While Hobbits might enjoy an easy rural living, the Tales of the Shire system requirements demand a lot of work from your gaming laptop or PC for what looks like an otherwise cozy farm sim. If nothing else, it's considerably more demanding than its biggest rival: Stardew Valley.
Tales of the Shire appears to be Stardew Valley with a Lord of the Rings spin in 3D. Unfortunately, that's where the comparisons end, as the Tales of the Shire requirements call for an old entry from our best graphics card buying guides at the recommended specs, and even that isn't guaranteed to get you solid performance on 1440p or higher resolutions.
Here are the Tales of the Shire system requirements:
Minimum (1080p, 30fps, very low preset) | Recommended (1080p, 60fps, high preset) | |
OS | Windows 10 64-bit | Windows 11 |
GPU | Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 AMD Radeon R9 270X |
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT |
VRAM | 4GB | 8GB |
CPU | Intel Core i5-7600K AMD Ryzen 3 1200 |
Intel Core i5-10600 AMD Ryzen 5 8400F |
RAM | 16GB | 16GB |
Storage | 3GB | 3GB |
The Tales of the Shire minimum requirements demand some fairly decent hardware, yet seem to return very little performance. With an Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 or AMD Radeon R9 270X, you can only expect to see 30fps at 1080p on the very low graphics preset, which isn't a great start. Anything less than 60fps isn't really acceptable for modern releases, especially for a game that requires 16GB of RAM, and an Intel Core i5-7600K or AMD Ryzen 3 1200 CPU.
If you do want 60fps, you'll need to meet the Tales of the Shire recommended specs, which jump up quite a bit from the minimum requirements. You'll need an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT GPU, an Intel Core i5-10600 or AMD Ryzen 5 8400F CPU paired with 16GB of RAM. This doesn't even guarantee you 60fps at higher resolutions, which the developer has not outlined in their official requirements.
Of course, it might be possible to optimize the game by tweaking the in-game settings, but we won't know for certain until we arrive at the Tales of the Shire release date.
As for download size, the Tales of the Shire requires just 3GB of storage space, which is strangely small considering the otherwise mid-range hardware the game requires. You won't even need the best gaming SSD to get the game running if the Steam listing is to be believed, though you should consider using one if you want to get the best performance out of the game.
Take our Tales of the Shire system requirements PC benchmark test to answer the question… Can I run Tales of the Shire?
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