Insurgency Sandstorm's Minimum Specifications, Explained

[New World Interactive]

As many people know our team has worked very hard over the past months optimizing the game for a wider array of PC hardware. While we are very proud of what we’ve accomplished in this period of time, we acknowledge that there’s still room for improvement. We plan to continue optimizing the game alongside our other post-release initiatives (some of which were outlined in our recent blog post[newworldinteractive.com]).

There are a few things related to the minimum spec that are worth pointing out. Players on this specific setup (8GB RAM + HDD + 2GB VRAM) may have varying performance depending on specific hardware (e.g. RAM bandwidth, HDD specs, GPU speed, etc.). It is recommended if you have the above specs that you try to run the game with minimal background applications to get the best possible performance, as you are likely to be memory-bound.

The above being said, we felt uncomfortable increasing the minimum spec, and would like to explain why. There are a couple of modifications you can do to our minimum spec which will yield a much smoother gameplay experience; these include increasing the amount of system memory, increasing the amount of VRAM, or using a solid state hard drive. We could have made these adjustments in the minimum spec, but that would have made the minimum spec inaccurate. For example, if we upped the memory requirement above 8GB, that would not be accurate because technically you can run the game with 8GB memory fine if you have an SSD or if you have more than 2GB of VRAM. If we upped the GPU requirement, that would also not be accurate because technically you can run the game fine with a GTX 760 if you have more than 8GB of RAM or a solid state drive. If we upped the hard drive requirement to SSD, that would also not be accurate because technically you can run the game fine with a mechanical HDD if you upgrade your system memory and/or the VRAM of your GPU.

The above gets a bit technical we understand, but we felt it was important to explain so that players can understand how we arrived at our minimum spec. It’s worth further reiterating that we are actively working on the game post-release and hope to reach even lower minimum specs as we go, especially as we try to get the game in a good place for consoles.