Bandai Namco’s new anime action RPG Scarlet Nexus has revealed its minimum requirements to run on PC, and it looks like anyone will be able to run the game. PC specifications have been the gatekeepers of games since the beginning. The long-running joke of whether or not a system can run Crysis has been around for decades now. Still, optimization efforts from developers have mitigated the level of entry for gamers. League of Legends, Fortnite, and many other titles are successfully optimized to run even on the lowest PC with stable FPS.

How games on PC manage to scale down the requirements for lower-end users include reducing graphical textures, removing effects like motion blur, and decreasing resolution. Taking those steps allows players to adjust their experiences with the game. Some players would choose over-the-top looking graphics and effects at 30 FPS, while others will scale them down to an acceptable level for 120 FPS. This flexibility drives a lot of players toward PC rather than consoles for their platform of choice.

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From its listing on Steam, Scarlet Nexus’s system requirements don’t require anything like a 1060 Ti or anything like that to run the game. The minimum requirements to run it are an Intel Core i5-3470 or an AMD FX-8350 processor and A GTX 760 with two gigs or an AMD Radeon HD 7970 with three gigs and 6 gigs of ram. The GTX 700 series cards were released in 2013 and the AMD 7000 series were released in 2012. Recommended specs are an Intel i7-6600 or AMD Ryzen 5 2600x processor, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 with four gigabytes, or an AMD Radeon 59 290x with four gigabytes and eight gigabytes of ram. 50 gigabytes of space is needed to install.

Scarlet Nexus  character strides twoards camera with angry expression

In layman’s terms, Scarlet Nexus could run on a six-year-old mid-range PC and still be able to run the game fine. How it achieves this is probably due to the nature of the graphics in the game. Since Scarlet Nexus is anime-inspired, character textures, at least on the faces, hair, and skin will be flat and simple. The bulk of the game's hardware usage will more than likely come from the effects, amount of items on the screen, and textures of the environment. Even then, the textures in the environment will be simplified to match the textures of the characters.

Anime-style video games like Scarlet Nexus never really take too many resources as long as it isn’t trying to tackle too many things at once. Nier: Automata, another anime-inspired game, has similar low specs and an identical install size but was filled to the brim with content. Perhaps AAA games like Call of Duty should rethink gunning for photorealistic graphic textures to reduce its installation's immense size and follow in the footsteps of Scarlet Nexus’s simplified style.

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Scarlet Nexus releases June 25, 2021, on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

Source: Steam