WARDOGS Is Steam's Number One Seller. Can Your PC Feed 100 Players?

WARDOGS went into Steam Early Access at noon Eastern on September 10, and by the end of that first day Bulkhead had posted a 1.25 million copies sold notice on the store page. By September 12 PCGamesN had the figure at 1.5 million, and on Saturday the 13th the concurrent count on Steam peaked at 428,666. As this is written it is the number one item on Steam's top sellers list and the third most played game on the platform, behind only Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2, which are free.

That is a very large number of people trying to run a hundred-player Unreal Engine 5 shooter on whatever they already own. The Steam listing has two rows of requirements, and the interesting one is not the graphics card.

What the game is, briefly

A hundred players split across three teams fight over a single control zone on a destructible slice of industrial Eastern Europe. Loadouts, vehicles and gear are bought with in-match cash rather than unlocked, and the cash carries over. Bulkhead, the studio behind Battalion 1944, built it on UE5 with a networking and simulation layer of its own, and Team17 is publishing. It is $39.99 now and Bulkhead has said the full release, one to two years away, will cost more. Consoles are not until 2028.

The launch was messy in a way that had nothing to do with hardware. At the worst point 168,000 people sat in a login queue while the login service admitted ten players a second out of the hundred it was being asked to; the first stability hotfix that evening replaced the flood with batched admissions. The reviews took the hit and recovered: as of the 14th the Steam score is Mostly Positive, from roughly 39,300 positive and 9,900 negative. If you read a "runs terribly" review from the 10th, check whether it was about the game or the queue.

The two rows on Steam

Bulkhead published a minimum and a recommended tier, each with a stated performance target, which is more than most studios manage.

Minimum, targeting 1080p Low at 60 fps with an upscaler on: Windows 10, a Core i5-8600 or Ryzen 5 3500, 16GB of RAM, a GeForce GTX 1660 or Radeon RX 590, and 50GB of storage.

Recommended, targeting 1440p Medium above 70 fps at native resolution, or 4K Medium above 60 fps upscaled: Windows 11, a Core i7-12700K or Ryzen 7 5700X, 16GB of RAM, an RTX 3070 or RX 6700 XT.

Two details are easy to skip. The minimum's 60 fps is an upscaled 60, and a GTX 1660 has no tensor hardware, so the upscaler doing that work is FSR or UE5's own TSR rather than DLSS. And the recommended tier gives you the same 16GB of RAM as the minimum. Nothing on the sheet asks for 32GB, which in a year when a DDR5 kit costs what a mid-range card used to is worth noticing before you buy anything.

Read the CPU line twice

Most requirement sheets are GPU sheets with a processor listed for form's sake. This one is not. A hundred players, vehicles, buildable structures and controlled destruction all have to be simulated and replicated on your machine every frame, and that work does not shrink when you lower the resolution.

Our FPS model handles that with a flat ceiling per processor: the most frames a CPU can feed the graphics card in this game at any resolution. With the profile we assigned WARDOGS off the spec sheet, those ceilings come out like this.

Processor	Frames the CPU can feed
Ryzen 5 3500	~90 fps
Core i5-8600	~92 fps
Core i7-8700K	~104 fps
Ryzen 5 3600	~110 fps
Core i5-10600K	~114 fps
Core i5-12400F	~144 fps
Ryzen 5 5600	~146 fps
Ryzen 7 5700X, Core i5-13400F, Ryzen 5 7600 and up	not the limit with any card we track

Read it as a ceiling, not a prediction. A Core i5-8600 with an RTX 5090 does not get 5090 frame rates in this game; it gets about 90, in our model, with the card mostly idle. That is the spec sheet's minimum processor and it is a 2018 six-core, so the floor Bulkhead set is a real floor. From a Ryzen 5 5600 or i5-12400F upward, the processor stops being the thing that decides your frame rate for any card short of the top of the stack, which is why the recommended tier can name a 12700K and a 5700X interchangeably.

If you have a fast card and an old six-core and the game feels stuck at the same number at every resolution, that is what a CPU ceiling looks like. The bottleneck checker will tell you which side is limiting for your exact pair, and Intel's free PresentMon shows it live with its GPU Busy metric.

What the graphics card gets you

These are outputs from our model on the Medium preset at native resolution, no upscaler, with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D-class processor so that every row is GPU-limited.

