Baldur's Gate 3's early access PC requirements are here

Hot off the heels of announcing the early access release date for Baldur's Gate 3 last night, Larian Studios have also unveiled the game's initial PC requirements over on their freshly minted Steam page. Larian head honcho and creative director Swen Vincke said the team are still in the process of optimising the game in their Panel From Hell stream last night, but they're hoping they'll be able to lower the requirements outlined so far so that more people will be able to play it come September 30th. Let's take a look.

At the moment, Larian haven't given any indication of what kind of performance they're targeting with their minimum and recommended PC requirements for Baldur's Gate 3's early access launch, but judging from their choice of recommended graphics cards, I'd imagine they've probably been put together with playing the game at 1920x1080 in mind.

Baldur's Gate 3 minimum PC requirements

CPU: Intel Core i5-4690 / AMD RX 4350
RAM: 8GB
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 / AMD Radeon R9 280X
DirectX: 11
Storage: 70GB
OS: Windows 10 (64-bit)

Baldur's Gate 3 recommended PC requirements

CPU: Intel Core i7-4700K / AMD Ryzen 5 1500X
RAM: 16GB
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB) / AMD Radeon RX 580
DirectX: 11
Storage: 70GB
OS: Windows 10 (64-bit)

Fortunately, there's nothing overly complicated here. The minimum PC requirements should cover anyone who's built a PC within the last seven years or so, and the recommended spec has pretty popular components, too, including Nvidia's GTX 1060, which is still the most widely used graphics card on Steam according to their most recent hardware survey.

It's actually a very similar set of PC requirements to what we saw for both Horizon Zero Dawn and Death Stranding, although the good news here is that, unlike those games, you won't need a DirectX 12-compatible graphics card in order to play it. As a result, those of you with slightly more vintage GPUs should still be able to play Baldur's Gate 3's early access version without much trouble. You will, however, need to be running the 64-bit version of Windows 10, so anyone still hanging onto their ancient copy of Windows 7 will finally need to bite the bullet and upgrade if they want in on Larian's upcoming RPG.

It's possible these PC requirements may change over time, though, as Larian have said they "might decrease over the course of early access as performance improves." I'd imagine this statement will only apply to their CPU, RAM and GPU requirements rather than suddenly supporting older operating systems, admittedly, but you never know.

One thing you can be sure of, though, is that I'll be testing the game thoroughly once it comes out in early access on September 30th, seeing exactly what kind of performance you can expect from Baldur's Gate 3's current set of PC requirements and how it evolves over time. Watch this space.