The smell of freshly cut grass. The sound of £190 million being exchanged for the services of a single human being. It's football season. FIFA is back with FIFA 18, promising to be bigger and better than ever. The Journey follows the continuing career of young upstart Alex Hunter, while cover star Ronaldo lends his talents to overhauled animations. FIFA 18 on PC is the full-fat DX12, Frostbite version again this year, here are PC specs needed to run FIFA 18.

Things are a little bit different this time as we've got the minimum and recommended specifications for both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 versions of FIFA 18.

Despite the slightly confusing way EA Sports has delivered the system requirements, there isn't actually a great deal to split any of these specs. If you want a pure minimum vs recommended then just use the top left and bottom right set of system specifications for FIFA 18. 

For the most part, the system requirements for FIFA 18 remain roughly in line with FIFA 17, unsurprisingly. Those happy to play FIFA 18 on DirectX 11 mode will be able to run the game on older graphics cards, namely any GPU from the GTX 400 series or Radeon R7 260 onwards, provided it's got at least 1GB video memory. This just needs to be paired with a dual-core processor and you're golden. FIFA 18 shouldn't be a challenge to run on an average to low-end gaming PC.

FIFA 18's recommended specs are slightly higher than we've come to expect, probably down to a few minor graphical upgrades over FIFA 17. The pairing of the GeForce GTX 670 or Radeon R9 270X isn't likely to worry many though. Looking at more modern rigs, anything with a GeForce GTX 1050 or Radeon RX 460 and upwards should be capable of playing FIFA 18 on Ultra at 60 frames per second.

One final snag to look out for is the 8GB RAM requirement across all specs. This is double FIFA 17's minimum RAM and the main area which could cause performance problems for the sequel. If you have 4 or 6GB you may still be able to run FIFA 18 provided you closed as many running applications and processes as possible prior to launching FIFA 18.

In terms of the differences between DirectX 12 and DirectX 11, don't expect to see any of note. Microsoft's latest graphics API doesn't really offer any graphical advantages above and beyond DirectX 11. The slightly higher system requirements for DX12 may be explained away by more modern cards being better equipped to deal with some of its tech, which includes offloading CPU work to the GPU in order to improve performance for those with lower-end processors.

As ever, remember you can always check out how well your PC can run the FIFA 18 System Requirements here, where you can check benchmarking and performance from other users. Compare your graphics card to the FIFA 18 GPU benchmark chart and we also have a FIFA 18 Frames Per Second system performance chart for you to check.