Ubisoft may act all fashionably slow to a multiplayer shooter party, but its upcoming XDefiant is the lowest PC Si I've seen in years.

Let's start with the entry point, the minimum specification proposed by Ubisoft runs XDefiant. As with the 8-year-old 4GB graphics card, a CPU with 4 cores and 8 threads is enough. Even 8GB of system RAM is fine, and yes, it's really 2024 - you're not drifting back in time while you sleep.

Whether XDefiant can actually play on such hardware is quite another thing, and I'm not a fan of the general minimum hardware requirements. The recommended system requirements honestly seem more realistic, and the CPU suggestions are the same, but the graphics card is more modern and has 6〜8GB of VRAM. If you dive into the so-called Ultra requirements, 4K gaming will demand an 8-core 16-threaded CPU and a GeForce RTX3080 or Radeon RX6800XT graphics card. This is a huge leap in GPU performance, but one of the things that is not clear from Ubisoft's system requirements is 4K resolution, game advanced settings, or a combination of both.

Also, there are no expected performance figures on what kind of frame rate you will get with such hardware, so it's hard to guess. You need to do it. Ubisoft is really ruining us, however, with an uncapped frame rate "for maximum fps."

Honestly, you really promise to be still in 2024.

It's puzzling why Ubisoft is proposing a Core i7 9700K or Ryzen7 3700X.Both are not old chips, which means that the 3700X is not as good in games as the 9700K.When we reviewed the Ryzen7 3700X, the gap between them can be quite large, especially at lower resolutions. There's also the fact that if XDefiant requires RTX4 to run "Ultra" in 3080K, the full power of the CPU is not so important. A high-speed 5-core chip like the Ryzen 5600X should be good enough.

The odd CPU recommendation is not limited to the highest settings, as ubisoft says that the minimum CPU should be 10th generation Intel, but the maximum settings, which may seem like something about core and clock speed, but I think it's actually about threads. Intel's Core i3 10105F has 4 cores and 8 threads, while the 9th generation Core i3 all have 4 cores and 4 threads. All the Cpus recommended in XDefiant's system requirements are at least 8 thread chips, which strongly suggests that the game has been developed to use exactly that number of threads.

At least, the game is not heavy on system RAM and storage requirements, as it requires 16GB of dual-channel memory and just 35GB of drive space. XDefiant launches May 21, so there are just days to wait before you check out how well the game actually works on your gaming PC, but I don't think anyone with a relatively modern rig has a problem.