Raise a glass to one of the biggest games of 2023 having rec specs from 2014

Rejoice, all ye mere mortal PC gamers, for your Diablo 4 hour approacheth.  The Diablo 4 beta has been announced, and the hardware requirements are mercifully modest. It's likely they may increase when we get to June's launch, but for now they make for great reading.

At rock bottom, Blizzard says you'll need an Intel Core i5 2500K or AMD FX 8100 CPU on the CPU side and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 or AMD Radeon R9 280 for graphics. Oh, and 8GB of RAM and 45GB of available storage. That'll buy you a 720p low graphics settings experience at 30 fps. 

As for the recommended specs, Blizzard doesn't specify the targeted resolution, quality and frame rate. But it's looking in the region of 1080p, medium and hopefully 60 fps.

Whatever, you'll need an Intel Core i5-4670K or AMD Ryzen R3-1300X processor, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon RX 470 graphics (ahh, remember when you could get a half decent GPU for $180?), and 16GB of RAM.

Yes, it'll run on your very old PC 

Blizzard says the game may actually run on even lower spec hardware than the minimum quoted, but at the cost of a "significantly diminished" experience.

But if we take the recommend spec as a more realistic option, the Nvidia and AMD GPUs in question date from September 2014 and August 2016 respectively. So, yeah, them's some pretty old ass GPUs.

In other words, here's a game from a big developer that doesn't need a shiny new GPU. Hooray.

Well, that's true for now. The game's developers mentioned in a livestream that ray tracing will be added after the game launches, though to what extent we still don't really know. However it shakes out, that implies an absolute minimum of Nvidia RTX 2060 or AMD RX 6000 graphics. 

But of course, you needn't play with ray tracing and it's far from clear that enabling it will make a compelling addition to the gameplay. Better for now, then, to focus on the fact that Diablo 4 certainly looks one of the more democratic triple-A game titles of late. Something we can all enjoy.

Oh, and for the record, the Diablo 4 early access beta for players who pre-ordered the game kicks off on Friday, March 17 at 9 am PT and will end on Monday, March 20 at 12 pm PT.  The second Diablo 4 open beta is open to everyone from Friday, March 24 at 9 am PT and end on Monday, March 27 at 12 pm PT.