You want to talk about a game that's going to bust the muscles of your PC and push your hardware to its absolute limits, then you're going to want to talk about Cloud Imperium Games and Roberts Space Industries' Star Citizen. Some of the game's specs have been partially revealed and you'll need a monster rig if you want to truly enjoy the all-encompassing space simulator.
Back in early November there was an updated system requirements thread over on the Roberts Space Industries forum that outlined what kind of system gamers would need to effectively run Star Citizen's dogfighting module. You'll need 8GB of RAM, no questions asked. Your CPU? i5 2500, i7 2600, 2700 or better. What about the GPU? Well, don't expect to bring any Crysis 1 crap to the table because you'll get laughed away from the inner-circle of the Glorious PC Master Race unless you're packing – at the minimum – a GTX 670 or greater that happens to be DirectX 11 or higher. Yeah, the developers are serious about pushing the limits of gaming to new heights and I'll be standing on the sidelines with a bunch of fans and buckets of ice next to an open PC case with a smoking motherboard, some fried GPUs and a screaming CPU, cheering them on.
As noted on the thread...
”Keep in mind that these requirements are NOT FINAL, and are very likely to change as we move towards final release.“For the Dogfighting Alpha, thanks to a lack of optimisation, performance figures are a little unreliable and the 'quality' settings seem to not be fully implemented, so lowering your quality (aside from resolution) might not get you much FPS gain. AMD FX series CPUs will likely have lower performance than expected currently, due to a lack of optimisation yet.”
Blues caught a post from over on DSO Gaming where they managed to get in word with Sean Tracy, the game engine's technical director at Cloud Imperium Games, who managed to break down just how consistently demanding Star Citizen is likely to be, even following some good measures of optimization, saying...
“We are creating this game with the PC gamer in mind. Of course performance will be optimized much further than our current version of Arena Commander but I wouldn’t expect that we would drop the system requirements any time soon. Additionally on the Direct X 10 front, as almost every engine/rendering we’d like to put in relies heavily on DX11 and even DX12 or Mantle I can’t see DX10 cards even existing much longer. It’s difficult to say, but I don’t expect that the majority of gamers would even have DX10 cards anymore and so for us to continue support it wouldn’t make sense."
The module that contains the playable dogfighting is most definitely worth checking out if you're a backer. Alternatively, it's worth checking out on YouTube if you have a few minutes to spare. The races are especially enticing... to me, anyway.
Up next is the first-person combat module. I can't say it was the most revolutionary thing to happen to FPS combat (because it's not) but for a space-sim with the addition of being able to explore, adventure and fight in a fully functional FPS module kind of sends goosebumps down my arms. Again, don't take my word for it, check out the gameplay video and see for yourself.
You can learn more about Star Citizen, which has managed to accrue more than $61 million dollars in crowd-funding, as reported by Joystiq, by paying a visit to the game's official website.
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