EA confirms minimum specs for Will Wright's God game

Jun 11, 2008 10:05 GMT  ·  By

Electronic Arts has officially released the minimum system requirements for Will Wright's highly anticipated evolution sim / God game Spore. A Mac - PC spec comparison reveals that Windows users have it their way, as far as video goes, while PowerPC Mac owners (G3/G4/G5) will not be able to run the game at all.

Spore is an evolution game, a God game. The player's task is to mold and guide a species across many generations, growing it from a single-celled organism into a more complex being. Eventually, the species becomes sapient, at which point the player sets the rules for that species' society. The goal is to progress the living being (intelligent at this point) towards space-exploration.

Mac System requirements, according to ShackNews, are as follows:

- Mac OS X 10.5.3 Leopard or higher - Intel Core Duo Processor - 1024 MB RAM - ATI X1600 or NVIDIA 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100 - At least 4.7GB of hard drive space for installation, plus additional space for creations.*

NOTE: these are minimum system requirements for Spore, meaning that if your system specs are no better than this, the game won't necessarily run well. Also, it should be noted that Spore will NOT run on PowerPC machines / PowerMac (G3/G4/G5).

Electronic Arts also claims that, for computers using built-in graphics chipsets, the game requires at least Intel Integrated Chipset GMA X3100, Dual 2.0GHz CPUs, or 1.7GHz Core 2 Duo or equivalent.

Supported Video Cards include:

ATI Radeon series: X1600, X1900, HD 2400, HD 2600 NVIDIA GeForce series: 7300, 7600, 8600, 8800 Intel Extreme Graphics: GMA X3100

NOTE: Spore will not run on the GMA 950 class of integrated video cards.

As always, install space is subject to change.

Windows PC owners can easily run Spore on less powerful hardware, the requirements sheet reveals. Supported graphics cards for PC range from the FX 5900 and FX 5950, of the NVIDIA GeForce series, to the 9500, 9600 and 9800 of the ATI Radeon series.

Spore is scheduled to launch on September 7, with a Nintendo DS edition also launching on the same day. The Spore Creature Creator will become available for Mac on June 17, but Apple is already taking pre-orders for it.

Some screenshots of the Tribal Phase in Spore are available below.

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