Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond has some bloody high minimum PC requirements

Respawn Entertainment have revealed the minimum PC requirements for Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond and, well…. I hope you’re up for a bit of a giggle. They’re pretty extreme, going well beyond the requirements of any major VR game release thus far.

Here’s Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond minimum requirements:

  • Intel i7 9700K (or comparable AMD)
  • 16 GB DDR4 RAM
  • Nvidia RTX 2080 or higher
  • 340+ GB of space to unpack/install; 170 GB once installed; SSD or NVMe recommended

By contrast, here’s Half-Life Alyx’s recommended requirements:

  • Intel i7 9700K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600
  • 16 GB DDR4 RAM
  • Nvidia RTX 2070 Super or AMD RX 5700 XT

That game, however, can run much lower, dropping to a GTX 1060 6GB or RX 580 8GB for the GPU and pairing that with a Cor i5 7500 or Ryzen 5 1600. Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond goes, well, above and beyond that by a lot.

The key sticking point won’t be the CPU or RAM – a 9700K is from late 2018 and per Half-Life Alyx, the incredibly popular Ryzen 3600 will be a comparable CPU thanks.

Even if you insist on an 8-core CPU, Steam’s hardware survey reports that a little over 10% of PC gamers (Steam having 90 million monthly users) have an 8-core CPU, and we can extrapolate that a decent slice of those will have an appropriate CPU. There will be a healthy overlap between high-end PCs and VR gamers as well, so even though only 1.96% of Steam users have VR, you can probably bet on a decent mid-high-end PC powering it.

No, the real problem is the GPU requirement.

The Nvidia RTX 20 series was already not that popular amongst gamers, not really giving a major step forward in performance over the 10 series that went before and its headline ray tracing features coming at a high cost in performance. The RTX 30 series that has just been released is seemingly much more in demand (going by how difficult it is to find stock!).

Going by Steam’s November survey, just 2.77% of their PC gamers have an RTX 2080, RTX 2080 Super, RTX 2080 Ti or RTX 3080 – the RTX 3090 does not chart. That number will have climbed with the release of the RTX 3070 on 29th October, but it’s still a tiny percentage of gamers to target.

In fairness, the barrier for entry is coming down. While the RTX 2080 debuted as a $699 card in late 2018, it was superceded at the same price point by the speedier 2080 Super a year later. The RTX 30 series has made a huge leap forward in performance, such that the RTX 3060 Ti is a match for the 2080 Super performance but costs $399. Still almost the price of a PS5 or Xbox Series X on its own, but a whole lot cheaper…. if you can find one in stock.

Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond will be coming to PC VR via Oculus and Steam on 12th December.

Source: Polygon

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