The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt doesn’t release until May, but CD Projekt Red put out the PC system requirements today—I guess to give you time to save up for a new rig, if you need one. As with The Witcher 2, I could see this being a game where people need an upgrade.
That being said, after a year of inflated system requirements (Wolfenstein, The Evil Within, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Assassin’s Creed: Unity), The Witcher 3‘s seem almost…reasonable? I mean, The Witcher 3 will definitely require a powerful machine, and it looks like dual-core CPU users are out of luck again, but for a massive open-world game from a studio known for punishing graphics requirements this doesn’t seem too bad.
Minimum specs
Intel CPU Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz/AMD CPU Phenom II X4 940 Nvidia GPU GeForce GTX 660/AMD GPU Radeon HD 7870 RAM 6GB OS 64-bit Windows 7 or 64-bit Windows 8 (8.1) DirectX 11 HDD Space 40 GB
Recommended
Intel CPU Core i7 3770 3.4 GHz/AMD CPU AMD FX-8350 4 GHz Nvidia GPU GeForce GTX 770/AMD GPU Radeon R9 290 RAM 8GB OS 64-bit Windows 7 or 64-bit Windows 8 (8.1) DirectX 11 HDD Space 40 GB
Notice that 6GB of RAM is the minimum, mirroring a few other games we’ve seen this year. Now that consoles have 8GB of RAM, it seems like this is becoming more common. Also notice that the Minimum Specs are basically in-line with the graphical horsepower of a PlayStation 4—its GPU is roughly equivalent to a Radeon 7870 or GTX 660.
As I said, it’s definitely not a low-end game, but the requirements seem pretty fair coming from a PC-first company like CD Projekt. I expect the highest settings will also require a rig quite a bit more powerful than the Recommended specs—The Witcher 2 can still make a high-end system bleed, thanks to its ubersampling capabilities.
And remember, you’ve got four months to scrimp and save for four SLI-ed Titans. Time to go shovel your neighbor’s driveways or something.