If you plan to inject screen-space ray tracing (RTGI via Reshade) and run the mod at a crisp 4K resolution, the old engine requires significant GPU horsepower to brute-force the performance. Intel Core i7-12700K or AMD Ryzen 7 5800X Memory (RAM): 16 GB or 32 GB RAM

To understand the requirements, it's helpful to know the baseline. The original 2005 release of Need for Speed: Most Wanted had famously low requirements:

Some high-end cards like the RX 6700 XT have reported low GPU utilization, so "older" mid-range cards often perform just as well due to engine limitations. Performance Tips & Optimization

| Component | Requirement | | :--- | :--- | | | Windows 7 SP1, Windows 10, or Windows 11 (64-bit) | | CPU | Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 / AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ | | RAM | 4 GB | | GPU | NVIDIA GeForce GT 730 (2GB) / AMD Radeon HD 7750 | | Storage | 8 GB free space (SSD not required, but HDD is slow) | | DirectX | Version 9.0c |