Up To Spec

My old PC I bought to play games using the Oculus Rift is finally outdated for my gaming purposes. New games require more capability and the updates to older games is requiring upgraded hardware as well. When my condo flooded and forced me into a hotel at the end of February, I was able to purchase a nice laptop on sale that fortunately will run the games I'm interested in, EVE Online and Final Fantasy XIV, for a few years into the future.

My PC was struggling to run EVE so I went over to the Can You Run It website and checked out how my laptop compared to the recommended settings.

I checked and my drivers are up to date

Oh, that explained some things. The shaders and dedicated video RAM weren't up to recommended specifications on my PC. And I think my CPU speed may be down as well. I wasn't able to move back in until Thursday and haven't set up my tower yet. No wonder my laptop works so much better than my PC.

At the North American Fanfest, Yoshi-P announced that the PC specifications were increasing, giving players 10-12 months time to upgrade their computers. The current recommended specifications allowed me to run the game very well.

Endwalker recommended spec

But with the graphical upgrades coming in Dawntrail, the recommended system specifications also changed.

Dawntrail minimum and recommended spec

My laptop meets the recommended, but not my PC.

Just for giggles, I decided to look up the Star Citizen recommended specification. According to CIG, if your PC is set up for the recommended specifications for EVE or FFXIV, you will run Star Citizen pretty well.

I chuckled, because from everything I've heard and seen, Star Citizen requires at least 32 GB of memory and 64 GB is recommended.

For now I can play my games on my laptop, knowing I won't need to upgrade for a couple of years. But while I'm buying items for my place, I might as well buy a new tower that will last quite a few years into the future. And as for my current PC, I can still use it to run all my Python scripts.