Total War: Shogun 2 Gets Detailed Hardware Requirements

The Creative Assembly, as the developer, and SEGA, as the publisher, have offered the official system specifications needed to run their upcoming strategy title, Shogun 2: Total War, providing both a minimum set of requirements and a set of recommended hardware.

The minimum hardware requirements from Total War: Shogun 2 include:

- a 2 Ghz Intel made dual core processor or a 2.6 GHz single core processor or the equivalent made by AMD, with SSE 2 included;
- 1 GB of RAM for Windows XP and two of them for Windows 7;
- a graphics card with Shader Model 3 including 256 MB with support for DirectX 9.0c;
- 20 GB free on the hard drive;
- a screen resolution of at least 1024 x 768.

Experience with previous Napoleon and Empire: Total War, the two games in the series that have been the most graphics intensive suggests that the minimum settings will allow Shogun 2 to run but that medium sized battles will be pretty much unplayable.

For better performance players should look to the recommended system specs, which The Creative Assembly says will deliver a good game experience:

- Intel Core i5 processor or better or a comparable device produced by AMD
- 2GB of RAM for those playing on Windows XP and 4 GB RAM when using Vista or Windows 7;
- an AMD Radeon HD 5000 or 6000 graphics card or another card compatible with DirectX 11;
- 1280 x 1024 resolution for the screen
- the same 20 GB of hard drive space

Total War: Shogun 2 is set to be released exclusively on the PC on March 15 of this year.

The original Shogun is still upheld by some fans of the series as being the best game in the series and the developers at The Creative Assembly have expressed their desire to return the series to its roots with Shogun 2.