Solid State Storage is now a baseline requirement for WoW – Shadowlands’ system requirements are now available

Yesterday, Blizzard confirmed that World of Warcraft: Shadowlands will release on October 27th, and now the expansion has received full PC system requirements for PC and macOS.  

On PC, it looks like a lot of WoW users will need to upgrade their systems, as World of Warcraft now has “Solid State Drive” storage within both the game’s minimum and recommended system requirements. On top of this, Blizzard has also increased World of Warcraft’s CPU and graphics requirements, suggesting that WoW’s Shadowlands expansion will be a lot more demanding than its predecessors. 

Below, we have compared the PC system requirements of World of Warcraft’s Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands expansions, highlighting the changes made between both expansions. 

With Shadowlands, the game’s recommended GPU requirements have risen from a GTX 960 to a GTX 1080 and an R9 290 to an RX Vega 64. Shadowland’s new recommended graphics cards are around 2-3x more powerful than the GPUs which were recommended for Battle for Azeroth. On top of that, the game’s minimum and recommended CPU requirements have also been bumped a few hardware generations. 

World of Warcraft	Battle for Azeroth	Shadowlands
Â	Minimum RequirementsÂ
Processor	Intel Core i5-760 or AMD FX-8100	Intel i5-3450 or AMD FX-8300
Video	Nvidia Geforce GT 560 2GB or AMD Radeon HD 7850 2GB 0r Intel HD Graphics 530 (45W)	Nvidia Geforce GTX 760 2GB or  AMD Radeon RX 560 2GB or Intel UHD Graphics 630 (45W TDP)* *(Requires Manufacturer’s driver support)Â
Memory	4GB RAM	4GB (8GB if using integrated graphics)
Storage	70GB 7200 RPM HDD	100GB SSD
Â	Recommended Requirements
Processor	Intel i7-4770 or AMD FX-8300	Intel i7-6700K or Ryzen 7 2700X
Video	Nvidia Geforce GTX 960 or AMD Radeon R9 280	Nvidia GTX 1080 or AMD Radeon RX Vega 64
Memory	8GB RAM	8GB RAM
Storage	70GB SSD	100GB SSD

These changes are designed to move World of Warcraft’s playerbase towards newer hardware, which makes sense given the game’s recent engine upgrades. During Battle for Azeroth, World of Warcraft moved to DirectX 12, and with it came better support for multi-threading and increased game performance. Moving forward, World of Warcraft players should expect to see more engine-level improvements and additional graphical features. 

Today, 250GB SSDs can cost as little as £30, which is a small investment given how many hours of gameplay that World of Warcraft has to offer. SSD storage will become a requirement for a lot of new PC titles as we enter the next generation of console gaming. With both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X adopting SSD storage, it is likely that more and more games will be designed with SSD storage in mind. As such, fast storage will soon become necessary for smooth gaming experiences, as hard disk drives won’t be able to keep up with the data requirements of new games.