PC/System requirements

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As PCs are made of many interchangeable components, they can run games with differing levels of performance — unlike video game consoles, where the components are fixed, and so a certain level of performance is guaranteed for each game.

The main three system specifications which affect game performance are:

  • the CPU frequency (in Hertz), which is the number of operations the processor can do per second;
  • the amount of RAM (in bytes), which is the amount of working space available for a game;
  • and the amount of video RAM (in bytes), which is the amount of working space available on the graphics card, for storing textures.

Each of these affects game performance in a different way, but if they're below the recommended specifications for a game, that game is unlikely to run well, or even at all in some cases.

Additionally, there are various other parameters which can affect whether you can install or play a game on a computer:

  • the amount of disk space required (in bytes) affects whether game can be installed fully, partially, or at all;
  • the optical drive speed (units explained here) affects the data transfer rate if the game's running off an optical disc;
  • your internet data transfer rate decides whether you can play online or not, and some games require an internet connection;
  • your operating system version decides whether a game executable will run on the computer, with games being written and compiled for specific versions of operating systems or their libraries;
  • and your DirectX version affects whether a game using DirectX will run on Windows — many games use features only available in certain versions of DirectX or higher.

[edit] Measuring specifications

CPU clock speed
1.2 GHz
System RAM
1 GiB
Disk space
2 GiB
Video RAM
128 MiB
Network connection speed
128 Kibps
Optical drive speed
32 x
DirectX version
Version 8
Linux icon.png glibc 2.4

On StrategyWiki, any game which has its system requirements available will have them displayed in the infobox on the guide's main page, in a section similar to the one on the right here. Each system requirement is shown with a bar displaying how it relates to a modern average gaming PC.

To add system requirements to an infobox, add |requirements={{pcreq|}} to its own line and fill in the parameters as noted at {{pcreq}}.

In order, the specifications are (with maximum values):

  • CPU frequency (max: 3000MHz)
  • Amount of RAM (max: 2048MiB)
  • Amount of disk space (max: 10240MiB)
  • Amount of video RAM (max: 1024MiB)
  • Internet data transfer rate (max: 8192Kibps)
  • Optical drive speed (max: 52x)
  • DirectX version (max: 10)
  • Windows version ("98", "Me", "2000", "XP", "XP (SP2)" or "Vista")
  • OS X version
  • Linux version (generally information about kernel and glibc compatibility)
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