GPU	1080p	1440p	4K native
GeForce GTX 1660 Super	~49 fps	~36 fps	~21 fps
Radeon RX 6600	~62 fps	~45 fps	~27 fps
Intel Arc B580	~74 fps	~54 fps	~32 fps
GeForce RTX 3060 12GB	~77 fps	~56 fps	~34 fps
GeForce RTX 4060	~86 fps	~63 fps	~38 fps
Radeon RX 9060 XT	~92 fps	~67 fps	~40 fps
GeForce RTX 5060	~95 fps	~69 fps	~41 fps
GeForce RTX 3070	~99 fps	~72 fps	~43 fps
GeForce RTX 5060 Ti	~107 fps	~78 fps	~47 fps
Radeon RX 7800 XT	~107 fps	~78 fps	~47 fps
GeForce RTX 5070	~122 fps	~89 fps	~53 fps
Radeon RX 9070 XT	~125 fps	~91 fps	~54 fps
GeForce RTX 5070 Ti	~129 fps	~94 fps	~56 fps
GeForce RTX 5080	~138 fps	~100 fps	~60 fps
GeForce RTX 5090	~147 fps	~107 fps	~64 fps

The sheet and the model agree where they overlap, which is the reason to trust the rows in between. An RTX 3070 reads 72 at 1440p Medium against Bulkhead's "70+", and 43 at native 4K, which becomes a 60 once you let an upscaler render from 1440p. A GTX 1660 on Low reads in the mid 50s at native 1080p in our model, and an upscaler at that tier lifts it over the 60 Bulkhead quotes. The one row the sheet names that our model reads under target is the RX 6700 XT, at 58 rather than 70 at 1440p Medium. We would still call it playable; we would not promise the 70.

Then the admission. These are model outputs from a game profile we set off the spec sheet, not benchmarks, and we do not run a lab. The profile sits on both of Bulkhead's targets, which is encouraging, but a hundred-player match with a base going up under artillery is exactly the scene a spec sheet does not describe, and the first public benchmark runs will tell us how far off we are. We re-rate when they land. For your own processor and card at your resolution, the WARDOGS page runs the same model on every combination we track.

The Secure Boot question

The game uses Easy Anti-Cheat, which installs a kernel-level driver, and that has produced the predictable forum threads asking whether Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 are required. They are not, officially: the Steam page lists Windows 10 as the minimum, and Bulkhead's pre-launch anti-cheat post talked about in-game reporting and community server admins rather than firmware settings.

What is true is that a number of players on the Steam support forum report a launch crash that went away when they turned Secure Boot on, which is consistent with how recent EAC builds have behaved in other games. If the game will not start, that is the first thing to try, and it costs nothing. Linux is not officially supported at launch and Bulkhead has said Proton compatibility is still in progress, so the Steam Deck is off the table for now.

Our opinion, for what it is worth: a kernel anti-cheat in a hundred-player game with a cash economy is the right call, and the reporting tools Bulkhead described are the more important half. A shooter this size lives or dies on the first month of cheating, not the first week of queues.

If you are buying for it

The processor is the thing to fix first if yours is on the minimum line. A Ryzen 5 5600 is the cheapest part in our catalog that clears the CPU ceiling for every card below the flagship tier, and it drops into any AM4 board an older Ryzen came from. On Intel, a Core i5-12400F does the same job on a 600 or 700-series board. Neither costs what a graphics card does.

For the card, the value line in this game is the recommended tier, and it is a generation older than the current one: an RTX 3070 or anything that scores like it. New, that means an RTX 5060 or RX 9060 XT for 1440p Medium in the high 60s at native, or an RTX 5060 Ti and RX 7800 XT for the high 70s. The 16GB parts are the ones to pick if you can, because a UE5 map that streams destruction and buildables is the kind of workload where 8GB runs out in ways an average frame rate hides. The build generator will price a full machine around any of those, and the best GPU for your processor pages will tell you which card your CPU can actually keep busy.

Do not buy used in a hurry for it. Asking prices on the used market have sat above new retail for most of this year, and a cheap listing on the week a game hits a million sales is the warning sign, not the deal.

The short version

• Early Access since September 10 at $39.99; 1.5 million sold by the 12th, 428,666 concurrent on the 13th, number one on Steam's top sellers as this went up.
• Minimum: i5-8600 or Ryzen 5 3500, GTX 1660 or RX 590, 16GB RAM, 50GB. That is 1080p Low at 60 with an upscaler on.
• Recommended: i7-12700K or Ryzen 7 5700X, RTX 3070 or RX 6700 XT, still 16GB RAM. That is 1440p Medium above 70 at native.
• The processor decides more than usual. Old six-cores cap near 90 to 110 frames in our model at any resolution; from a Ryzen 5 5600 or i5-12400F up, the card is the limit.
• No official Secure Boot or TPM requirement, but turning Secure Boot on is the first fix to try for a launch crash. No Linux, no Deck, no console until 2028.