Battlefield V's System Requirements Harken Back To A Simpler Time

It’s not quite 1940’s technology, but the upcoming World War 2 FPS has pretty reasonable preliminary minimum system requirements.

It’s not quite 1940’s technology, but the upcoming World War 2 FPS has pretty reasonable preliminary minimum system requirements.

EA unveiled Battlefield V, the latest installment of the series and out-of-order follow-up to Battlefield 1, only last week yet the team behind the game have already announced a set of preliminary minimum system requirements. Published on Battlefield V’s EA Origin pre-order page, they will make for reassuring reading if you haven’t been especially diligent in upgrading your PC with up-to-date hardware.

In fact, the minimum system requirements match those of 2016’s Battlefield 1, which shouldn’t be all that surprising. Both utilises EA DICE’s Frostbite 3 game engine, a revision which debuted with Battlefield IV in 2013 and was designed with the performance limitations of PCs and consoles of the era. Tweaks have been made to the engine since then, but we’ve yet to hear of any major performance-impacting updates.

The CPU minimum requirement for this game is probably the most stringent, at least on the Intel side of things. Here it demands a Core i5 6600, whereas only an AMD FX-6350 is necessary if you go down that route; either way it’s probably more accurate to say that a recently released quad-core CPU of almost any stripe running over 3GHz will be fine. By contrast, 8GB of system memory is probably the minimum you should expect in any gaming PC built in the past 6 years, even given recent RAM price hikes.

On the GPU side EA are keeping requirements exceptionally low. They state that either an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 2GB or AMD Radeon HD 7850 2GB would be sufficient for minimum performance levels, both of 2012 vintage. It’s probable therefore that of more recent generations, NVIDIA’s GTX 1050 and AMD’s RX 560 would more than meet the necessary pixel-pushing power.

OS: 64-bit Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10
Processor (AMD): AMD FX-6350
Processor (Intel): Core i5 6600K
Memory: 8GB RAM
Graphics card (AMD): AMD Radeon™ HD 7850 2GB
Graphics card (NVIDIA): nVidia GeForce® GTX 660 2GB
DirectX: 11.0 Compatible video card or equivalent
Online Connection Requirements: 512 KBPS or faster Internet connection
Hard-drive space: 50GB

Also noteworthy is that although only 64-bit versions of Windows are compatible, they still intend support for Windows 7. Many publishers are in the process of slowly phasing out support for this OS, so it’s nice to see EA hold off on this trend for a little longer.

Keep in mind, EA DICE haven’t published the level of in-game fidelity you can expect to attain with this sort of system configuration. It may be 720p30 with reasonable quality settings (not bad for a gaming experience on a laptop for instance), but for 1080p60 you may be better served waiting on recommended specifications.

If the recommended system requirements match those of Battlefield 1 they will be likely reflect a need for a CPU that supports eight threads, such as a quad-core Intel Core i7’s with Hyperthreading or AMD Ryzen’s with SMT. GPU requirements will also rise similarly, but not outrageously, to an AMD Radeon RX 460 4GB or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB. In fact the most difficult benchmark to meet will probably be 16GB of system memory, which could be especially challenging for older DDR3 systems.

Nonetheless, right now it appears that EA DICE are keeping the things relatively affordable for gamers rather than bloating out system requirements unnecessarily. Long may that remain the case.