Find Out If Your PC Can Run Star Wars: Battlefront

Electronic Arts and DICE are gearing up for the release of the public Star Wars: Battlefront beta. Today they released details on the game's system requirements, giving PC gamers an idea of what's required to play the title.

The news was made apparent over on the official Origin store, where they break down the minimum requirements and the recommended requirements. You can check out the specs for Battlefront below.

Minimum PC System Requirements

OS: 64-bit Windows 7 or later

Processor (Intel): Intel i3 6300T or equivalent

Memory: 8GB RAM

Hard Drive: At least 40 GB of free space

Graphics card (NVIDIA): nVidia GeForce GTX 660 2GB

Graphics card (ATI): ATI Radeon HD 7850 2GB

DirectX: 11.0 Compatible video card or equivalent

Online Connection Requirements: 512 KBPS or faster Internet connection

Recommended PC System Requirements

OS: 64-bit Windows 10 or later

Processor (Intel): Intel i5 6600 or equivalent

Memory: 16GB RAM

Hard Drive: At least 40 GB of free space

Graphics card (NVIDIA): nVidia GeForce GTX 970 4GB

Graphics card (AMD): AMD Radeon R9 290 4GB

DirectX: 11.1 Compatible video card or equivalent

Online Connection Requirements: 512 KBPS or faster Internet connection

Those are some killer specs. Ouch.

While the 64-bit OS makes sense – and by now anyone remotely serious about gaming on PC really needs a 64-bit OS otherwise it's like trying to play Wii U games on an N64 – the RAM requirements are insane. 8GB for the minimum? That's pretty high-up the chain for the bare minimum. I would have expected maybe 6GB.

Hopefully the high-end RAM requirement means that the game will have much larger and more expansive battles than we may have been anticipating. For now we've only seen small skirmishes and a few modes that don't really show much scope to Star Wars: Battlefront in comparison to the first two games on the PS2 and OG Xbox.

One thing that baffles me though is that the CPU requirements are kind of low. For the minimum CPU you'll only need an i3, which is pretty far down the totem pole for gaming CPUs. The interesting thing about it is that the minimum RAM requirements are higher than the minimum CPU requirements. This seems to indicate that the game will have a lot of heavy memory-consuming elements – maybe a lot of the parts and pieces stay on the ground? Maybe there's a ton of talking and explosions? Maybe there is the possibility of having more vehicles on the screen than what we know about?

One reason could be that the game's new character customization could zap a lot of memory. In the old Star Wars: Battlefront games the two things that took up the most memory were vehicles and characters with special items. In this newest game from DICE players will have the ability to customize their character and add things like jetpacks, rocket launchers, special grenades and other items. It was possible to mod the original Battlefront to do the same thing, but as I mentioned changing up certain characters with certain abilities would zap the memory.

Graphically the minimum GPU requirements are also pretty. If you bought a GTX Titan from when it was first announced so many years ago, your card will just barely step over the line for the minimum requirements for Star Wars: Battlefront. Now I don't know if this is stuffed requirement or if the game genuinely requires that level of hardware, but you will have need a serious rig to run Star Wars: Battlefront.

The recommended requirements are even higher yet, with an Intel i5 6600 being recommended along with 16GB of RAM. Now that's just insane. The recommended GPU is practically top of the line with a GTX 970 at 4GB and an AMD R9 290 sitting at the top of the crop. Those are two of the most high-end GPUs on the market at the moment barring AMD's recent 300 series and Nvidia's GTX 980.

The beta for Star Wars: Battlefront gets underway this weekend and you can play-test it on the Xbox One, PS4 or PC. For more info feel free to visit the official website.