One of the best PS5 games will soon be available for PC gamers and requires quite a bit of RAM for smooth gameplay.
Why is so much RAM required?
Unfortunately, there is currently no information on what graphics quality, resolution and frame rate will be targeted with the official system requirements. Here they are at a glance:
Minimum requirements:
- Operating system:Windows 10 64-bit
- Processor: Intel Core i5-6400 or AMD Ryzen 5 1500X
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (6 GB) or AMD Radeon RX 580 (8 GB)
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Memory: 60 GB (SSD recommended)
Recommended:
- Operating system:Windows 10 64-bit
- Processor: Intel Core i7-8700 or AMD Ryzen 7 2700X
- GPU: NVIDIA Geforce RTX 2070 Super (8 GB) or AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (12 GB)
- Memory: 32 GB RAM
- Memory: 60 GB (SSD recommended)
The relatively low minimum requirements are very pleasing. Both AMD’s Radeon RX 580 and Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 1060 are very old, but are still present in some gamers’ computers today.
For those who want to see the game in action, check out the latest PC trailer:
However, it becomes apparent that you won’t get far with 16 GB of RAM. If we take a look at the recommended hardware configuration, one immediately notices the high RAM requirement. A proud 32 GB of RAM is demanded from your PC.
The exact reasons for this RAM appetite of Returnal are not known. The PC version will support both DLSS and AMD FSR. There will also be ray tracing for shadows and reflections.
Despite these additional graphics goodies, it’s not entirely clear why so much RAM is needed. Even Portal RTX recommends 32 GB only in the absolute ultra configuration.
And what about you?
According to the (Steam hardware survey from November 2022) (thanks for pointing this out to community member DarkG4m3r), more than half of all Valve platform users still own a PC with only
16 GByte RAM.
Do you already have 32 GBytes of RAM in your system or are you planning to upgrade soon? Is this possibly just the beginning and is 16 GByte no longer up to date for gaming? Drop us a line in the comments and let us know what you think!
