Just try it to find out.

A. it works, and no worries.

B. It doesn't work, you can report that to Ludeon, and they may be able to find a fix. In the meantime, you can keep your game set at 1.6 easily in the Steam Library settings for Rimworld, so no worries there either. This may mean you lose out on performance gains, and possibly newer things that may or may not come, but either way you'll be playing until you get your new PC at some point.

They probably stopped supporting 32-bit in 1.7, which would make it not able to run on older 32 bit processors. It would really surprise me if they didn't leave 1.6 as a version option so that their players on older machines can still play.

Edit: A quick google search suggests your processor is 64 bit, so assuming that's why they say older processors won't work, then you'll be fine for 1.7. Try it and find out.

Originally posted by The Grand Mugwump:

They probably stopped supporting 32-bit in 1.7, which would make it not able to run on older 32 bit processors. It would really surprise me if they didn't leave 1.6 as a version option so that their players on older machines can still play.

Possibly, but I think it has been well over 20 years since a 32 bit PC processor was released. Doubtful that will be the OPs issue.

edit: Oh, and they clearly said they are running 64 bit windows, so definitely not the issue.

The 1.6 version will absolutely stay, Ludeon has left EVERY major release on Steam as an option since they first started releasing on Steam, plus they even through in the VERY old Alpha4 just for ♥♥♥♥♥ and giggles I think, lol (Alpha 4 was WAY before Steam release, think the first Steam release was Alpha 14 IIRC)

Originally posted by The Grand Mugwump:

Originally posted by BlackSmokeDMax:

Possibly, but I think it has been well over 20 years since a 32 bit PC processor was released. Doubtful that will be the OPs issue.

edit: Oh, and they clearly said they are running 64 bit windows, so definitely not the issue.

The 1.6 version will absolutely stay, Ludeon has left EVERY major release on Steam as an option since they first started releasing on Steam, plus they even through in the VERY old Alpha4 just for ♥♥♥♥♥ and giggles I think, lol (Alpha 4 was WAY before Steam release, think the first Steam release was Alpha 14 IIRC)

Rimworld has supposedly maintained 32 bit support all the way up to 1.6, and 1.7 is where they've stopped. So I made an assumption that is why they said older machines might not work.

Yeah, not sure what that could actually be... maybe some newer instructions added to the x86 chips that older chips wouldn't have? Older memory bus limitations? Hard to tell, Ludeon was very vague with that.

Hell it could even be the fact that 10+ year old chips are likely to not have as many cores, and while Rimworld isn't super multi-core, it can at least rely on the operating system for more modern CPUs to be running all of its stuff mostly on a different core to not have all the resources being hogged on the core it needs to run the game.