While console gamers are currently enjoying what is said to be the best entry in the Assassin's Creed series for years, we PC owners have to hang on until November 19th before Assassin's Creed Syndicate is released on the platform. For anyone wondering if they'll need to upgrade their rig before then in order enjoy Syndicate to its fullest, Ubisoft has published the official specs required to run the game.
Ubisoft states the minimum specifications as an Intel i5 2400 clocked at 2.5GHz or, for those with an AMD-based system, an AMD FX 6350 at 3.9GHz. It also asks for 6GB of system RAM and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 or an AMD Radeon R9 270 (2GB VRAM with Shader Model 5.0).
The game's recommended specs are pretty demanding. Ubisoft says that for a "recommend experience" when playing at a full HD resolution the game requires a video card of at least 3GB of VRAM. The company also states: "While we encourage you to fiddle with the advanced options to fully customize your gaming experience, please keep an eye out for the VRAM meter usage when you adjust these settings."
The full recommended specifications include an Intel Core i7 3770 clocked at 3.5GHz or an AMD FX 8350 at 4.0GHz, 8GB of RAM, and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 760, GTX 970 or an AMD Radeon R9 280 X (3GB) or better. The game will take up 50GB of drive space.
Recommended specifications for PC games do seem to be getting steeper; Ubisoft asking for a GPU with at least 3GB of VRAM just for a '1080p experience' seems to be asking a lot, especially as Steam's hardware survey shows that only 22 percent of rigs have that much video memory or more. Hopefully, Syndicate will be better optimized for the PC than the last Assassin's Creed game, Unity, which also recommended some very powerful hardware just to give the game graphical parity with the console versions - which didn't exactly have breathtaking visuals.