Po-tay-toes. Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a GPU.
Ubisoft might be acting all fashionably late to the multiplayer shooter party, but its forthcoming XDefiant looks like it will be accessible to just about every gamer out there, thanks to having some of the lowest PC system requirements I've seen in years.
Let's start with the entry point, the minimum specs Ubisoft suggests will run XDefiant. A CPU with four cores and eight threads will be good enough, as will a 4GB graphics card from eight years ago. Even 8GB of system RAM is fine and yes, it really is 2024—you haven't drifted back in time while you were sleeping.
Whether XDefiant is actually playable on such hardware is a different thing altogether and I'm not a fan of minimum hardware requirements in general. The recommended system requirements seem more realistic, to be honest, and although the CPU suggestion is the same, the graphics card is more modern, with 6 to 8GB of VRAM.
Jumping into the so-called Ultra requirements, 4K gaming will demand an eight-core, 16-thread CPU, and a GeForce RTX 3080 or Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card. That's quite a big jump in GPU performance, but one thing that isn't clear from Ubisoft's system requirements is whether that kind of graphics card is needed because of the 4K resolution, the game's detail settings, or a combination of both.
And once again, we're left to guess as to what kind of frame rates you'll get with such hardware, as there are no expected performance figures on offer. Ubisoft is really spoiling us, though, with an 'uncapped frame rate for maximum fps.'
I promise that you really are still in 2024, honest.
It's puzzling why Ubisoft is suggesting a Core i7 9700K or a Ryzen 7 3700X. It's not that they're both old chips, it's that the 3700X isn't as good in gaming as the 9700K. When we reviewed the Ryzen 7 3700X, the gap between them could be pretty large, especially at low resolutions. And there's also the fact that if XDefiant needs an RTX 3080 to run 'Ultra' at 4K, then the outright power of the CPU isn't going to be super important. A fast six-core chip, like the Ryzen 5 5600X, should be more than good enough.
The odd CPU recommendations aren't just limited to the highest settings, though, as Ubisoft is saying that the minimum CPU should be a 10th Gen Intel, albeit a rather slow one, but for maximum settings, a 9th Gen Core will be okay. This might look like it's just about cores and clock speeds, but I suspect it's really about threads.
Intel's Core i3 10105F has four cores and eight threads, whereas all of the 9th Gen Core i3 have four cores and four threads. All of the recommended CPUs in XDefiant's system requirements are at least eight thread chips, which strongly suggests the game has been developed to use exactly that number of threads and no more.
At least the game isn't heavy on system RAM and storage requirements, as the specs top out at 16GB of dual-channel memory and a mere 35GB of drive space is all that's needed. XDefiant launches May 21 so there's just a day to wait before you can check out how well the game actually runs on your gaming PC, but I don't think anyone with a relatively modern rig will have any trouble.
