With BioShock Infinite due on March 26, developer Irrational Games is working the hype machine by gradually releasing more information, including the fact that the company's latest project will have proper PC support. In an interview with PC Gamer, technical director Christopher Kline acknowledged that Irrational's PC-specific features were lacking in the earlier BioShock titles, mostly because the studio simply couldn't spare the resources required, not because it wasn't interested in pleasing PC enthusiasts.
Things will be different this time. Kline says the studio assembled a special team responsible for identifying and implementing features important to PC gamers, and they had the resources needed to make it happen, be it new EyeFinity rigs for testing or fresh talent. As a result, folks who buy the game on PC will enjoy higher resolution textures, DirectX 11 graphics features such as HD Ambient Occlusion and Diffusion Depth of Field, a slew of graphics settings as well as support for Steam Cloud and Big Picture.
BioShock Infinite will also ship with a fully customizable integrated benchmark tool that performs a controlled fly-through of various scenes from a level in the game, capturing minimum, maximum and average framerates over 500ms intervals. Besides letting you adjust all the graphics settings and giving quick access to various presets, the benchmark can be automated to run a suite of tests with a custom script. Once finished, the tool spits out a .csv spreadsheet with all of the data so you can analyze the results.
Along with those nuggets, Irrational has revealed BioShock Infinite's minimum and recommended system requirements. On the low end, the game calls for a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo or 2.7GHz Athlon X2, an 8800 GT, Radeon 3870 or HD Graphics 3000 with 512MB of VRAM, 2GB of RAM and at least 20GB of storage space. However, the company recommends a quad-core CPU, a GTX 560 or HD 6950 with a gig of VRAM, 4GB of RAM and 30GB of storage. Also, since the game is DX10/DX11 only, Windows XP isn't supported.