Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown system requirements are pleasingly low

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

If you're used to looking at system requirements with a feeling of "am I going to have to replace my GPU already" dread, you'll be happy to know that Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown won't demand a high-end rig. That cartoony art style was never going to be a real resource hog, but it's still nice to see system requirements where ultra isn't out of reach. You'll probably be able to run this one on a laptop.

Each tier of system requirements for Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown targets a minimum of 60 fps, though Ubisoft notes it can go above 120 fps if you've got the hardware for it. To hit ultra on a 4K monitor you'll only need a GTX 1060 with 6GB of VRAM. What's more, it'll only take up 30GB of hard drive space and doesn't demand an SSD, which is becoming a rare thing these days.

"I know it's not exactly the Prince of Persia fans have come to expect," Mollie Taylor wrote after a hands-on with The Lost Crown last year, "especially with the hotly-anticipated Sands of Time remake currently drifting on the desert winds. I'd consider it no bad thing that it's going for such a different feel, though. With the team behind the excellent Rayman Legends working on The Lost Crown for the last four years, the result is a gorgeous 2.5D sidescroller that hearkens back to Prince of Persia's origins while imagining a new future for the series and features all sorts of utterly devious puzzle platforming with some mighty satisfying execution."

For me, Prince of Persia will always first and foremost be a 2D game about a rotoscoped guy being impaled on spikes and gorily halved by chomping metal teeth, so a return to a sidescrolling Persia seems fine by me. It'll be out on January 18 via Epic and the Ubisoft Store.

Minimum requirements (1920x1080)

CPU: Intel Core i5-4460 3.4 GHz, AMD Ryzen3 1200 3.1 GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 (2GB VRAM) or AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT (4GB VRAM)
RAM: 8GB (Dual-channel setup)
Hard disk space: 30GB
DirectX version: DirectX 11
OS: Windows 10/11 (64-bit only)

Recommended requirements (2560x1440 [2K])

CPU: Intel Core i7-6700 3.4 GHz, AMD Ryzen5 1600 3.2 GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 (4GB VRAM) or AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT (4GB VRAM)
RAM: 8GB (Dual-channel setup)
Hard disk space: 30GB
DirectX version: DirectX 11
OS: Windows 10/11 (64-bit only)

Ultra requirements (3840x2160 [4K])

CPU: Intel Core i7-6700 3.4 GHz, AMD Ryzen5 1600 3.2 GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB VRAM) or AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT (8GB VRAM)
RAM: 8GB (Dual-channel setup)
Hard disk space: 30GB
DirectX version: DirectX 11
OS: Windows 10/11 (64-bit only)

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.