This past Tuesday came a big announcement for those looking forward to Baldur's Gate 3. Larian Studios confirmed its newly expected, and still tentative, release date for Baldur's Gate 3's Early Access launch. If all goes to plan, Baldur's Gate 3 will be playable starting on September 30. Coinciding with the announcement, Larian also released its minimum and recommended PC requirements for Baldur's Gate 3. Players will have a month and a half to prepare for the PC game's release.
Sourced via the Baldur's Gate 3 Steam page, the upcoming RPG's minimum PC requirements aren't too severe. The CPU requirement is for an Intel Core i5-4690 or an AMD FX 4350. These are CPUs from 2013 and 2012 respectively. As for GPUs, the Nvidia GTX 780 and AMD Radeon R9 280X are minimum requirements, both having been released in 2013. In other words, so long as someone's PC is newer than or has upgraded since 2013 then it should run Baldur's Gate 3. Other requirements include Windows 10 64-bit, 8GB of RAM, and 70GB of storage space.
The recommended specifications for Baldur's Gate 3 aren't too much heftier. The CPU requirement is for an Intel i7 4770 or an AMD Ryzen 5 1500X. The GPU requirements are for an Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB or an AMD RX580. And the only other additional requirement is for 16GB of RAM instead of 8. Otherwise, similar Windows 10 64-bit and 70GB of storage requirements are in place.
These components aren't difficult to come by and are on the more affordable side of the spectrum when it comes to PC components. Both the CPU and GPU requirements can be acquired for below $200 apiece. GPUs could also drop in price soon with the announcement of Nvidia's upcoming 3000 series of RTX cards.
Baldur's Gate 3 isn't being positioned as a major visual powerhouse or anything, but that doesn't mean it isn't a sharp-looking game. And it definitely doesn't mean that it won't require every bit of PC performance that the player's hardware can offer. Divinity: Original Sin 2 was well-known to push PC hardware very hard, with high FPS difficult to attain for some time before Larian delivered optimizations.
The problem may be compounded with Baldur's Gate 3, since it seems like Larian is really pushing development to get the game launched as soon as it can. The early access version of Baldur's Gate 3 that launches in late September seems likely to face challenges. More powerful PC hardware could help offset some of those issues. Others may want to wait until full launch, or at least for Early Access development to progress some.
Baldur's Gate 3 releases on September 30 in Early Access on PC with a Stadia version also in development.