Diablo IV — Introduction
Diablo IV has arrived, eleven years after its predecessor. The game is in "early access" for the next few days, for people that are willing to fork over the extra money to buy the Deluxe or Ultimate editions. We got an Ultimate code for testing purposes, and the game unlocks at 4pm PDT on June 1. Once it's out, the benchmarking fun begins. How does it run, and what sort of hardware will you need? That's what we aim to find out.
A lot has changed in the past decade, especially in the world of PC hardware. The fastest PC back in mid-2012 consisted of a shiny new Core i7-3770K, paired with a Radeon HD 7970 or GeForce GTX 680. Or maybe a Core i7-3960X if you were into HEDT setups, with a dual-GPU GeForce GTX 690 or Radeon HD 6990? Typical PCs would have 8GB of memory, while high-end systems might come with 16GB. Most people were still using hard drives rather than SSDs, typically of the 250GB to 500GB variety.
But it's not just the hardware that's changed. We've gone from Windows 7 to Windows 8/8.1, 10, and 11. Microtransactions were a relatively new thing back in 2012, buying digital cosmetics was scorned, and live service games weren't a thing. It's a brave new world for Diablo IV, in other words.
