With the launch of Redfall set for early next week, Bethesda has kindly provided some prepwork to consider in advance - a breakdown of the crossover shooter's PC specification requirements (minimum, recommended and ultra) as well as all available accessibility settings and options. They fail to mention any resolution or framerate targets, so it will be up to PC gamers to investigate the nitty-gritty numbers on the day of Redfall's release (May 2). As part of the whole promo campaign NVIDIA has decided to unleash a gameplay trailer (see below) of the game running on a high end PC fitted with a (presumed) high-end GeForce RTX 40-series graphics card.

Redfall's PC audience will get to flex their graphical muscles more so when compared to unfortunate current gen Xbox owners - Bethesda and developer Arkane Studios have recently admitted that their supernatural shooter will be restricted to 30 FPS Quality Mode on Series X and S consoles at launch. A higher framerate performance mode is promised in the future - via a game update - but the Microsoft-owned publisher has not set a more specific release window for the upgrade. The middle and high-tier specifications on PC seem to be quite reasonable, so Redfall is not expected to be a stuttering mess on arrival.

An intriguing entry has appeared on the Geekbench Browser site, the information was uploaded with a timestamp from this morning (11:07 am on April 20 to be specific) pointing to a mobile ASUS device that was tested in GeekBench 5. The archived info dump reveals that the subject matter of the benchmark was the ASUS ROG Ally handheld gaming console, which has received a lot of attention in recent weeks - with it being touted as a very serious alternative to Valve's Steam Deck, a handheld gaming PC that is quite popular with enthusiasts. The ROG Ally will need to offer a potent hardware package if it stands to compete directly with the Steam Deck, and the latest information confirms that this new contender is very promising in that department. Geekbench 5 awarded an impressive OpenCL score of 35498 to the RC71L variant of the ROG Ally, an RC71X-assigned model is known to exist but details of its exact nature have not been revealed. This particular ROG Alloy unit was running Windows 11 Home (64-bit) under the operating system's performance power plan.

The new entry on Geekbench Browser shows that the Ally is packing an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU, which appears to be a customized version of the Ryzen 7 7840U APU mobile platform chipset - previous rumors have indicated that the latter would be in the driving seat. Both Phoenix range SoCs share the basic 8 cores and 16 thread makeup, but the Z1 Extreme is capable of boosting up to 5.062 GHz from a base frequency of 3.30 GHz. AMD's Radeon 780M iGPU (RDNA 3) is expected to deal with the Ally's graphical aspect, but the benchmark info dump only provides scant details about the GPU (codenamed "gfx1103") - most notably the presence of six computer units, an 800 MHz max frequency, and access to 8.20 GB of video memory. Number crunching boffins have calculated that the Ally could field 768 FP32 cores, courtesy of the dual issue SIMD design inherent to RDNA 3.

Electronic Arts has updated the listings for PC system requirements for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and the gaming community has reacted to the refresh of the game's minimum installation storage requisite. It calls for a whopping 155 GB of disk space, for the base game alone, not including the expected routine of patches and extra story content (via DLC). The publisher suggests that an SSD is best used for an optimal in-game experience. The slightly older PC requirements specified a minimum of 150 GB for HDDs, and 130 GB for SSDs.

As it stands, the Respawn Entertainment developed action adventure game has one of the larger minimum storage requirements among modern titles - all the more surprising given that it will offer a relatively short and linear single player experience. Current installations of the PC version of Red Dead Redemption 2 will occupy 150 GB of disk space. Jedi: Fallen Order (2019), Survivor's preceding title in the series, demands a comparatively modest install base of 55 GB. It will be interesting to observe whether Jedi: Survivor will drive sales of larger storage solutions - in the recent past, gamers have scrambled to acquire higher capacity SSDs and HDDs in order to accommodate the ever-growing installations and content drops required to play the Call of Duty/Modern Warfare series.

The latest patch for Halo Infinite has introduced an undesired side effect for a select portion of its PC platform playerbase. Changes to minimum system specification requirements were not clarified by 343 Industries in their patch notes, but it appears that the game now refuses to launch for owners of older GPU hardware. A limit of 4 GB of VRAM has been listed as the bare minimum since Halo Infinite's launch in late 2021, with the AMD Radeon RX 570 and Nvidia GTX GeForce 1050 Ti cards representing the entry level GPU tier, basic versions of both were fitted with 4 GB of VRAM as standard.

Apparently users running the GTX 1060 3 GB model were able to launch and play the game just fine prior to the latest patch, due to it being more powerful than the entry level cards, but now it seems that the advertised hard VRAM limit has finally gone into full effect. The weaker RX 570 and GTX 1050 Ti cards are still capable of running Halo Infinite after the introduction of season 3 content, but a technically superior piece of hardware cannot, which is unfortunate for owners of the GTX 1060 3 GB model who want to play Halo Infinite in its current state.