Homeworld 3's latest system requirements won't fill up your SSD but you'll need all the CPU and GPU you can throw at it

With Homeworld 3 just weeks away from launch, Blackbird Interactive has done what surprisingly few developers do these days: updated and released a comprehensive system requirements chart. For gamers using a modest PC, it looks very promising, but if you're hoping to play it at 4K with maximum graphics, you're going to need the very best gaming hardware.

The chart was tweaked last week to "match the performance and optimization improvements made coming up to launch", which is May 13. I'm not a big fan of developers posting minimum requirements and much prefer to use their recommended specs as the entry point for enjoyable gameplay. For playing at 1080p, using the medium quality preset, a Core i5 9600K or Ryzen 5 3600X is suggested for the CPU.

Those are both six-core processors, though AMD's does offer multithreading support for 12 threads in total. That Intel chip dates back to 2018 (the Ryzen is a year younger) so it doesn't look like Homeworld 3 will be especially CPU-heavy. That said, it is a real-time strategy game set in space, so I should imagine that in really big battles, especially online ones, the 9600K might struggle a bit.

For graphics cards, Blackbird Interactive suggests an Arc A580, GeForce 'RTX 1080 Ti', or a Radeon RX 5700. The Nvidia recommendation is obviously a typo and should be a GTX 1080 Ti, which is a seven-year-old GPU. At the time, it was one of the most powerful graphics cards you could buy but today's mainstream GPUs are more than a match. It does make a pleasant change seeing Intel's graphics cards getting a mention in system requirements.

RAM requirements are 16GB across the board and that's pretty much the norm for PC gaming these days. What is unusual is the amount of storage space needed, just 40GB. Compared to the 100GB+ behemoths we often see nowadays, that seems like a mere drop in the ocean. Mind you, space is mostly empty.

Going to the other scale of things, 4K gaming on the Epic preset needs far more recent and potent hardware. A Core i7 12700K or Ryzen 7 7700X for the CPU, and an RTX 3080 or RX 6900 XT for the graphics card. So you're looking at processors with eight or more cores (16+ threads) and while that makes more sense for this type of game, it's rare to see any game actually use that many threads.

Those GPUs aren't the latest models, of course, but neither are they lightweight offerings. Blackbird Interactive also points out that with these settings, you'll need 12GB of VRAM on your card.

And then there's good ol' ray tracing. There isn't much call for highly accurate global illumination in open-space games, so the developers are only using it for shadows. The system requirements for enabling ray tracing start very reasonably at 1080p, Low RT but jump right to the very latest and greatest components if you want to play at 4K, Ultra RT.

A Core i9 14900K or a Ryzen 9 7950X3D suggests that it will be extremely demanding, especially with the GPU requirement being an RTX 4080 or RX 7900 XTX. That's...umm...mighty. Fortunately, upscalers are on offer in the form of AMD's FSR 2 and Nvidia's DLSS 3 to claw back some performance, though there's no direct mention of frame generation in the system requirements. DLSS 3 implies that it's present but I suspect it's not.

If I have one criticism of Blackbird Interactive's system requirements is that while they're pretty comprehensive, the chart says nothing at all about expected performance—in other words, what kind of frame rate should expect to see with that hardware and setting combination. One could take this as a sign that the game isn't going to run at very high fps but in RTS games, what really counts as high?

When Homeworld 3 launches on May 13, we'll be sure to let you know.