Firaxis and 2K Games have broken down the requirements for 1080p and 4K gaming in the upcoming franchise instalment and things are getting spicy.
Firaxis and 2K Games have broken down the requirements for 1080p and 4K gaming in the upcoming franchise instalment and things are getting spicy.
Civilization, the 4X strategy franchise and formative gaming experience for many fans of the genre, will arrive in its seventh major incarnation early next year on PC, SteamOS and MacOS. There are still five months to go and the developers will have their nose to the grindstone finalising and optimising the game before it ‘goes gold’, but the team appear to now be confident enough to share their expected PC system requirements at a trio of performance tiers.
At the low-end the system requirements are not particularly steep. Quad-core Intel 10th Gen or AMD Ryzen 1st Gen CPUs post a low bar, as does 8GB of RAM and GTX 1050/RX 460 GPU. Bear in mind however that this is rated for just 1080p 30fps gaming at Low image quality presets. Such a system represents a fairly low tier PC from late 2017.
It starts to get tougher higher up the performance tiers. To achieve 60fps at 1080p|Medium settings you’ll need at least a 6-core i5-10400 or Ryzen 5 3600X, the latter of which at least is a small step above the extremely popular Ryzen 5 3600. An RTX 2060 or RX 6600 pushes the recommended GPU performance level above that of the GeForce GTX 1060 that at one stage appeared almost ubiquitous. In essence, you require a good mainstream gaming system from around 2019.
Finally, to hit Ultra performance levels – i.e. 4K|High Quality|60fps in-game rendering – you’ll unsurprisingly want an exceptionally beefy system. As far as the number of CPU cores go, it appears that Civ VII will take as many as it can get with the 20-core Intel i7-14700F or 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X. It’ll also happily welcome more RAM, recommending 32GB, and a very fast GPU in the form of at least an RTX 4070 or RX 7800 XT. That’s a very good gaming system from late 2022 for those keeping score at home.
The only aspect of hardware requirements unchanged across the tiers is the recommendation of a 20GB SSD, so don’t go uninstalling all those Steam games to free up space just yet.
Civilization VII on PC utilises the DirectX 12 API and as a result requires 64-bit versions of either Windows 10 or 11. It’s scheduled for release in February 2025. The studio is also working on native versions for SteamOS and MacOS, and will have more information to share on that in the near future.
SOURCE: @CivGame on X/Twitter
