PC System Requirements speculation

Optimum.  Sinclair ZX81. 1K ram.  Black and white telly....  

After over 20 years of PC gaming, I think I can give a somewhat qualified opinion.



Some of the horror stories are true, and they all have different reasons, and some are completely exaggerated.



Once in a great while, you get a truly awful port like Batman: Arkham Knight. The PC version was apparently farmed out to some external studio who did such a crappy job that Steam removed the game from its store for months until the game was in a playable state.



Also once in a great while, you get a complete dick move like Watchdogs, where PC graphics options were intentionally disabled to force console parity.



However, many of the "average" bad ports seem to be at least partly caused by the rigs they're running on, because I rarely have any problems even with games that are supposedly poor ports or poor original software. I know my rig and I keep my OS and drivers clean and up to date, and stuff generally runs as smooth as an elven baby arse.



And on the bright side, some ports are really good! Nixxes is a Dutch company that specializes in PC ports, and they generally produce good, solid stuff, often with additional features like benchmark tests to help you find those sweet optimal settings.



And sometimes you may have to wait longer for the PC version because the devs actually add features and brush up the graphics to produce an overall superior port, like GTA V.

The range of possible hardware combinations is so wide that it's hard to give a clear-cut answer to that question -- that same 'breadth' also accounts for the difficulty of producing a 'PC version' that will run optimally on all hardware.

Some disconnected thoughts:

Upon launch, performance is abysmal (low FP, glitches, crashes) for pretty much everyone save a lucky few. 'Luck' here is not a function of having stronger hardware.
Some developers are quick to produce patches (the first couple of days) which fix the worst crashes. CDPR did a pretty good job with TW3 in that regard. For their games it's 'smooth sailing' after that point.
Some developers are a lot slower; but over the space of a few months their games become playable. Ubisoft is like this.
Some developers outsource PC porting to houses that don't even have the requisite expertise. Sometimes they flat out refuse to patch a title with game-breaking bugs (Arkham Origins). The PC port of Arkham Knight had missing features upon release, in addition to being broken. They pulled it from sale; then took several months to 'fix' it -- up to a degree. The planned Linux port got cancelled in all that chaos.
Rockstar had an awful reputation with respect to PC ports; GTA IV was a disaster that barely got fixed. GTA V on the other hand, was a very well optimized port.

Getting a game on release on PC is pretty much a gamble, really. It makes sense to wait a few weeks, actually, just to see what early adopters are experiencing, and whether patches are being released.
On the other hand, I've also had some first hand experience during my short time as a PS4 owner, that consoles aren't terribly different nowadays, with respect to patches. I remember AC Unity not becoming playable on the PS4, before several large patches were out.

I'm fairly new to PC gaming. Can someone who is more in tune with PC demands speculate on what sort of performance I can squeeze from ME:A on a 1080p monitor?

My specs:
CPU: i5-6400
GPU: RX480(8GB)
MEMORY: 8GB RAM
OS: WIN 10

You should be fine. You might look at adding an additional stick of RAM. BF1 was known to use a decent amount of RAM (I think I remember it sitting around 6-7 GB of RAM). DA:I could also creep up to that 8 GB usage in it's early days (patches eventually lowered RAM usage, IIRC). 8 GB of RAM is pretty cheap these days, so it wouldn't cost you much.

For risk of sounding like I am paranoid, I'd like to be able to play the game at max @1440p. Don't know if I will be able to with 4 GB of VRAM unless they find a way to stack VRAM.

Like I said (I think), I'm running on 2X 980s. Great cards.

Just did a benchmark on DA:I @4k and got this:



Wondering if I should do a test with just gameplay without going into the menu? (I think when I go to menu I get 200 FPS or it could have been when I died) ([Edit] I just checked; there are only 5 target points where it read the FPS over 100, so not a significant factor, however I did notices when I get into menu that I get 60 fps which could be a factor. 30 targeted FPS that are >50 FPS. That accounts for roughly 5% of all the frames, so I don't think that is significant either.)

I tried using RivaTuner but every time I try and play the game with that open game crashes, don't know what that is about, but it would be a lot better for logging info, way better than fraps. I wanted to use RivaTuner to see if I was bottlenecking at VRAM. I remember previously when I tested I was getting into >3GB VRAM usage. That means I could be dangerously close to a VRAM bottleneck if ME:A is a beefed up version of DA:I.