HiGame

Ubisoft has announced the minimum requirements for the PC version of Assassin’s Creed Unity — and, well, they’re a little bit puzzling to say the least. At a bare minimum, the new Assassin’s Creed game will require an Nvidia GTX 680 or AMD Radeon HD 7970, 6GB of RAM, and a Core i5-2500K or Phenom II X4 940 CPU. The recommended specs take that up to a Core i7-3770 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a top-of-the-line GTX 780 or Radeon R9 290X. We know that the Xbox One and PS4 struggle with Assassin’s Creed Unity — they are both locked to*900p @ 30 fps — but even the*minimum*PC specs are about twice the*processing power present in the Xbox One. What on earth is going on?

To round out the minimum PC specs for Assassin’s Creed Unity, it also requires 50GB of free space, and a 64-bit version of Windows 7 SP1. Your GTX 680 or HD 7970 needs 2GB of RAM, too. To put the hardware specs into perspective, the GTX 680 is Nvidia’s top-end single-GPU card from 2012 which retailed for $500. The same GK104 GPU then got reused in the GTX 770 in 2013 — which cost $400 at launch, but is available for around $300 today. It’s pretty much the same story for the Radeon HD 7970; two years ago, it was AMD’s top-end $500 card.

Unity’s minimum CPU requirement is a little less insane — the Core i5-2500K was a mid-range part that retailed for $220 — but still, when we factor in the 6GB of RAM, the minimum specs equate to a*pretty serious gaming PC in 2012; something in the $1000+ range. Heck, even today a GTX 680 or 770 is a pretty decent card that will play just about anything at 1920×1080. (And let’s not even discuss that insane 50GB storage requirement; I think we’ll talk about that in a separate story.)



Assassin’s Creed Unity should be very pretty on the PC

So, what’s going on?


Clearly, Assassin’s Creed Unity is a beefy game — while the Xbox One and PS4 aren’t exactly cutting-edge hardware, it’s still telling that they’re locked to just 1600×900 @ 30 fps. Still, bear in mind that Ubisoft’s minimum PC requirements ask for a GPU*that’s capable of around*4 teraflops — or twice the theoretical processing power of the PS4

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