Bioshock Infinite PC Specs, Features Revealed

PC ports are always a bit of a touchy discussion among game players, as they can, like most purchases being judged, turn out great, mediocre, or downright pitiful. Irrational Games, creators of the original Bioshock, have very clearly indicated today that their PC installment of the upcoming Bioshock Infinite will certainly not be some shotty port, and will have a number of desirable features.

Features

In regards to control options, Bioshock Infinite will support both the traditional mouse-and-keyboard route as well as third party controllers. All default action bindings can be remapped to your choosing. Irrational opted against including inherent, artificial mouse smoothing, instead opting to let you toggle the sensitivity to your liking.

As for controller options, you’ll be able to select from three default button layouts: Default, Marksman, and Retro, each with their own configuration options. You can tweak the aim assist, movement sensitivity, vibration level, inversion, and even set your sticks to Default, Southpaw, or Legacy Southpaw if you’re so inclined. There’s even a layout option for lefties!

Now, graphics. Like the best of the best of PC ports, Bioshock Infinite will have a slew of graphical options to tweak to your liking. First of all, this is a DirectX11 game, meaning all the fancy shadows, depth-of-field, and ambient occlusion options you love will be included, given you have the proper graphics card. Finally, the game is shipping with full-res textures right off the bat – which means a lengthy install (Irrational says three discs in total), but boy will that sucker shine like a new pair of boots. And if you have more than one monitor, Infinite also has multi-monitor support via AMD Eyefinity, Nvidia Surround, and Matrox TripleHead2Go.

There’s also a new feature included that Irrational is calling “horizontal plus”, that apparently stretches the picture to as wide as your widescreen goes, revealing more of the environment around you. For all you home theater junkies out there with a gaming PC hooked into your sweet setup, this could be a dream come true.

If that’s all too much graphical hoo-hah for you to digest, note that there’s also simple graphical presets of the traditional “Very Low” to “Ultra” varieties that’ll help you figure out what’s best in terms of performance for your rig. And if what’s being said is to be believed, the game’s visuals can be dropped down so low as to actually function on machines with integrated graphics (i.e. most laptops). That’s pretty stellar.

Finally, the game will support Steam Cloud, meaning your save file is consistent across all computers you play Bioshock Infinite on, as Steam will automatically upload your content to (you guessed it) the cloud.

Awesome, right?

Specs

MINIMUM

• OS: Windows Vista Service Pack 2 32-bit
• Processor: Intel Core 2 DUO 2.4 GHz / AMD Athlon X2 2.7 GHz
• Memory: 2 GB
• Hard Drive: 20 GB free
• Video Card: DirectX10 Compatible ATI Radeon HD 3870 / NVIDIA 8800 GT / Intel HD 3000 Integrated Graphics
• Video Card Memory: 512 MB
• Sound Card: DirectX Compatible

RECOMMENDED

• OS: Windows 7 Service Pack 1 64-bit
• Processor: Quad Core Processor
• Memory: 4 GB
• Hard Drive: 30 GB free
• Video Card: DirectX11 Compatible, AMD Radeon HD 6950 / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560
• Video Card Memory: 1024 MB
• Sound Card: DirectX Compatible

[via Irrational Games]