Ah, PC gaming, so complicated and treacherous. THQ has released the minimum, recommended and optimum specifications for the PC version of Metro 2033, the promising post-apocalyptic survival shooter that would be quite good provided they fix the ammo situation.
The game has a lot of promise. A great atmosphere, interesting premise, and potentially great focus on survival as opposed to all-out combat. There are just a few aggravating issues, as my preview points out, getting in the way of all the fun.
Anyway, the specs are after the jump. Look at them if you like numbers and funny words.
Minimum:
- Dual core CPU (any Core 2 Duo or better will do)
- DirectX 9, Shader Model 3 compliant graphics cards (GeForce 8800, GeForce GT220 and above)
- 1GB RAM
Recommended:
- Any Quad Core or 3.0+ GHz Dual Core CPU
- DirectX 10 compliant graphics card (GeForce GTX 260 and above)
- 2GB RAM
Optimum:
- Core i7 CPU
- NVIDIA DirectX 11 compliant graphics card (GeForce GTX 480 and 470)
- As much RAM as possible (8GB+)
- Fast HDD or SSD
Enabling 3D Vision
- Metro 2033 utilizes NVIDIA 3D Vision with compatible cards and hardware. To play in 3D you will require:
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 and above recommended
- A 120Hz (or above) monitor
- NVIDIA 3D Vision kit
- Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7
Jim Sterling serves as reviews editor for Destructoid.com, head of the Podtoid podcast, and produces a number of news stories, original features, one-of-a-kind videos. With his passionate argumentative style, controversial opinions, harsh delivery, and dedication to brutal honesty Sterling is a name that you can't help but recognize.
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Contest:
8:20 AM on 02.25.2010
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What the Fuck ? Who in the world has more than 8Gigs of RAM ? Is this game installing itself directly into RAM ?
Also, plenty of people have that.
But maybe those Guys in Russia have more money to spend on their Uber-Nasa-Pcs than we in poor old Germany.
That's crap, anything outside of crazy flight sims isn't taking advantage of an i7.
@Jim: Give it a few days after release, and someone'll release a trainer that will let you enable infinite ammo.
My PC won't be able to run this on max. In b4 Retro 1933...
This game is being developed with PC in mind, and will look noticeably better than the console version, given the DX11 and hardware tessellation compatibility.
In other news, I desperately need more RAM.
Looks like it might be a neat game, but to go from 2gb of Rec. ram, to 8gb for optimum seems specious. Why not just put 64gb for optimum? Why not throw an SLI setup in the optimum. It seems like they just grabbed the most expensive hardware and threw it on there.
Also interesting, is that everything is Nvidia and Intel, there isn't 1 mention of AMD cpu or graphics on the whole specs list. I know this game was developed for Nvidia cards, but still, seems kinda ridiculous.
Scroll ,
"Why would I need an i7 for this? "
Are you even reading? Do you understand the difference between the words "Minimium", "recommended" and "optimum"? It's just......... not that hard to read, man.
Recommended:
* Any Quad Core or 3.0+ GHz Dual Core CPU
* DirectX 10 compliant graphics card (GeForce GTX 260 and above)
* 2GB RAM
That is not that bad.
You know what? The more and more I come to Destructoid.. the more I realize it's got to just be the idiots commenting around here, for some odd reason. I feel like I'm pointing these things out to a wall.
"The internet. Where the whining never stops and people react before thinking."
lol, this made me laugh because it's true.
Anyone bitching about these specs are simply not reading what's actually written.
I think they might just be throwing out numbers with those specs. I'm hoping that the minimum isn't really and 8800 GPU though. I think that that's what a lot of devs are going to be putting as the minimum from now on, but I have no idea if it's actually meaningful.
My PC was top-spec when I bought it in mid-2008. Now it doesn't even make the recommended specs. Which is odd, because I get 60fps in everything else these days.
If it can run on the PS3's measly specs I don't see why I needs this kind of PC.
