Ember and Blade System Requirements (PC and Mac)

Ember and Blade is a 1-vs-1,000 game, and its requirements are written around that claim rather than around its art style. The recommended tier explicitly targets 1080p 60fps including peak monster waves, which is a more honest benchmark than most store pages give.

Here is what the store page publishes, and what each tier actually implies.

Windows minimum

Two notes the store page adds: 16GB of RAM is recommended for integrated graphics, and the CPU list is explicitly about thread count rather than raw clock speed. That second point fits a game whose selling point is a thousand enemies on screen at once.

Windows recommended

Official media

macOS

The Mac build is Apple Silicon only. There is no Intel Mac support, and the store page marks the requirement plainly.

What the numbers mean in practice

The minimum is not a comfortable setting; it is a playable one. A 1050 Ti-class card at 720p 30fps will hold together during ordinary fights, and the peak waves are exactly the situation the tier was written for, not an edge case.

If your machine sits between the two tiers, expect the recommended preset to hold at 1080p until a boss room fills with adds, and plan to drop effects rather than resolution. The game's Blessing visuals are the heaviest part of the frame, and Demo 2.2 added options that reduce them along with a halftone pattern for photosensitivity.

Official media

What to turn down first

Blessing effects are the expensive part of a frame, not the environment. A boss room with five Blessings firing at once is heavier than the same room empty, which is why the recommended tier specifies peak waves rather than average play.

The order that costs least visually: reduce Blessing effect transparency first, drop shadow quality second, and leave resolution alone until both are exhausted. Demo 2.2 added a global effect-reduction setting and a halftone pattern precisely because the effects layer is both the heaviest and the most distracting.

Laptops and integrated graphics

The store page's own note is the useful one here: 16GB of RAM is recommended for integrated graphics. Chips like the Iris Xe or Radeon 680M listed in the minimum borrow system memory as VRAM, so on an 8GB laptop the game is competing with the operating system for the same pool.

If you are on a thin laptop, check the RAM before the GPU. Doubling memory changes more than any settings preset.

Windows version and DirectX

Two requirements are stricter than they look. Windows 10 must be version 2004 or newer, and DirectX 12 is mandatory with no DirectX 11 fallback listed.

The DirectX 12 requirement is the one that ages machines out. Cards that still run fine in DirectX 11 titles but lack solid DX12 support will not be rescued by lowering settings, because the game does not offer a lower API path.

The practical consequence: a machine that runs DirectX 11 games comfortably but sits below the DX12 feature level cannot be fixed with settings, and the demo is the cheapest way to find out before January.

It is also the reason a card that benchmarks well in older titles can still fail here: the requirement is a feature level, not a performance number.

Storage and other details

• 10 GB of storage is listed on the Mac requirement table. The Windows table does not repeat it, so treat 10GB as the working figure for either platform.
• DirectX 12 is required on Windows; there is no DirectX 11 fallback listed.
• Full controller support with DualShock and DualSense support, plus Steam Cloud and Family Sharing.
• No Steam Deck rating has been published, so deck compatibility is unverified. The Windows minimum sits inside the Deck's performance range on paper.

If your machine is below the minimum

Two honest options. The first is the demo: it runs the same Act 1 content, so its performance on your machine is the best possible prediction of the Early Access build's performance in January.

The second is to wait for patch notes rather than for hardware. Optimization has been a recurring item in the demo's update history, which means the January build may run better than the current one on the same card.