what is the minimum spec graphics card for star citizen that's what this video is about let's get
into it over the last few months i've tested lots of graphics cards to find a new champ basically
to find something to replace the 1066 gigabyte which is showing its age a little bit so in this
video i've taken some of the best contenders from the testing that i've done and i've popped them
in the minimum spec system so the minimum respect system has got the i5 8400 which is my recommended
bare minimum to get in star citizen on the cpu side on intel side on amd it's between the 2600
and the 3600 one of those two would probably be a comparison and then we've got 16 gigabytes of
ram running nice and slowly uh 2400 megahertz i think this is running out uh and so this is a bit
of a test to see if you put these graphics cards in with the comparable cpu and ram setup how do
they form and then at the end of this we should be able to recommend what you should buy or at
least if you're looking to try the game out what you should get as a bare minimum to try and get
half decent frames because as we always say star citizen is not like most games if you're expecting
a minimum spec to get you 60 fps at low settings forget it you're going to be more likely to get
30 fps with definite dips below 30 in the cities so just have that in mind if you're trying the
game out for the first time or you're thinking why isn't my pc running very well it is because star
citizen is a bit of a monster cpu really loves really fast cpus and so if you want to get really
good frames in this game you've got to go out and buy a 5800x3d or something like that on the amd
side or the newest older lake cpus it really is a very cpu demanding game and actually we're finding
it's becoming more and more gpu demanding as time goes by so that's enough of that let's get into
the testing and see how these graphics cards perform let's start off with orazim which is
a very gpu demanding scene because you're looking out across the clouds but actually origin is also
very intense on the cpu you'll see here these results are in a bit of a weird order you wouldn't
expect this order and this wasn't what we saw when we were testing all of these with the 5800x2d
we see that for some reason the 1070 is at the bottom which doesn't make any sense and the 1660
base model is at the top which again doesn't make much sense what's going on here is that we are cpu
limited in every case apart from the 1066 gigabyte and the problem with this testing here is that all
of these cars are just at the whims almost of the cpu doing different work and loading different
things in and doing all sorts of things so it's just throwing everything out of order slightly
what we can really take from this is that we are cpu bottlenecked on the main part in orizon and
uh this is a sort of performance you'll expect from the cpu actually rather than the gpus all
the the three gpus that we're testing really here today the 1660 the 1660 ti and the 1070 have got
more room to go at 1080p with the clouds on media in space you'll see all these cars perform really
well nothing really to complain about here you take any of those results so let's move on
next into quantum travel and this is a nice test because we've got all of these results being gpu
bottlenecks quantum travel is actually quite hard to run and so you see the true potential
of these cars in quantum travel that 1660 result 40 fps i'd say for a minimum is great but uh the
ddr6 that the ti version has seems to really help in this case um but yeah any of those newer three
cards that we're testing you'd be very happy with those let's look at area 18 and a cpu bound result
this particular scene looking at the globe and all the things going on around it is really heavy
on the cpu as you actually move around area 18 and uh you just move travel and move around the city
it isn't this bad so this is a worst case scenario really as you travel through area 18 but
there's not much we can draw from the graphics cards here other than the fact that really the
main three that we're looking at today are capable of performing around the 30 fps part which again
is what we're kind of aiming for here finally let's have a look at lorville this is where i do
the majority of the testing lots and lots of runs to get relatively accurate data we will see here
that the 1070 as expected with this result sits on top and the 1660 ti is below and the 1660 is
below that but they're all good around the 30 fps mark what we will say from here is that
in the testing we did before on the main system with the faster cpu we saw big frame drops from
most of the six gigabyte cards and four gigabyte cards and so we we found that the 1070 actually
performed a bit better and it is slightly a head start still here but what seems to be happening
here is because the overall kind of highs of these runs are reduced by the fact that the cpu is much
less powerful it seems like the drops that the six gigabyte cards and they do still have them
because of swapping in memory in and out we've done some testing on that before but they do
have the drops but it doesn't seem to affect the overall result as much because the frames never
get as high if that makes any sense because we're limited by the cpu all of these results again are
cpu bound um and so you would see better with the best cpu but this kind of is our really our worst
case scenario in the game in the cities doing runs like this and all of them i would say are
star citizen playable which means they wouldn't be acceptable in any other game but for star citizen
to hit around the 30 fps mark and there will be bits we drop below they're all pretty good so
let's try and sum up these months worth of testing and hundreds and hundreds of pounds worth of
graphics cards that i've been buying we have found i think that any of these cards will do the job
the 1070 i think probably is the best case because it's got extra vram it's got eight gigabytes of
vram and we've found in the past that that means it doesn't stutter as much the six gigabyte cards
they swap in some memory in and out and that does lead to frame drops and a bit stuttering
whereas actually with the extra vram the a 1070 is just a more stable performance even if it
actually probably isn't quite as fast as the 1660 ti especially in some areas but all of the 1660
variants i would say are a good starting point for a bare minimum spec the bottom level the 1660 the
1660 super that we didn't test today which kind of sits in between and then the 1660 ti they're
all good graphics cards first star system to get started as long as you've got a fast enough cpu
you'll be able to get in the game see what's going on and make a judgment for yourself anything lower
than these cards i think you are going to struggle in parts you will be probably okay in space even
actually the 1060 six gigabyte if you were to stick out the cities or if you were to turn the
clouds off you would probably still be able to get around but i think for to try and get a general
sense a real sense of the game you'd probably want these other cars that we're talking about
so there we go this is obviously drastically different from what cig recommends and for a
long time now i've been saying that crg's minimum spec are plainly wrong and there was talk actually
that they were doing some updating or they were looking at the mirror respect a bit more but we've
not seen anything yet so so far forget what crj is saying and listen to me i've done this testing
and i think yeah these are the cards to go for so there's no point i don't think recommending one in
particular one because they perform so closely in performance they're all relatively close but
i think any of these ones will do and so there we go that is the end of this video if you like
this more technical look at star system please subscribe and like and uh let me know how you get
on with these cards if you've got them i think a lot of you guys already have been commenting below
and giving me good insights to how you found this using these cards but uh i'll see you soon bye
you