Windows 11 desktop

Microsoft confirms that Windows 11 will require 8th Gen Intel Core or 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen


A couple of days ago, Microsoft officially announced the latest version of Windows, Windows 11. Alongside its announcement, Microsoft also shared a list of CPUs that will support this operating system. These CPU requirements were a bit high and some people thought that these requirements were only for OEM systems. However, Microsoft has now officially confirmed these CPU requirements.

win 11 CPU list confirmation tweet

According to the list of supported CPUs, PC gamers will at least need an 8th generation Intel Core or a 2nd generation AMD Ryzen CPU. If you own an AMD Ryzen 1XXX CPU, you won’t be able to install Win11. Similarly, if you own an Intel i7 7700K you won’t be able to install it. We also won’t able to install it on our older PC system which has an Intel i7 4930K, even though that CPU can run all modern-day games.

What this ultimately means is that the number of gamers that will transition to Windows 11 will be limited. Given the fact that DirectStorage will also be available exclusively on Windows 11, we can safely assume that its adoption rate won’t be high. With the exception of specific first-party studios, I don’t see any third-party team abandoning all those PC gamers.

Again, there are currently a lot of PC gamers using older Intel i7 CPU models. Hell, there are even numerous gamers that rock Ryzen systems. And yes, those CPUs are more than enough to run most PC games and Windows. Yet despite that, Microsoft is basically forcing PC users to upgrade their systems so they can install Windows 11.

Microsoft will end support for Windows 10 in 2025. And if I were to guess, I’d say that most triple-A studios will support both Windows 10 and Windows 11 until then. So yeah, don’t expect a lot of games to properly take advantage of DirectStorage until then.