God of War is only officially supported to run on Windows 10 and Windows 11, but an unofficial patch has allowed Sony’s game to be played on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1.
As Gameguru Mania reports, the patch was created by NexusMods user okt04175. It modifies the OS detection behavior in the game, which unlocks it for Microsoft’s older operating systems. However, four other patches are also required to ensure it works, including doitsujin’s DXVK, HansKristian-Work’s vkd3d-proton, Sporif’s DXVK-Async Patch, and marco-calautti’s DeltaPatcher. Full details of how to go about patching the game are available on okt04175’s NexusMods page.
One side effect of installing these patches is that the game will no longer run on Windows 10 or Windows 11. Reverting back to those officially-supported operating systems would require a fresh install without the patches. However, for anyone still running an old gaming rig or laptop on Windows 7/8, this is a nice option to have.
The minimum spec for the game requires an Intel Core i5-2500K or Ryzen 3 1200 combined with 8GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX 960 or Radeon R9 290X graphics card. So there’s definitely going to be quite a few Windows 7 systems out there capable of running this game. The video above gives you a good idea of how it will look and run using close to minimum hardware (albeit with 16GB of RAM) at 1080p.
