The minimum and recommended requirements for the PC version of Mass Effect were released today, on to the Bioware community forums.
Here they are:
Minimum System Requirements for Mass Effect on the PC
Operating System:
Windows XP or Vista
Processor:
2.4+GHZ Intel or 2.0+GHZ AMD
Memory:
1 Gigabyte Ram (XP)
2 Gigabyte Ram (Vista)
Video Card:
NVIDIA GeForce 6 series(6800GT or better)
ATI 1300XT or better (X1550, X1600 Pro and HD2400 are below minimum system requirements)
Hard Drive Space:
12 Gigabytes
Sound Card:
DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card and drivers
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Recommended System Requirements for Mass Effect on the PC
Operating System:
Windows XP or Vista
Processor:
2.6+GHZ Intel or 2.4+GHZ AMD
Memory:
2 Gigabyte Ram
Video Card:
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX or higher.
ATI X1800 XL series or higher
Hard Drive Space:
12 Gigabytes
Sound Card:
DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card and drivers – 5.1 sound card recommended
--------------------------------------------
One thing that is fairly mysterious about these specifications is that they did not say whether the CPU required was a single-core, or dual-core CPU. While a single-core 2.4 GHz Intel CPU seems like a nice, low and reasonable requirement for the minimum marker, having the recommended CPU only 200 MHz faster seems a little bit odd. This story will be updated with a clarification once the official word from Bioware is given. My guess would be that the minimum req' is 2.4 single core, and the recommended req' is 2.6 dual core. As for the video card requirement, perhaps those with older (and popular) 6600 GT cards might be upset that they didn't make the cut, but so it goes in PC game land I suppose. With a recommended video card of 7900 GTX, that doesn't seem to graphically punishing at all -- perhaps something like 8800 GT will just own this game.
Update on the CPU situation: The above processor speeds are both single-core speeds. The game apparently doesn't take too much advantage of multiple cores -- if you have a new quad core, you can't really expect to run this game with any speed advantage at all (as is the case with most games, actually.) Derek French said in the forums: "The GHz difference between the single and dual was something like 0.1 or 0.2 different, so we decided not to make a big deal about it," in reference to the requirements. So if you are looking for a better Mass Effect experience on your PC, you might want to grab some more RAM while it's cheap, and pick up a new video card instead of a new CPU.
Mass Effect will be hitting stores May 28th in North America, and June 6 for you Euro's. No word yet on when the game will be arriving to Aussie-land.
Here is a recent video the PC interface for the game (though it has been modified since this video was made, apparently):
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