Diablo IV — Introduction

Diablo IV has arrived , eleven years after its predecessor. The game is in "early access" for the next few days, for people that are willing to fork over the extra money to buy the Deluxe or Ultimate editions. We got an Ultimate code for testing purposes, and the game unlocks at 6pm PDT on June 1. Once it's out, the benchmarking fun begins. How does it run, and what sort of hardware will you need? That's what we aim to find out.

A lot has changed in the past decade, especially in the world of PC hardware. The fastest PC back in mid-2012 consisted of a shiny new Core i7-3770K , paired with a Radeon HD 7970 or GeForce GTX 680 . Or maybe a Core i7-3960X if you were into HEDT setups, with a dual-GPU GeForce GTX 690 or Radeon HD 6990 ? Typical PCs would have 8GB of memory, while high-end systems might come with 16GB. Most people were still using hard drives rather than SSDs, typically of the 250GB to 500GB variety.

But it's not just the hardware that's changed. We've gone from Windows 7 to Windows 8/8.1, 10, and 11. Microtransactions were a relatively new thing back in 2012, buying digital cosmetics was scorned, and live service games weren't a thing. It's a brave new world for Diablo IV , in other words.

Please note that this article will be updated regularly for the next day or so as we test hardware and refresh the charts. If you don't see your GPU tested and you'd like us to run some benchmarks, make a request in the article comments. We can't test everything , but come on: This is Diablo! There are probably millions of people waiting to play the game, with everything from a maxed out extreme gaming PC down to a portable potato.

We're going to at least try to check out at least one currently supported GPU from each generation (meaning, with current drivers) from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. That means AMD RX 400-series and later (2016 and newer), Nvidia GTX 900-series and later (2014 and newer), and Intel Arc. Sigh. Okay, maybe we'll give a couple of integrated graphics solutions a shot as well, time willing.

Diablo IV — System Requirements

The official Diablo IV system requirements don't look too onerous. In fact, even a PC from 2012 might conceivably run the game. Here's the breakdown.

Minimum PC Requirements

• Intel Core i5-2500K or AMD FX-8350
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 or AMD Radeon R9 280
• 8GB of system memory
• SSD with 90GB of available space
• Windows 10 64-bit version 1909 or later
• DirectX 12
• Broadband internet

Blizzard says a minimum spec PC will manage 30 fps with 720p, upscaled to 1080p, at low settings. We're... not going to test the minimum spec PC. At least not first. Mostly because we don't have most of those parts hanging around. We'll leave that as an exercise for the internet at large for now, so if you have such a system, sound off in our forums on how it runs!

There are a few interesting pieces of information, though. For example, the CPUs are very old by today's standards, and the GPUs both stopped getting driver updates in the past year or two. Is Blizzard testing with the final AMD 22.6.1 and Nvidia 474.30 drivers? We don't know. (Note that Nvidia has released security updates for some older GPUs like the GTX 660, with the last driver from March 2023, but the last "Game Ready" release was 472.12 from September 2021.) Also, the R9 280 was, literally, a rebadged Radeon HD 7950 Boost, which means technically you could go back a bit further on the GPU side of things.

The DirectX 12 requirement is a bit interesting as well, as some of those older GPUs were potentially problematic. There's DX12 compatible, and then there's GPUs that actually work well with DX12. Cards with less than 4GB have always been a bit problematic with DX12 games in my experience.

8GB of system memory shouldn't be a problem for most people — Windows itself tends to want at least 8GB to run well, unless you're doing something like a Tiny 11 installation . Likewise, 90GB of free space isn't too bad these days when you can pick up a 2TB SSD for $75 (that's for the Solidigm P41 Plus that we reviewed and found to be okay, given the capacity and price).

Recommended (Medium) PC Requirements

• Intel Core i5-4670K or AMD Ryzen 3 1300X
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon RX 470
• 16GB of system memory

Stepping up to the recommended specs, you'll need a CPU from about 2014 or later on the Intel side, or a first generation quad-core Ryzen CPU from AMD. Either way, those are CPUs that don't have SMT / Hyper-Threading. And they're still enough for 60 fps at 1080p and medium settings. It seems like Diablo IV won't be too much of a resource pig, if these recommendations are anything to go by.

