Here’s What You Need To Play The ‘Star Wars: Battlefront’ Beta Today

If you’re an avid Star Wars fan, then today is a great day to be one, as EA and DICE will finally open up their upcoming reboot of the long loved Star Wars: Battlefront franchise. The beta is set to unlock at 1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific, and if you’re on PC, you can already start the pre-loading process to hop right in when the switch is flipped.

But what do you need in order to play Battlefront?

Thanks to a post on EA’s Origin PC players aren’t left in the dark, however, many have been left scratching their head at the beefiness of the requirements. Console players have it much easier, thanks to the static ecosystem, and all they need to play Battlefront will be at least 8GB of space on their crowded hard drives. PC players looking to storm Hoth in Star Wars later today will need around 11 GB as well as a rig that falls within these minimum/recommended specs.

Minimum PC System Requirements

• OS: 64-bit Windows 7 or later
• Processor (Intel): Intel i3 6300T or equivalent
• Memory: 8GB RAM
• Hard Drive: At least 40 GB of free space
• Graphics card (NVIDIA): nVidia GeForce GTX 660 2GB
• Graphics card (ATI): ATI Radeon HD 7850 2GB
• DirectX: 11.0 Compatible video card or equivalent
• Online Connection Requirements: 512 KBPS or faster Internet connection

Recommended PC System Requirements

• OS: 64-bit Windows 10 or later
• Processor (Intel): Intel i5 6600 or equivalent
• Memory: 16GB RAM
• Hard Drive: At least 40 GB of free space
• Graphics card (NVIDIA): nVidia GeForce GTX 970 4GB
• Graphics card (AMD): AMD Radeon R9 290 4GB
• DirectX: 11.1 Compatible video card or equivalent
• Online Connection Requirements: 512 KBPS or faster Internet connection

Many players have been left scratching their heads at Star Wars: Battlefront requiring 16GB of RAM, especially since this seems to be the first game to market requiring that much memory. However, fans shouldn’t be dismayed, as Digital Foundry has some great analysis of the PC version on a far less beefy rig.

In an event in Stockholm a few weeks back, Digital Foundry was able to go hands-on with the PC version of the game, and thanks to this analysis, we can see that maybe the specs listed above are a little overzealous. Playing on a rig with an i7 Intel CPU, what looks to be an AMD R9 290X GPU, and only 8GB of RAM, the game still performed admirably, maintaining on average around 80FPS with VSync disabled. This means if you’re playing on a sub-par rig compared to the recommended specs, don’t panic. My personal rig should be able to handle this fine, with my GTX 970 GPU and 16GB of RAM, but what the Digital Foundry analysis is telling us is that my rig from three years ago (AMD 7950 and 8GB RAM) would still be adequate.

This isn’t the first time a game in recent memory has recommended over-compensating specs and it turned out that normal rigs could handle the top settings just fine. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor required a GPU with 6GB of VRAM (of which few exist) in order to play on the highest settings, yet my rig mentioned from three years ago could play at ultra presets at a smooth 60fps. So while having the ultra rig would be nice, it doesn’t seem necessary thanks to the analysis already on hand.

The bonus to this is that the Star Wars: Battlefront beta is just that, a beta, which means DICE has plenty of opportunities from now and Battlefront’s launch to optimize the game further based on the data received from feedback this weekend. This way, hopefully, the game can be further optimized — for all systems, which PS4 could use, apparently — and make for a smoother experience for all come November 17.

Looking forward to Star Wars: Battlefront this weekend? Share your experiences in the comments below.

[Image via EA]