I've always liked building my gaming computers with excess in mind, aiming to jam liquid cooling, flagship graphics cards and oodles of RAM into massive aluminum cases so that I can jabber about how my numbers are bigger than someone else's despite marginal performance increases for significant amounts of cash. Right now, though, I'm rather glad that in my last build I erred on the high-end side of components if Dying Light's system requirements are anywhere close to true.
Techland updated the game's Steam store page today with the minimum and recommended settings, and it looks like you'll need quite a bit of punch in your rig if you want to meet the optimal settings. Here is the list below:
MINIMUM:
OS: Windows® 7 64-bit / Windows® 8 64-bit / Windows® 8.1 64-bit
Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-2500 @3.3 GHz / AMD FX-8320 @3.5 GHz
Memory: 8 GB RAM DDR3
Hard Drive: 40 GB free space
Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 670 / AMD Radeon™ HD 7870
Sound: DirectX® 10
RECOMMENDED:
OS: Windows® 7 64-bit / Windows® 8 64-bit / Windows® 8.1 64-bit
Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-4670K @3.4 GHz / AMD FX-8350 @4.0 GHz
Memory: 16 GB RAM DDR3
Hard Drive: 40 GB free space
Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 780 / AMD Radeon™ R9 290
Sound: DirectX® 10
Yup, you read that correctly, the recommended requirements include an Intel i5-4670K, a whopping 16GB of RAM and a GTX 780 as the best way to make the game purr. That is a significant amount of memory, especially considering many of my friends are running some of their machines with a measly 4GB with a few others capping out at around 8GB. If by some chance the game requires close to these numbers, which I doubt, it will be a pretty significant resource hog that could make it nearly unplayable for many fans.
That said, take the numbers with a grain of salt as most games never truly push the limits of the requirements they suggest, but they are still interesting to look at and gauge how well Dying Light will look and clue us into how well optimized it will be on launch. You can pick up Dying Light next month on January 27th, 2015 for PS4, Xbox One and PC.
Update: Since the time this post was published last night, the system requirements on Dying Light's Steam page have been changed and are now a bit more modest. The changes include the dropping of the minimum recommended graphics card from a GTX 670 down to a GTX 560, the minimum RAM requirement dropped from 8GB down to 4GB and the recommended RAM requirement dropped from 16GB down to 8GB. It puts the game's system requirements back in line with other recent releases and much more digestible than it first appeared.
Here are the updated requirements:
MINIMUM:
OS: Windows® 7 64-bit / Windows® 8 64-bit / Windows® 8.1 64-bit
Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-2500 @3.3 GHz / AMD FX-8320 @3.5 GHz
Memory: 4 GB RAM DDR3
Hard Drive: 40 GB free space
Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 560 / AMD Radeon™ HD 6870 (1GB VRAM)
DirectX®: Version 11
Sound: DirectX® compatible
RECOMMENDED:
OS: Windows® 7 64-bit / Windows® 8 64-bit / Windows® 8.1 64-bit
Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-4670K @3.4 GHz / AMD FX-8350 @4.0 GHz
Memory: 8 GB RAM DDR3
Hard Drive: 40 GB free space
Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 780 / AMD Radeon™ R9 290 (2GB VRAM)
DirectX®: Version 11
Sound: DirectX® compatible