Graphics card suggestions get a bump up to 4GB cards now, but the GTX 970 is still pretty ancient by today's standards, having launched in 2014. Then again, it's about as fast as a GTX 1650 from 2019, which isn't that old.

Blizzard also bumps the RAM recommendation to 16GB, which is what we'd recommend for most people anyway. Windows just feels so much nicer on 16GB (or more) memory. The rest of the requirements remain unchanged, so we've dropped them from the list.

High PC Requirements

• Intel Core i7-8700K or AMD Ryzen 7 2700X
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 or AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
• 16GB of system memory

Blizzard's high recommended specs are for 1080p at high settings, still aiming for 60 fps. The components are now from about 2018 (give or take). The CPUs are either a 6-core/12-thread Intel chip, or an 8-core/16-thread AMD chip, from several generations back.

GPUs are also a couple of generations old, with the RTX 2060 and RX 5700 XT. If we were picking nits, we'd point out that, based on our GPU benchmarks hierarchy , for non-ray tracing games the RX 5700 XT ends up being about 30% faster than the RTX 2060. It also has 2GB more VRAM.

Then again, Diablo IV has DLSS 3 support, which means it also supports DLSS 2 upscaling and that typically boosts RTX 2060 performance by 30%. But there's no indication of whether Blizzard is factoring in DLSS or not.

Ultra 4K PC Requirements

• Intel Core i7-8700K or AMD Ryzen 7 2700X
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 or AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT
• 32GB of system memory

Finally, for 4K ultra at 60 fps, the only changes are that Blizzard recommends 32GB of system memory, and you'll need a beefier GPU: RTX 3080 or RX 6800 XT. Those are at least roughly comparable, though it's worth mentioning that Diablo IV won't support ray tracing at launch — that will come later, according to Nvidia .

In our rasterization test suite, the RTX 3080 ends up being 5% faster than the RX 6800 XT at 4K ultra. Once the game gets ray tracing support, that lead could grow to 50% or more, depending on how demanding the ray tracing is. Factor in DLSS upscaling (we're not sure if Diablo IV supports FSR 2 yet) and it could be an even bigger gap. But we'll see how the game runs soon enough.

Diablo IV — Initial Thoughts

We haven't been able to play Diablo IV yet — we didn't get access to the preview code, and we didn't want to waste time testing performance on non-public code anyway, if possible. But plenty of gaming sites have played the game and posted their thoughts.

Sister site PC Gamer's Diablo IV review-in-progress seems underwhelmed with the live service nature and "just wait for the end game" design philosophy. It hasn't scored the game yet, opting to wait for the retail launch. At the other end of the spectrum, GamesRadar+ gave Diablo IV an editor's choice 5-star review and calls it "a magnificent and absurd loot theme park," though it reviewed the Xbox Series X version. Overall, the current Metacritic score of 88 for the PC version looks quite favorable.

We haven't seen much in the way of commentary on performance. That's a good thing, as it probably means the game runs slicker than snot. Nvidia's preview benchmarks show the RTX 4070 getting 43 fps at 4K max settings without upscaling, and 113 fps with upscaling and frame generation. The RTX 4090 meanwhile got 95 fps at 4K native, and 229 fps with DLSS 3 upscaling and framegen.

In other words, for high-end PCs, Diablo IV doesn't appear to be super taxing. We suspect lots of people will play quite happily at 4K and high settings on relatively modest hardware. And when the ray tracing update comes out, we'll hopefully get some wonderfully enhanced visuals rather than just slightly nicer shadows.

We'll find out soon enough how the game runs on a wider selection of GPUs, including perhaps some cards from the Diablo III era. Check back this evening, starting at 7pm EDT, for our benchmarking party. In the meantime, let us know in our forums the GPUs you'd most like to see benchmarked first, and we'll do our best to accommodate requests.