Armored Core VI has relatively light system requirements, but no ray tracing during missions

[Daniel Sims]

In brief: FromSoftware has been gradually revealing details about PC requirements for Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon. Now, less than two weeks away from launch, it appears the game is slightly easier on hardware than the company's last title, Elden Ring, with a reduced ray tracing implementation.

FromSoftware has released the complete system requirements and PC options screen for Armored Core VI. The specs indicate it should be an overall smoother experience than Elden Ring. Possibly the most critical improvement is that it will be the developer's first PC release to support a 120fps frame rates cap.

The studio had capped its prior titles at 60fps and infamously restricted the first PC launch of the original Dark Souls to 30fps and 720p resolution. Users have previously had to implement mods to overcome the locks, but Armored Core VI shouldn't pose that problem.

Another important detail for the upcoming mech simulation game is that ray tracing will only be available in the garage mode, where players customize their gear. From's first attempt at ray tracing in Elden Ring implemented it within normal gameplay but only featured ray traced shadows and ambient occlusion.

Despite the lack of ray-traced reflections or global illumination, the visual setting still impacted performance significantly. This factor might be behind the company's more cautious approach in Armored Core VI, but it's still unclear what ray tracing features it will include.

Elsewhere, the PC graphics options seem pretty standard. There are settings for HDR, anti-aliasing, screen-space ambient occlusion, depth of field, motion blur, shadows, lighting, effects, volumetric fog, reflections (non-ray-traced), water surfaces, and shaders.

The system requirements list suggests graphics cards slightly weaker than the specs for Elden Ring, which demands for mid-to-high-level RTX 3000 series cards for RT, whereas Armored Core VI only recommends mid-range RTX 2000 GPUs.

	Minimum	Recommended
CPU	Intel Core i7-4790K Intel Core i5-8400 AMD Ryzen 7 1800X AMD Ryzen 5 2600	Intel Core i7-7700 Intel Core i5-10400 AMD Ryzen 7 2700X AMD Ryzen 5 3600
RAM	12GB	12GB
GPU	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, 4GB AMD Radeon RX 480, 4GB	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, 6GB AMD Radeon RX 590, 8GB Intel Arc A750, 8GB
GPU (ray tracing)	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, 6GB AMD Radeon RX 6600, 8GB	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070, 8GB AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT, 8GB Intel Arc A770, 16GB
Storage	60GB	60GB

Armored Core VI launches on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series consoles on August 25. Its release will end a decade-long hiatus for the franchise and bring it to PC for the first time.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/99781-armored-core-vi-has-relatively-light-system-requirements.html

 

[magisys]

Not having to deal with excessive hardware requirements only to implement very heavy cosmetic effects combined with useless high resolution both clearly intented to make the hardware requirements skyrocketing and sell new overpriced components, is a really big big big big plus by my side. also I'm glad that Armored Core is coming back after many years with a release on PC. hoping that will be much better that the two last (very poor) installment in the series...

 

[waclark]

snip
clearly intented to make the hardware requirements skyrocketing and sell new overpriced components,
snip

Uh, how does that benefit FromSoftware? Do you really think the SW developers sat around saying, "how can we make this require more hardware that someone else can sell and make money on?" That doesn't make sense at all.

 

[amghwk]

Wot? People STILL crazy about ray tracing schmucking??

Wake up! (FYI, I have a 4090 too, along with my 5700XT, but I was and am never a fan of the RT BS. And no, I didn't get the 4090 for the RT. I just wanted to play my favourite games @ 4K with maxed out settings @ a minimum fps of 60, WITHOUT RT in games that support it.)

Sigh... Whatever happened to gameplay??

 

[waclark]

Wot? People STILL crazy about ray tracing schmucking??

Wake up! (FYI, I have a 4090 too, along with my 5700XT, but I was and am never a fan of the RT BS. And no, I didn't get the 4090 for the RT. I just wanted to play my favourite games @ 4K with maxed out settings @ a minimum fps of 60, WITHOUT RT in games that support it.)

Sigh... Whatever happened to gameplay??

Any reason we can't have both?

 

[magisys]

Uh, how does that benefit FromSoftware? Do you really think the SW developers sat around saying, "how can we make this require more hardware that someone else can sell and make money on?" That doesn't make sense at all.

so you really believe that games like CP2077 have RT implemented like a tech demo solely for fame and glory purposes? Or other games clearly unoptimized with heavy graphics and visual focus, with new and esclusive effects and marketing functionality (like physx in the past, dlss today)?
I really don't care the benefit of FromS or others devs (I'm a customer, not a shareholder), but surely it's been from the time of heavy marketing for 4k gaming and RT scams that the last effort in selling overpriced hardware has take place.
Honestly, do you think that the developers are not "talking" with hardware manufacturer to make or not to make plans of including RT in new games ore make some sort of business agreement to include or not exclusive crap in games? I think they do, because that is called greedy marketing for brainless consumism.
For those reason I'm more prone to look with favorable eyes these new games of well known devs that doesn't focus on excessive visual marketing crap.

 

[waclark]

so you really believe that games like CP2077 have RT implemented like a tech demo solely for fame and glory purposes? Or other games clearly unoptimized with heavy graphics and visual focus, with new and esclusive effects and marketing functionality (like physx in the past, dlss today)?
I really don't care the benefit of FromS or others devs (I'm a customer, not a shareholder), but surely it's been from the time of heavy marketing for 4k gaming and RT scams that the last effort in selling overpriced hardware has take place.
Honestly, do you think that the developers are not "talking" with hardware manufacturer to make or not to make plans of including RT in new games ore make some sort of business agreement to include or not exclusive crap in games? I think they do, because that is called greedy marketing for brainless consumism.
For those reason I'm more prone to look with favorable eyes these new games of well known devs that doesn't focus on excessive visual marketing crap.

I think developers use graphics technology to enhance their games and make them attractive to customers/gamers. RT is just one aspect they can utilize, just like stream processors, pixel shaders, vertex shaders and other parts of the GPU. Yes, I do think they talk to hardware manufacturers to understand the best or optimum way to utilize those features of the hardware, but the intent is to sell games (and make money) not sell hardware. The hardware, in most cases, is already in place so given that Nvidia has a large installed base in the gaming community it's logical they would want to use as many features of those GPUs as possible.

I don't see it as greedy consumerism to utilize features of the computers that are targeted for gaming software. It would be like saying, well you're only supporting keyboard and mouse play because you want to sell more KB/Mice for Logitech. Or saying, they only support 4K resolutions in order to sell more 4K monitors.

I suppose you must think that pong was the last game written that wasn't about excessive visual marketing. I mean, really, what has any other game brought us that pong didn't already do? In pong, you move the mouse/controller and click buttons to make something happen. This is the foundation of every computer game ever made. Everything else is just excessive, greedy consumerist graphics porn. Right?