The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is one of the most eagerly awaited games of 2015 (formerly 2014), and Polish developers CD Projekt Red have just dropped a nugget of info sure to be of interest to the PC faithful: minimum and recommended hardware specs for playing the game. All in all they're close to what you would expect for a high-fidelity title in 2015:



Cores are king on the CPU side with four discrete being the the order of the day. High as that might sound the AMD Phenom X4 940 is modest by today's standards, and Sandy Bridge-era Core i5-2500K is still in use in the huge number of systems bought more than three years ago. It will be interesting to see how dual-core and hyperthreaded CPUs such as those in many gaming laptops, as well as mid-to-high end AMD APUs, perform with this title.

As far as minimum GPU specs go, the Kepler-based NVIDIA GTX 660 and AMD HD7870 are fairly hefty minimums that most gaming setups should nonetheless be able to meet. In terms of raw performance the HD7870 (later rebadged as the Radeon R9 270X with tweaked speeds) is considerably superior to the GTX660, and may speak to NVIDIA-specific optimisations. Of some concern is that on paper the Radeon R9 265 isn't quite as fast as the HD7870, but is a card that many gamers will have purchased in the past year.

A minimum memory requirement of 6GB is exactly in line with expectations; most gaming systems should really be rocking 8GB or more these days.

The recommended specifications, presumably for 1080p gaming with high image quality settings, aren't too onerous compared to other recently released titles. High-end modern quad-core Intel CPUs, for example the Core i5-4670K from 2013, should be sufficient and of course Haswell-E based systems will blow this recommendation out of the water. AMD's product range is a little more difficult to assess, but with the FX-8350 available for £150 the platform could be an interesting affordable alternative to Intel's lineup.

Once again NVIDIA are favoured in the GPU stakes, with the relatively (and we mean relatively) modest GeForce GTX 770 being recommended alongside the slightly stronger Radeon R9 290. Those looking to pick up new hardware may want to eschew the GTX 770 in favour of the slightly more expensive and much more plentiful GTX 970, or hold on for the GTX 960 expected later this quarter; equally the Radeon R9 290 represents excellent performance and value for money.

Finally, both minimum and recommended specs stipulate 40GB of HDD space, which could be a concern for anyone using an SSD as their drive of choice.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt launches on May 19th, 2015.

Source: The Witcher Official Blog