Returnal has long been one of the few exclusive titles released for the PS5. The acclaimed game is now available on PC. However, the system requirements are quite challenging. You can find all information about this in this article.
As one of the first PS5 exclusives, Returnal was able to give a little taste of what the PS5 is capable of graphically. The roguelite shooter not only impresses with its great looks and a creepy atmosphere, but also offers a great story that wants to captivate you in front of the screen despite the extremely high level of difficulty.
The game will be released on Steam in spring. You can find out in this article why you probably won’t be able to play it anyway.
You need these system requirements if you want to play Returnal on the PC
Sony announced at the Game Awards last week that the formerly PS5-exclusive Returnal will soon be coming to PC – like several other Sony games recently and in the near future (via Twitter). So far, however, only spring 2023 has been mentioned as the release date.
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Developed by Housemarque, the game didn’t get the hype of other Sony exclusives like Spider-Man, The Last of Us or Horizon, but it’s still a really good game. It’s not for nothing that Returnal has a Metacritic score of 86 points (via Metacritic).
You can watch the Returnal announcement trailer on PC here:
The Returnal announcement trailer on PC.
That’s why it sounds great at first that more players will soon be able to enjoy this insider tip. Nevertheless, it is doubtful that many gamers will actually be able to play Returnal on their PC. The reason is the completely absurd system requirements of the title (via Steam).
What kind of performance does your PC have to have so that you can play the game? In order to play Returnal with the recommended system requirements, your PC needs:
Recommended:
The recommended system requirements of Returnal on PC.
You read that right. In order to be able to play Returnal on the recommended settings, you need a whopping 32 GB of RAM.
The fact that a game requires so much RAM is not only new in this form, but also a bit surprising, especially in the case of Returnal.
The PS5 has 16 GB of RAM, which is used for both RAM and VRAM. It is amazing that a PC basically needs 32 GB of RAM and then the 8 – 16 GB of VRAM of a modern graphics card.
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An obvious explanation could be that Returnal on the PS5 benefits from the extremely fast storage and the direct access of the GPU to the SSD. Although an NVMe SSD comes close in a PC, the PS5’s SSD is still faster. To emulate the PS5’s blisteringly fast SSD, the game will likely load more assets into RAM instead.
In the future, Windows’ DirectStorage API should help with this, with which even extremely detailed game worlds can be loaded faster than ever before. This works by splitting the assets into multiple batches, allowing multiple processing requests to occur at once.
The minimum requirements of Returnal are logically a bit lower overall, but still require 16 GB of RAM from you.
The minimum requirements of Returnal on PC.
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Other new games don’t even come close to reaching these spheres
To give you an idea of how unusual the huge memory requirements are, not even Microsoft Flight Simulator requires that much RAM. For the minimum requirements 8 RAM are needed, for the recommended 16 GB. And other games that have high graphics requirements, such as Cyberpunk 2077, A Plague Tale: Requiem or Dying Light 2, do not require more than 16 GB of RAM.
One game that comes close to Returnal’s spheres is Dead Space’s remake, due out in January. Both the minimum and the recommended system requirements for the sci-fi shooter require 16 GB of RAM (via Steam).
And even Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered only require 32GB of RAM when DLSS and the highest ray tracing settings are enabled.
What do you think of Returnal’s high system requirements? Do you think that this will be an isolated case in the near future or do you think that we will see many more games with such requirements soon? Do you still plan to play Returnal on PC?
Write it to us in the comments!