



On the other hand, as we continue to develop the game throughout Beta an increasing number of sophisticated graphical techniques will be added which will consume CPU and GPU cycles and therefore take performance in the opposite direction.



The end result of this ‘arms race’ will be a set of features enabled by default that gives great performance and a good looking game on your PC. We will auto-detect your settings and suggest some defaults. There will also be a menu of options that will allow you to enable or disable individual features so you can tune the overall experience to your taste, as depending on the bottlenecks on an individual system, not all features are equally expensive. For example laptops do some things as quickly as desktop computers, and other things more slowly.



Over time, we will supply tuning files for the more popular PC setups..



We hope this approach will make Elite: Dangerous pretty ‘future resistant’ and mean it will still look great in many year’s time. The rise of online distribution also means we will be able to incorporate new advances in rendering technology as we adopt them in our 64 bit COBRA multi-threaded engine.



Currently our recommended PC* specification for the game is:

Direct X 11

2GHz Quad Core CPU

2 GB System RAM (more is always better)

DX 10 hardware GPU with 1GB video ram e.g. Nvidia GTX 260, ATI 4870HD



We hope to be able to lower this in due course as further optimisations are included in the game.



* Mac fans you are not forgotten, don’t worry – development of the MacOS version continues! We will let you know our recommended system spec as soon as we are able.



You can see the full text of David’s original



In future issues of this newsletter, we plan to offer a guide to building your own PC to run Elite: Dangerous which will give further insight into selecting the different system components. The release of Premium Beta 2 brought in a lot of very good performance optimisations, and we will continue to optimise throughout development so what we have in the game today will run faster and faster over time.On the other hand, as we continue to develop the game throughout Beta an increasing number of sophisticated graphical techniques will be added which will consume CPU and GPU cycles and therefore take performance in the opposite direction.The end result of this ‘arms race’ will be a set of features enabled by default that gives great performance and a good looking game on your PC. We will auto-detect your settings and suggest some defaults. There will also be a menu of options that will allow you to enable or disable individual features so you can tune the overall experience to your taste, as depending on the bottlenecks on an individual system, not all features are equally expensive. For example laptops do some things as quickly as desktop computers, and other things more slowly.Over time, we will supply tuning files for the more popular PC setups..We hope this approach will make Elite: Dangerous pretty ‘future resistant’ and mean it will still look great in many year’s time. The rise of online distribution also means we will be able to incorporate new advances in rendering technology as we adopt them in our 64 bit COBRA multi-threaded engine.Currently our recommended PC* specification for the game is:Direct X 112GHz Quad Core CPU2 GB System RAM (more is always better)DX 10 hardware GPU with 1GB video ram e.g. Nvidia GTX 260, ATI 4870HDWe hope to be able to lower this in due course as further optimisations are included in the game.* Mac fans you are not forgotten, don’t worry – development of the MacOS version continues! We will let you know our recommended system spec as soon as we are able.You can see the full text of David’s original Eurogamer interview. In future issues of this newsletter, we plan to offer a guide to building your own PC to run Elite: Dangerous which will give further insight into selecting the different system components.