[2022] What hardware can increase performance in 7D2D?

Originally posted by L37:

Originally posted by Uncle Al: I was just managing to play on a real potato - an A10 processor with 32M of 1200 RAM and a GTX 950. I upgraded my processer (to R7 5800X) and RAM (to 32M of 2400) and I'm still using the same ancient GTX 950 until prices stop being stupid.

Using an SSD in both cases.

I went from 30 FPS on low settings with massive stutter during high zombie spawns to now running 60 FPS on medium settings with no stutter at all. All this with an ancient GPU that's virtually below minimum spec for the game.

Yeah, if it was older not zen based APU it was really, really bad. That's why it helped so massively.

As for OP-s question...
It is pretty similar to all the other games.
Somewhat decent CPU with single core performance being more important than number of cores, enough RAM to avoid active swapping (probably at least 16GB), for load times - SSD and then as good GPU as you can get.

Actually, most games only care about single-core performance because they can only use one core.
Though 7 Days relies heavily on single-core performance, it also requires multi-core functionality. Which is why the game performs quite poorly on CPU's that specialize only in single-core/thread performance. Like pretty much any AMD chipset before the 3rd Gen Ryzens, or their server-level CPU's like the Threadrippers.

I did this a while ago. Shows how much of a difference simple things like CPU and RAM clock speeds make. Literally just having your RAM default to the min spec speed because the person who built the PC neglected to set the XMP profile.

System comparison