Gothic 1 Remake: How does the game run on the minimum specs? Will it run smoothly?

The Gothic 1 remake is delighting gamers and eliciting nostalgic sighs from veterans of the Minental. That is, unless they're complaining about high hardware requirements and low frame rates instead. The role-playing game, based on a version of Unreal Engine 5.4.3 enhanced by developer Alkimia Interactive, places heavy demands on PC components—graphics cards, in particular, are put to the test. But VRAM and main memory are also heavily taxed.

The official system requirements underscore this. They list a GeForce RTX 2070 and a Radeon RX 6700 XT as the minimum entry-level requirements, along with at least 8 GB of VRAM and no less than 16 GB—but preferably 32 GB—of RAM. When it comes to CPUs, the Gothic 1 remake shows a bit of leniency: According to the official system requirements, the processor should be at least an Intel Core i7-7700K (4C/8T) or a Ryzen 5 1600X (6C/12T)—the recommendations also list the Intel Core i7-7700K and a Ryzen 5 3600X (6C/12T). Recommended graphics cards are a GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and a Radeon RX 6800 XT with at least 12 GB of VRAM.

It's a bit striking that there's actually very little difference between some of these hardware models. The GeForce RTX 2070 and RTX 3070 Ti are separated by just one GPU generation—or two years—and both are high-end models; the RTX 3070 Ti even borders on the top tier. The RX 6700 XT and RX 6800 XT even come from the same GPU generation; the RX 6700 XT is also a high-end model from the Radeon lineup at the time, while the RX 6800 XT is a top-tier model. When it comes to CPUs, there's no difference between Intel's recommendation and its minimum requirement; after all, there's a generational leap between the Ryzen 5 1600X and the Ryzen 5 3600X, complete with performance and efficiency improvements. However, both are six-core processors clocked at up to 3.6 GHz and 4.4 GHz, respectively, and offered an attractive price-performance ratio at the time of their release. The Intel quad-core, on the other hand, clocks up to 4.2 GHz, was released in 2017 like the Ryzen 5 1600X, but cost roughly twice as much as one of the more affordable Zen or Zen 2 processors.

If you spend a lot of time working with Unreal Engine 5, you may have noticed something about the official system requirements: Alkimia Interactive lists hardware specifications that are nearly identical to those listed by Epic itself in the official developer documentation. If we scroll a bit further in the UE5 documentation to the engine features and Lumen effects, we find the Radeon RX 6000 and GeForce RTX 2000 listed there—and, this is not insignificant when it comes to graphics card selection: Shader Model 6. This corresponds to DirectX 12 with Feature Level 11_0 and was released as early as 2016, but requires graphics cards based on the GCN 1 (Radeon HD 7000) and Kepler (GeForce 600/700) architectures, as well as the Windows Display Driver Model 2.1 (Windows 10 with the Anniversary Update, starting with version 1607). But enough about the theory. Let's move on to the RTX 2070 and real-world performance.

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Gothic 1 Remake: How does the game run on the minimum system requirements? The hardware requirements for Gothic Remake are high, and graphics cards in particular are put to the test. How does the game perform with the official minimum requirements, and can we get the Nameless One moving with adjusted graphics settings?

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1. Page 1 Introduction and Test Scenario
2. Page 2 Testing with the RTX 2070 and comparisons
3. Page 3 Testing with the RX 6700 XT and comparisons
4. Page 4 RAM and Conclusion