The Anno 1800 Closed Beta test has been taking place this weekend, giving us our first chance to go hands-on with the new historical management strategy game. Anno 1800 was originally set to launch on February 26th but has been pushed back until April 16th, providing Blue Byte with an extra couple of months of optimisation time.

A Closed Beta meant updated system requirements for Anno 1800. These Anno 1800 system specs are still in flux and could change between now and launch, but judging from Anno 1800's performance so far these look as if they're probably going to be in the right ballpark.

Anno 1800 Closed Beta Minimum System Requirements

• OS: Windows 7 64-bit
• CPU: Intel Core i5-3470 3.2 GHz or AMD FX-6350 3.9 GHz
• RAM: 8 GB System Memory
• GPU RAM: 2 GB Video Memory
• GPU: GeForce GTX 670 or Radeon R9 285
• DX: DirectX 11
• HDD: 60 GB Available Hard Drive Space

Anno 1800 Closed Beta Recommended System Requirements

• OS: Windows 10 64-bit
• CPU: Intel Core i5-4690K 3.5 GHz or AMD Ryzen 5 1400 3.5 GHz
• RAM: 8 GB System Memory
• GPU RAM: 4 GB Video Memory
• GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon RX 480
• DX: DirectX 11
• HDD: 60 GB Available Hard Drive Space

All in all the system requirements for Anno 1800 are fairly demanding for a city-builder type game. However, Anno 1800 definitely looks better than your average strategy game, cramming its environments with a ton of detail and also showing each and every citizen going about their daily business, whether that's heading to work or popping to the pub for a well-earned pint.

Anno 1800 Closed Beta Benchmarks

Anno 1800 benchmarks and frames per second analysis performed on GeForce GTX 1060 6GB | Intel i7-5820K | 16GB DDR4

For this Anno 1800 benchmark, we used a GeForce GTX 1060 equipped with 6GB video memory. This is slightly above the recommended GPU, a GeForce GTX 970. It’s backed up by 16GB DDR4 memory and an Intel Core i7-5820K CPU.

Anno 1800 GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 1080p Benchmarks

(Click to expand)

Based on the system specs for Anno 1800 provided by Ubisoft, the GeForce GTX 1060 falls right in line with where we'd expect. It's looking likely that Ubisoft's current target is for the GeForce GTX 970 and Radeon RX 480 to hit a locked 60 frames per second in Anno 1800 at 1080p/High. Anything above High and we begin to see prohibitive performance hits even on the GTX 1060, dropping well below 60fps on Very High and becoming a bit grim to play on Ultra High with lurching frame rates while zooming and out.

The hit was no doubt hardest on the graphics card, which was working flat-out all the time. The GeForce GTX 1060 6GB was usually at 100% utilisation in Anno 1800 at most graphics presets.

CPU was actually fairly low, hovering around 15-20% on Low and rising up to about 30% on Ultra, with peaks of 75% when zooming in or out quickly. Even at this early stage, Anno 1800 makes excellent use of multiple CPU cores and we can see all 12 threads on the Core i7-5820K are being used utilised in a balanced fashion.

As ever with these city-building games, CPU usage tends to rise the larger a settlement gets. I haven't exactly got a bustling metropolis just yet but even getting a few dozen buildings down was enough to begin to dent Anno 1800's frame rate and this will only escalate with larger towns and cities.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to benchmark at higher resolutions just yet as I'm stranded away from my 4K set right now and there seem to be some compatibility issues with downscaling resolutions.

Looking at the 1080p performance though, we think it's a safe bet the GeForce GTX 1060 would really begin to struggle at 1440p. This resolution looks like the realm of the GeForce GTX 1070 or the Radeon RX Vega 56, as a minimum, but even that's definitely pushing it if you want to play at Very High or Ultra.

A reminder as well that there's still another couple of months to go until Anno 1800's launch and plenty could still change. These benchmarks are purely intended to provide a rough idea of where Anno's performance is headed, although we'd expect to see some sort of optimisation to improve frame rates between now and its April launch.