I am not throwing a little hissy fit about it though, I am happy that there are still games pushing PC graphics forward and this one looks stunning. I'll be playing it with a few things turned down I assume, but oh well... that is what makes replays in a couple years more fun.
This game is scaled so it can run on DirectX 9/10/11 and they didn't bother to do so with Just Cause 2.
The Vista/7 requirement is only to guarantee DirectX 10/11 support, which XP doesn't have.
As said before, this screams optimization issues. Hell Bad Company 2 requires less and it also supports DirectX 11... among HBAO lighting. but why would I care? Im upgrading my PC this weekend, and buying a 400 series card. Just abother game to performance test I suppose.
It's either insanely beautiful or horribly optimized.
I'll just overclock my GTS 250. Sure that'll handle it just fine.
This is a PC-centered Eastern Europe game actually, like STALKER and Cryostasis. I would bet the Xbox port will be ass, though of course I cannot say for sure.
Optimum setting is running in Dirext X 11 so there will be effects running that you simply haven't seen in games before.
To run this game with everything going you'll need an expensive set up but it will look spectacular with volumetric dust clouds as you walk through the tunnels, light off visors etc.
As a game no doubt it will be good but as a technical demo it is just beyond sublime. For all those graphics nerds out there you have a new champion this makes Crysis look second rate.
For one, hardware based tessellation of polygons freaking EATS memory as it effectively multiplies the amount of polygons and vertecies on any given 3D model, often by levels of 2 to 4, maybe even up to 10, times as much depending on the usage in a game. A great example of this was Neverwinter Nights (Standard/Gold/Diamond Ed) as it used OpenGL hardware based tessellation on some ATI graphics cards (8500/9200 come to mind) which smoothed out a lot of the rough edges on the models, but it only went as far as doubling and smoothing the really rough looking polygons and it would sometimes hurt performance if you went too far with your overall settings. Keep in mind this was around 1999 to 2000 when OpenGL was more prevalent in gaming than it is now; and, DX11 is seriously late to this party. ;)
Second, take into account operating system and additional program overhead! Yes, we all know that often times that Vista (sp1 and later) and Win7 perform better in this area better than WinXP; but, they still eat a decent portion of memory for their own background processes. Your computer's operating system does a lot more than just sit there looking pretty, often times than not it tries to optimize itself for your eventual use, setup network connections to your local network or internet, load and dump needed and called for dll for your game, and report back when things go wrong. By comparison, even the most modern consoles do primarily one thing: play games or wait to play games. All the other stuff, like listening to music, playing videos, browsing the web (ps3/wii only) are small program bits that are turned off when the game you insert starts spinning and starting those usually pulls you out of the game (some exceptions are MGO part of MGS4 as they have a built-in web browser).
Third, even if the game is optimize to work on a console and look the same as it does on the pc, chances are that due to how the game is installed on a given pc, the game will still try to load as much of itself into memory as possible. So, the more memory you have, the faster the hard drive reads and the faster your processor and video card can dump that information onto the screen, the less it will have to hit the hard drive to get the rest of the data. Plus, you'd most likely be able to see a hell of a lot further than normal. On the other hand, since the game was originally also planned for the PS3, the textures are probably insanely high resolution texture maps and eat up a lot of space by default, pc or not. Let's just hope it doesn't take a blue-ray to install it on the pc. ;)
Lastly, as other people have mentioned, 8gigs plus of memory is much cheaper than it used to be. Having that much, or more is great for those of us that do graphics design, 3D modeling and render, creating movies, or even high end gaming. Sadly, I do also feel that the number is a bit high and feels a bit arbitrary. It's not like the game may actually need that much. I can find other uses for it though.
GAME DEVELOPERS MAKE GAMES FOR CONSOLES
WE OPTIMIZE/BUY NEW HARDWARE FOR OUR PC\S IN ORDER TO PLAY GAMES
SINCE THERE IS NOT A MODEL PC (like a model console xbox360e.t.c.)
they cannot optimize it for every single hardware..
and y.. i m stuck on minimum *GT220 AND Q9400 3gb ram..:b