Diablo III System Requirements

Blizzard doesn't announce their system requirements or recommendations until shortly before a game is finished. They don't know before then, since the final stages of programming include lots of optimizations to lower the machine load and streamline the program. Their goal is to keep their games playable on reasonable systems, without sacrificing performance or graphics.

Diablo III Demo Systems

While no information has yet been released about the game's likely system requirements, we do know something about the machines used to run Diablo III demos at Blizzcon and other shows. Some of the system info from the G-Star show in Seoul, Korea in 2010 was found by Korean gaming sites. [1]

CPU: Intel Core i7 870 (45nm, Soket 1156, 2.93GHz)
Motherboard: Intel DH55HC (intel H55)
RAM: EK Memory DDR3 10600 2GBx2EA
Video Card: GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 460 1GB WindForce or ZOTAC GeForce GTX 460 1GB
Hard Drive: Seagate Momentus XT 500GB
Power Supply: Acbel iPower 500
Case: Bestech Guardian
Monitor: Orion TopSync 24

Some photos of the machines during their set up process can be seen below.

Demo Machines are Monsters

Knowing the specs of demo machines at game shows isn't necessarily very useful for predicting the actual game requirements, though, as Bashiok explained in 2009. [2]

Bashiok, could you tell us, what was the hardware configuration of the computer whereat the Diablo III ran?

They were insane.

There’s a few reasons why it doesn’t matter what those machines were though.

Most machines are lent to us by hardware vendors. It’s in our interest to have our games look good and run well, and it’s in their interest to show off the latest and greatest their company has to offer. So generally they’re top of the line, using all the newest and best hardware.

Because we’re working with a pre-release version we work with the hardware that’s going to be on the show floor to build a final show floor build. The game hasn’t hit (obviously) final QA and hardware compatibility testing as it would before release to the public, so we need to ensure it’s going to run smoothly on this one specific set of hardware for the show.

It can also help, to a degree, overcome some potential technical hurdles we could run into with a pre-optimized build of the game. Throw more CPU/RAM/3D processing at it, and generally those pre-optimized problems won’t throw a wrench into the brief glimpse of a game that isn’t finished yet.

So, the combination of having hardware vendors showing off the latest and greatest, coupled with our interest to have a unoptimized version of the game look good, leads to show floor specifications that are probably way beyond what even the final “Recommended” specs for the game would be, let alone “Required”.

Diablo III's Technology

Diablo III is made completely in 3D, using custom in-house physics and graphics engines. The game is currently native to DirectX 9, and will not require DirectX 10 to run. The game will probably use a slightly higher level of system requirements than StarCraft II, which used Havok & DirectX 9, and is the closest thing we can compare the game to.

You can read more on StarCraft II's requirements and DirectX compatibilities as well as shader info here:

Graphics Requirements Confirmed - The most prominent part of the system requirements, the graphics requirements released from Blizzard document.
StarCraft II System Requirements - System requirements analyse from available information.
Kalos' Chronicles - Technical articles for StarCraft II.

Here is a Blizzard quote on the system specs: [3]

Jay Wilson: Currently we have no plans for specific DirectX 10 support. Right now are running a DirectX 9, and we run on a pretty broad range of systems, really fast. Overall, across-the-board Blizzard's goal is that all of our games support a broad range of systems. We don't jump up the system specs in any grand way. We have no intentions of being a high-end game, and certainly no intentions of being an exclusive DirectX 10 game at this time.

We don't exactly know what the system specs are yet, but we'll try to keep them pretty low. We make a lot of decisions about what we do and do not put into our graphics, in order to keep the game running fast. One of the reasons why we talk a lot about art style, and how we focus a lot on art style, stylization of art over... when we do that it allows us to have a good looking game about falling back on technology, our technology does not have to carry us when we have such great art in the game.

Starcraft 2 System Requirements

SC2 logo.

Fans often ask about Diablo 3's system requirements. While Blizzard won't make those known until much closer to the game's launch, we can look at the SC2 minimm requirements for some insight. Here's what Blizzard says, on their B.net support page. [4]

PC Minimum System Requirements

Due to potential programming changes, the Minimum System Requirements for this game may change over time. Mac Requirements

Windows® XP/Windows Vista®/Windows® 7 (Updated with the latest Service Packs) with DirectX® 9.0c
2.6 GHz Pentium® IV or equivalent AMD Athlon® processor
128 MB PCIe NVIDIA® GeForce® 6600 GT or ATI Radeon® 9800 PRO video card or better
12 GB available HD space
1 GB RAM (1.5 GB required for Windows Vista®/Windows® 7 users)
DVD-ROM drive
Broadband Internet connection
1024X720 minimum display resolution

PC Recommended Specifications:

Windows Vista®/Windows® 7
Dual Core 2.4Ghz Processor
2 GB RAM
512 MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800 GTX or ATI Radeon® HD 3870 or better

Mac Minimum System Requirements:

Mac® OS X 10.5.8, 10.6.2 or newer
Intel® Processor
NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600M GT or ATI Radeon® X1600 or better
12 GB available HD space
2 GB Ram
DVD-ROM drive
Broadband Internet connection
1024X720 minimum display resolution

Mac Recommended Specifications:

Intel® Core 2 Duo processor
4 GB system RAM
NVIDIA® GeForce® 9600M GT or ATI Radeon® HD 4670 or better

Compatible Operating Systems

Windows XP compatible
Windows Vista compatible
Mac OSX compatible