Civilization 7’s system requirements announced, won’t need a 4090 to push 4K Ultra

Due to hit the stores in February 2025, Civilization 7 has been the talk of the town for the 4X/grand strategy niche ever since it was first announced. While we obviously don’t know yet if Firaxis is cooking up something compelling here, the PC hardware requirements are genuinely reasonable.

Most other modern AAAs simply shoot for the stars and recommend Nvidia’s top-of-the-line RTX 4090 if you want to play them at a native 4K at 60 FPS; this is not the case with Civilization 7. Sid Meier’s next flagship 4X instead calls for a (relatively) humble RTX 4070 if you want to fully max it out. Though, I’d like to point out that this doesn’t specify whether that’s running with some type of upscaling or not. Something to think about as we go, perhaps.

It takes an RTX 4070 to push 4K Ultra in Civilization 7

Framerate is not of huge import when it comes to playing Civilization 7. I have spent dozens of hours playing Civilization 4 on a disturbingly underpowered rig back in the day, and I can vouch for the fact that 20 FPS doesn’t hurt as much as you think it would in a turn-based strategy game. Yet, if we can get a stable 60 on a reasonable rig, I’m all for it.

It’s excellent news that the humble RTX 2060 should get us to 60 FPS at 1080P, according to Firaxis’ official system requirements. Conversely, the RTX 4070 and the RX 7800XT should be able to render the game at 4K with 60 FPS in tow, which is pretty darn neat. On the opposite side of the performance spectrum, you should be able to get at least 30 FPS with the ancient GTX 1050. Lovely stuff!

Some caveats to keep in mind here, though. Firstly, as I said above, Firaxis could very well not be using a true native 1080P/4K render for these specs. Instead, this may be relying on some manner of upscaling to keep the FPS above the target frame rate, which wouldn’t be ideal. Further, sheer FPS doesn’t tell us the whole story for a Civilization game, as turn times are way more important here.

Turn times usually depend on your rig’s CPU, and the recommended specs are surprisingly humble, all things considered. The i5-10400 or the Ryzen 5 3600X should be more than enough at the “Recommended” performance spec. Since Firaxis hasn’t specified what this means for turn times, though, we just have to guess they’d be acceptable.

We’ll have to wait and see how this pans out, though the target spec sheet is very reasonable so far. The game is looking mighty fine so far, too. Steven Mills had the opportunity to spend some time playing it and interview Firaxis staff on the topic of Civilization 7, and he was quite happy with what was on offer.