Hot Take: ACE COMBAT 8: Wings of Theve is Playable with a Subpar Graphics Card

This isn't a first impressions article for ACE COMBAT 8: Wings of Theve because I've only played the first three missions in the game for about 3 hours, and easily half of that was just watching replays. The other hour was playing ACE COMBAT Zero: The Belkan War, which is only accessible by launching AC8.  Anyway, this is my hot take about ACE COMBAT 8: Wings of Theve, and I'm sure that it will be a controversial one in the ACE COMBAT community.

Like the title says, ACE COMBAT 8: Wings of Theve is, at least through the first three missions, playable with a subpar graphics card.  So y'all know where I'm coming from, here are the general/basic stats for my laptop:

OS: Windows 11 Pro

Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 7735 U Radeon Graphics

Memory: 32 GB RAM

Graphics Card: AMD Radeon Graphics 995 MB

For reference, the "Minimum Specs" as recommended to play AC8 are as follows (taken copy/paste from the Steam store page):

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system

OS: Windows 11

Processor: Intel Core i7-10700K / AMD Ryzen 5 3600X

Memory: 16 GB RAM

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060[6 GB] / AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT[8 GB]

DirectX: Version 12

Storage: 150 GB available space

Additional Notes: This game requires an SSD, a hardware ray tracing-enabled graphics card, and DirectX 12 with Shader Model 6.6 or higher. Estimated performance: 1920×1080(Upscale)/30fps with graphics settings at "Low". Framerate might drop in graphics-intensive scenes.

Yeah, that graphics card is the main issue here, and I'm more or less okay with that.  It's not like I'm looking to play the newest high-end AAA video game releases over here.

I tried to run AC8 on the Steam Deck, but I couldn't even get the game to start, so I figured I'd try my laptop.  And you know what?  It worked.  Kind of.

On my laptop, the game automatically lowered all graphical settings to Low, which I fully expected, and I left them alone.  During the first mission, I had the FPS settings at 60 max, but then lowered it to 30 after Cinema scenes maxed out in the mid-to-high 30s.  While playing the campaign (I have zero interest in online play*), I'm anywhere between 13 and 20 fps.  No, that's not at all ideal.  But I was able to play through the first three missions.

I'm including what I recorded natively from Steam while playing, and yes, it's nowhere near as crisp and smooth as it should be, but I'm still really surprised that what I played was as playable as it was.  After a few minutes, I grew accustomed to the lower frame rates and, in all honesty, when you're watching FPS consistently between 15-20, a brief dip down to 11 for a half second is nearly imperceptible, as compared to a drop from 60 down to 10.

Obviously, I'd much rather play this on a system that could handle at least the recommended specs and was playable at a minimum of 30 FPS, but I'm making do with what I have.  I'm really just going to play as long as the game remains playable like this because I very much enjoy this series.  

So the tl;dr for those of y'all who've skipped to the end.  Ideal: no.  Playable: yes.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

*P.S.  Once more for the people in the back.  I don't have any interest in online play, so needing a higher-end system to play online with up to 100 other people in the HUB world or eight other players in a sortie is a non-issue for me.  Even if I had a top-of-the-line desktop, zero interest.