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Looks like CPU cores are back on the menu, boys!

As is typical with strategy games, the CPU requirements often outweigh the GPU requirements. In layman’s terms, that means it needs a bigger brain to drive the logic than it does graphical muscle to shove the pixels around.

For the Dawn of War 3 system requirements, they’ve even gone so far as to caveat the difference between physical and logical cores.

Minimum Dawn of War 3 system requirements

  • OS: 64-bit Windows 7 with latest updates
  • Processor: 3GHz Core i3 quad (logical) core or equivalent
  • Memory: 4 GB of RAM
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 460 or AMD Radeon 6950 or equivalent, 1GB VRAM
  • DirectX: Version 11
  • Network: Broadband Internet connection
  • Storage: 50 GB available space
  • Additional Notes: Game requires Internet connection for play and progression. Quad (physical) core i5 or equivalent recommended for 3v3 multiplayer.

Recommended Dawn of War 3 system requirements

  • OS: 64-bit Windows 10 with latest updates
  • Processor: 3GHz Core i5 quad (physical) core or equivalent
  • Memory: 8 GB of RAM
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 770 or AMD Radeon 7970 or equivalent, 2GB VRAM
  • DirectX: Version 11
  • Network: Broadband Internet connection
  • Storage: 50 GB available space
  • Additional Notes: Game requires Internet connection for play and progression.

Note the mention of ‘logical’ and ‘physical’ cores in the minimum and recommended specs. What does that mean, exactly?

In a nutshell, a dual-core processor has twice as many cores available to do the work as in a single-core processor – which scales upwards, the more the merrier – which is great for complex computational tasks like strategy games. The more cores available to spread the workload across, known as multi-threading or parallelisation, the better. That way, there’s less chance of one core being too busy (or ‘locked’) and jobs having to wait for CPU time to be available.

But there are two ways of achieving this. If you add a second ‘physical’ core, then that’s literally an extra CPU die crammed into the chip, whereas if you add multiple threads, that’s effectively stacking a second ‘logical’ CPU on top of the first one.

There are pros and cons to each method. Extra physical cores typically draw more power and are more expensive to purchase, but tend to have higher clock speeds and larger caches available. Extra logical cores – or threads – tend to draw less power and be a little cheaper, but might have lower clock speeds or share cache space.

And in the Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War 3 system requirements, Sega and Relic Entertainment have been very keen to point out that the difference between physical and logical CPU cores matters – at least, when you’re playing 3v3 multiplayer.

Oh, and don’t forget, you’ll also need a persistent internet connection.

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