Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV

What to Upgrade First

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV was announced for a September 17, 2026 release under KING Art (the Iron Harvest studio) and Deep Silver, but as of this writing no real PC requirements exist. The Steam page is live and takes wishlists, yet both the minimum and recommended blocks show only a generic 64-bit note and “Coming soon” — no CPU, no GPU, no RAM, no storage. So everything below the OS line on this page is an estimate, scaled from the modern large-scale RTS bracket: the Dawn of War lineage, KING Art’s own Iron Harvest, and current-gen comparables like Age of Empires IV and Homeworld 3. These figures will be replaced the moment Deep Silver publishes the real numbers.

The genre is the key to reading this page. Real-time strategy is the one corner of PC gaming where the processor, not the graphics card, usually decides your framerate. A 40K battle with hundreds of units, projectiles, and abilities resolving at once is a simulation load — every unit is a small computation the CPU runs every tick — and that load climbs as the match goes long. The GPU draws the scene, but a mid-range card from the last few years can draw an RTS scene at high settings without strain. Dawn of War III ran on a GTX 660 floor back in 2017, and Iron Harvest asked for the same; a 2026 entry lifts that to something like a GTX 1660 Super, which every build on this site clears several times over.

That inverts the usual upgrade advice. On most game pages here the message is “buy the best GPU you can afford.” For Dawn of War IV, the card is rarely the bottleneck — the CPU is. That is exactly why the High and 1% tiers, built around the Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D, are the standouts for this title: 3D V-Cache delivers its biggest gains precisely in CPU-bound, simulation-heavy scenes, which is what a late-game 40K battle is. If you are building specifically for this kind of game, spend on the processor before the graphics card.

Against the estimated floor, every tier has room. The Recession build’s Arc A580 sits above a 1660-class minimum and its Ryzen 5 7500F laps any RTS CPU requirement, so 1080p High at 60 is a safe call. The Budget RTX 5060 pushes 1080p Ultra; the Mid RTX 5060 Ti 16GB opens 1440p Ultra; the High and 1% tiers run high-refresh 1440p or 4K while their X3D chips keep frames pinned through the largest battles. Because this is a near-term September 2026 release, the estimates carry more weight than for titles years out — and the weekly spec monitoring sweep will swap in the official figures the moment KING Art posts them.