Final Thoughts
Gamers can enjoy the Homeworld Remastered Collection with some fairly mundane hardware, which isn't too surprising for the polished version of a 12-year-old game. However, if you intend to play huge multiplayer matches with hundreds if not thousands of ships, then you can expect some major slow downs on mid-range hardware.
Like we said earlier, most of the mid-range graphics cards pushed above 100fps at 2560x1600 during the start of the game when you're collecting resources and building/researching ships. The high-end cards went as high as 140fps and most of the lower-end solutions were good for around 70fps through this relatively uneventful phase.
As the number of ships increased, however, frame rates slowly dropped. After we reached a few hundred ships we were seeing lag with the low-end and even mid-range hardware. Once our main battle unfolded, frame rates fell to levels lower than what we show in this review because we display averages and not the worst case scenario.
If you're happy to play with acceptable frames most of the time but can tolerate a slideshow of a battle, then you should be fine to run Homeworld Remastered with relatively low-end hardware such as the GTX 750 Ti or HD 7850. However, if you want smooth performance through sizeable battles, we recommend a R9 280X or GTX 770.
Ideally, you'll want a processor with four threads. It was interesting to see the Core i7-5960X, 4960X and 3930K perform so well. These processors feature a 20MB, 15MB and 12MB L3 cache, so perhaps this was the key to the extra performance over the 8MB L3 cache i7-4770K. Unsurprisngly, we also recommend Intel over AMD here.
Unfortunately, the FX range took a beating in Homeworld Remastered, though we think this is because the game doesn't heavily utilize more than two cores. This is an old game that hasn't been designed or optimized for more than four threads and that's bad news for AMD gamers. A Core i3 or i5 will deliver the best bang for your buck.
Homeworld Remastered looks like a respectable rehash of an old favorite and I can see it providing many gamers with countless hours of fun. Now, what I wouldn't do for a remastered Command & Conquer with multiplayer...