Wrap Up: What Kind of Hardware Do You Need?

Star Wars Battlefront is a truly gorgeous video game and arguably the best we've seen this year. Considering how exceptional the visuals are, the game's GPU demands aren't that exceptional. For example, at 1080p you can enjoy the game in all of its glory with nothing more than a $200 graphics card, the Radeon R9 380 or GeForce GTX 960.

Previous-gen mid-range products such as the GeForce GTX 760 or Radeon HD 7950 can also deliver playable performance at 1080p. Even budget graphics cards such as the GTX 950 will get you by with 48fps, which is not an ideal but certainly playable.

For 1440p gaming the GPU requirement is still reasonable, with $300 options such as the Radeon R9 390 or GeForce GTX 970 able to provide perfectly smooth gameplay.

As is often the case, those wanting to game at 4K will require at least two R9 390 or GTX 970 graphics cards or better.

We did not test the multiplayer portion of the game as it's not possible to get 40 players doing the same thing several dozen times to record accurate results. But for single player and co-op missions the game worked fine on the dual-core Pentium G3258, showing large gains once it was overclocked to 4.5GHz. The Core i3 processors also worked well, though they did dip lower than the FX and Athlon X4 processors.

For those of you wondering, we also tested several cards reducing the quality preset from ultra to high, which boosts performance by around 30%, while going from high to medium boosted frame rates by another 20%. The game also never used more than 4GB's of VRAM when using the ultra-quality settings, even at 4K.

Last but not least, both SLI and Crossfire are working out of the box with current drivers, which is great news for 4K gamers as they will no doubt be looking to take advantage of multi-GPU technology.