Skate system requirements include aggressive upscaling to keep specs low

The Skate system requirements have arrived, better late than never, but there are a few big talking points that may be cause for concern, even with the game being in early access. Most notable is the lack of Linux and Mac compatibility, as well as upscaling being used to determine half of the specs.

If you're looking to cruise around San Van with its vibrant environments looking their absolute best, then you're not going to need the best graphics card from our buying guide. However, due to upscaling being used to determine the recommended and ultra specs for Skate, it's hard to know what hardware you'll need to run the game without using FSR or XeSS.

Here are the Skate system requirements for PC:

The Skate minimum requirements pose little threat to most modern gaming PCs, with only an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 460 GPU listed alongside an Intel Core i5 6600K or AMD Ryzen 3 3100 CPU. You'll also only need 8GB of RAM.

Moving on to the Skate recommended specs, these take a bit of a jump up, listing an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 or AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT paired with an Intel Core i7 9700 or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 and 16GB of RAM. While this is a jump, these specs are still achievable for most gaming PCs and laptops from the last four years.

As for the Skate ultra requirements, these demand an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT alongside an Intel Core i7 11700 or AMD Ryzen 5900. You'll also need to double your RAM to 32GB.

What's most notable about both the ultra and recommended requirements is the use of upscaling to determine the specs. A note at the bottom of the table posted by developer Full Circle states that "Avg. performance estimates of recommended & ultra presets include use of optional upscaling at balanced settings."

Given that Nvidia DLSS support is not included in the early access launch, this presumably means that either AMD FSR or Intel XeSS has been used. Without a specific version number being provided, it's difficult to know exactly what to expect from the image quality once the upscaling has been applied.

I've spoken at length before about how upscaling doesn't belong in system requirements, but at least in the case of Skate, we know the level of upscaling that has been applied, whereas previously, such details have been left out in other games' system requirements.

Neither Linux nor macOS is supported by Skate either, which has major implications for Skate on the Steam Deck. Given that Skate is published by EA, this is likely due to the inclusion of EA anti-cheat tech, which is listed on the game's Steam store page, and famously doesn't play nicely with SteamOS.

Finally, the Skate download size is listed as 25GB, with no requirement for an SSD at this time. Despite this, we still recommend checking out our best gaming SSD guide to see if you can get a considerable upgrade for your rig without breaking the bank.

If you're ready to jump into San Van and start shredding, you'll need one of the best PC controller picks from our buying guide, as the game doesn't support mouse and keyboard controls.

If you're jumping into the early access window, you can show off your gnarliest tricks and most complex lines over on our community Discord server.