You'll need some serious hardware to play Serious Sam 4

An 8-core CPU is recommended

In a nutshell: Serious Sam 4 arrives on PC next week, which means the minimum and recommended specs have landed—and there's bad news for those still chugging along on potato-like PCs. It's a particularly demanding game, especially when it comes to the recommended setup that suggests an eight-core CPU.

The Serious Sam series has never been known for its graphics, and while the next installment does look nice, it's certainly not on par visually with some other recent titles. So why the meaty requirements? It's likely a result of the Legion System, which, according to graphics engineer Dean Sekulić from developer Croteam, enables "thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands" of enemies on the screen simultaneously.

Serious Sam 4 minimum specs:

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system

OS: Windows 10 64-bit

Processor: 4-core CPU @ 2.5 GHz

Memory: 8 GB RAM

Graphics: nVidia GeForce 780/970/1050 or AMD Radeon 7950/280/470 (3 GB VRAM)

DirectX: Version 11

Storage: 40 GB available space

Additional Notes: Requirements are based on 720p rendering resolution at 30 FPS

Serious Sam 4 recommended specs:

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system

OS: Windows 10 64-bit (1909)

Processor: 8-core CPU @ 3.3 GHz

Memory: 16 GB RAM

Graphics: nVidia GeForce 1080/2060 or AMD Radeon Vega64/5700 (8 GB VRAM)

DirectX: Version 12

Storage: 40 GB available space

Additional Notes: Recommended APIs include DX12 and Vulkan.

While Doom Eternal is another game that recommends at least a GTX 1080 or RTX 2060, that eight-core CPU demand is pretty hardcore—even Microsoft Flight Simulator asks for either a Ryzen 5 1500X (four-core) or Intel i5-8400 (six-core).

Serious Sam 4 was supposed to arrive on both PC and Google Stadia in August, but like many recent titles, it was delayed. The game was also subtitled Planet Badass, but that was dropped due to how it translated—or failed to translate—into other languages.

Serious Sam 4 arrives on PC and Google Stadia this September 24.