Why it matters to you
Prey might look pretty, but you don’t need a world-beating PC to see the game in all its glory.
The minimum and recommended specifications for Bethesda’s upcoming reboot of the Prey franchise have been released, giving us our first idea of what we’ll need to have to see the space station and its dangers in glorious detail. Although a little hefty at the top end, a large number of PC gamers should have what they need for a good-looking experience.
Prey may not have anything to do with its original namesake, but much like that first game, it does look gorgeous. With that in mind, it’s great to see that people won’t need top of the line systems to run the game at decent detail settings. It’s not a cakewalk though, as you’ll need at least a GTX 970 or R9 290 to match the recommended specifications.
Minimum
Recommended
CPU
Intel i5-2400 or AMD FX08320
Intel i7-2600K or AMD FX-8350
GPU
Nvidia GTX 660 2GB or AMD 7850 2GB
Nvidia GTX 970 4GB or AMD R9 290 4GB
Memory
8GB
16GB
None of those are too bank-breaking, though the recommended graphics cards still aren’t the cheapest. Fortunately, there are newer alternatives that should be much more affordable. AMD’s 500 series cards are coming in more cost effective versions, with sub-$200 cards easily delivering enough bang for your buck. Likewise Nvidia’s midrange Pascal cards could be a more cost-effective option for those looking to really experience what Prey’s claustrophobic space station locales have to offer.
Although we don’t yet know which operating systems and versions of them the game supports, it seems safe to say that the latest versions of Windows — 7 through 10 — will be viable, as they are the most common among gamers. As Hexus points out, there’s also no news on which APIs are supported, though considering Prey doesn’t show up on any publicly updated lists for DirectX12 or Vulkan support, we’d take an educated guess that Prey is DX11 only.
As our friends at Futuremark have pointed out before, DirectX12 and Vulkan require special consideration to support, so it could be that since the number of gamers with supporting hardware wasn’t great during the early days of Prey’s development, it just wasn’t built with that API support in mind.
Whatever graphics card you end up running the new Prey on though, there will be a number of graphical options you can tweak in the menu system. That way you can customize the experience to your taste, adding detail where possible and improving performance where it’s needed.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkrlhY4gUKk?feature=oembed&w=100&h=100]
The Prey demo is currently available for Xbox One and PS4 gamers, letting them try out the first hour of the game. PC users will need to wait a little longer, but the game will launch starting 12:00 midnight ET on May 5, with various other territories getting their Xbox One and PS4 versions at midnight locally.