: the 8 GB of of system RAM remain in the recommended specs, but both listed CPUs see an upgrade to an 8-thread part in the form of the Intel Core i7-4790 and the AMD Ryzen 5 1500X. Graphics cards for the recommended experience are being defined as either an Nvidia GTX 970 4GB or an AMD R9 290X 4 GB. It seems the 8 GB system RAM has come here to stay in AAA gaming, folks, and number of required CPU threads has been steadily increasing. Now if only there aren't as many game-breaking bugs as is traditional in a Bethesda game... Especially not cazadors.
Sources:
Bethesda, via DSOGaming
The recommended specs are more in-line with what one would expect, even though this game certainly won't be a resource hog by any definition: the 8 GB of of system RAM remain in the recommended specs, but both listed CPUs see an upgrade to an 8-thread part in the form of the Intel Core i7-4790 and the AMD Ryzen 5 1500X. Graphics cards for the recommended experience are being defined as either an Nvidia GTX 970 4GB or an AMD R9 290X 4 GB. It seems the 8 GB system RAM has come here to stay in AAA gaming, folks, and number of required CPU threads has been steadily increasing. Now if only there aren't as many game-breaking bugs as is traditional in a Bethesda game... Especially not cazadors.
18 Comments on Fallout 76 PC System Requirements Outed: 4-Thread CPUs Minimum, 8-Thread CPUs Recommended
The graphics probably will not warrant the minimum specs.
I see 6600K as min
4790 as recommended
no 4790K mentioned anywhere
Also, extremely weird choice of CPUs, seems like a healthy mix of not knowing many things.
same old, same old...
Then the recommended is FX 81**/83**, Core I7, Ryzen.
The requirements say nothing about requirements for threads, not every aspect of those CPUs listed are requirements! The performance is the requirement, not the specs of the CPU!
By this logic, not only 8 threads, but also 3.5 GHz, 8 MB L3 cache, and I guess even a 65W TDP would be considered requirements.
And technically, the requirements list disk space, so obviously this game will never work on SSDs!
You know, it is allowed to think!
And they're gonna have players solve and find them... Again. Did they fire all of their testing staff? WTF. Make you pay full price for something re-hashed, peddling stripped down Fallout 4 which will have even less features. Just perfect for money making! Putting least amount of effort while maximizing profits. So what is new here?
I'm calling it, TES 6 will come on the same engine, and the cycle continues.
My favorite game series is being run into the ground, one step at a time. If it was in the ground then it's six-feet under now.
How come Ubi***t is able to actually fix almost everything what was wrong with their past games. Call of Duty is actually becoming good!? Cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria.
Bethsoft isn't on the good graces of gamers anymore (they weren't with the enthusiast crowd and modders since days of Oblivion), I think they joined EA and Konami in full (only rightful for them as they were the pioneers of modern DLC). Zenimax that owns both Bethesda and by extension BGS, couldn't care less and they're making tons of cash. Might as well keep the track record straight, they're not going to do a 180 and please everyone. Their business practices get under my skin. (Brainwashing/convincing gaming press at events are we now? So you can get PR?) Just how many fools are going to buy this at full price or even pre-order it for those sweet, sweet pre-order bonuses.
Rant over.
And guys, I think we need another video game crash. And let new people into the industry. Sad thing is they're really good at preventing something like this and game companies know exactly what they are doing, always feigning ignorance when something isn't right.
Its like RAM, if you don't have enough, prepare to enjoy stutter.
Unfortunately you will still have a stutterfest in this specific example. FO4 never ran perfectly either, regardless of the hardware you tossed at it. 76 will be worse because netcode.
FWIW I think these specs are quite realistic and the AMD-Intel CPU comparisons check out. At least they got one thing right, I guess :D We don't need a crash. We need to keep making noise about things we don't like. The reason those Ubisoft games improved is because we made noise. They even have MTX in there now that you can safely ignore without 'feeling' an impact on gameplay, in most of their games, and the rest has made the grind integral to gameplay so P2W isn't happening anyway. That alone is a direct result of players voicing their opinions.
Similarly, we are very good as a community to destroy releases by rapidly dwindling player counts, and there is a huge snowball effect in there as well: once the shit hits the fan, and social media, it can easily explode and we leave a wasteland behind, moving elsewhere en masse. The games that are improving are those where a publisher feels they can still reel those players back in. The key to doing that: meaty content updates (look at Warframe for a good example), and creating a soft landing for returning players. No amount of PR can replace actual content, and good gameplay. The merit of that will never go away.
The gaming biz is so much more dynamic right now, and there are so many (independent) developers around, its super healthy and as a gamer you have every opportunity to support devs and publishers you like.
The main goal of more cores for gaming is as you imply; let the heavier threads work undisturbed. And it mostly affects stutter, not average frame rate so much. But it only truly helps if you can add more cores. SMT/HT only lets a core switch between two threads, the total throughput is never above a fully saturated thread.
SMT actually hurts gaming more than it helps, because gaming is heavily synchronous tasks. The only "exception" would be for an extremely underpowered system where a game needs many more threads than the cores provided, and it may help a little, but only because it will mitigate some of the OS overhead, but the game will still be a Stutterfest™ and either unplayable or borderline unplayable. If you don't have enough RAM, swappnig will save you from hanging or crashing, but performance will still be awful.
If you don't have enough cores, SMT may help marginally in edge cases, but performance will still be bad, and sometimes even worse than without SMT.