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

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.

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.