Ubisoft today announced the minimum and recommended PC specs for Assassin’s Creed Unity, and let’s just say it’s going to generate Nvidia and AMD some new business.

A 64-bit operating system is required in order to play Unity, and you’ll need a whopping 50 GB of hard drive space to install it. The processor and RAM requirements aren’t especially noteworthy, but what stands out most are the video card requirements.

A GTX 680 or HD 7970 is the bare minimum for what will run the game. The only video cards supported at release are the GTX 680 or better; the GTX 700 series; the HD 7970 or better; and the R9 200 series. Laptop versions of these “may work but are not officially supported.”

By comparison, the last Assassin’s Creed game, Black Flag, recommended a GTX 470 or HD 5850 (GTX 260/HD 4870 required), both of which are significantly older than what’s being asked for by Unity. Even looking at other games that have been or will be released this fall–Alien: Isolation (GT 430/HD 5550), The Evil Within (GTX 460), and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (GTS 450/HD 5870)–show how Unity’s requirements blow them all away.

Ubisoft would no doubt point to the fact that Unity has been built exclusively for current-gen consoles and PC, and it therefore needs a good deal of horsepower to run. Still, it’s surprising to see that the PC version of Unity will only be available to a relatively small subset of PC owners–I’m personally out in the dark despite spending close to $600 on a video card less than three years ago.

The full required and recommended specs follow below. Let us know in the comments how your machine compares.

Required Specs:

• OS: 64-bit Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8/8.1
• Processor: Intel Core i5-2500K @ 3.3 GHz or AMD FX-8350 @ 4.0 GHz or AMD Phenom II x4 940 @ 3.0 GHz
• RAM: 6 GB
• Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 or AMD Radeon HD 7970 (2 GB VRAM)
• DirectX: Version 11
• Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card with latest drivers
• Hard Drive Space: 50 GB available space

Recommended Specs:

• Processor: Intel Core i7-3770 @ 3.4 GHz or AMD FX-8350 @ 4.0 GHz or better
• RAM: 8 GB
• Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 or AMD Radeon R9 290X (3 GB VRAM)

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