If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy.

Starfield’s system requirements are up, wants a GTX 1070 Ti and 125GB SSD space at minimum

A galaxy is big, turns out

Starfield’s PC system requirements have appeared on its Steam page, and while exploring its possibly too vast collection of planets and facial hair options probably will not have your PC sobbing stress tears, the spacefaring RPG will make some big asks. Especially where SSD space is concerned.

Bethesda say you’ll need 125GB of free storage to get Starfield all comfy and installed, and unusually, even the minimum specifications outright state that an SSD is required. HDDs are invariably slower, and to be perfectly honest I wouldn’t mind seeing the back of them myself, but it's still peculiar to read of solid state storage as a specific minimum requirement.

Watch on YouTube
Liam walks you through the 12 most exciting things we learned from the recently broadcast Starfield direct.

The CPU requirements aren’t too high but a lot of low-end graphics cards could miss out as well, as these system specs list the AMD Radeon RX 5700 and Nvidia GTX 1070 Ti as minimum GPUs. Remember when both of those could take a halfway decent crack at 4K? The times, they are a-changin’. Here are the full lists:

Starfield minimum PC specs

  • OS: Windows 10 version 22H2 (10.0.19045)
  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X / Intel Core i7-6800K
  • RAM: 16GB
  • GPU: AMD Radeon RX 5700 / Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti
  • DirextX: DX12
  • Storage: 125GB available space (SSD required)

Starfield recommended PC specs

  • OS: Windows 10 / 11 with updates
  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X / Intel Core i5-10600
  • RAM: 16GB
  • GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT / Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080
  • DirextX: DX12
  • Storage: 125GB available space (SSD required)

One does get the sense that this might be another toughie to run well. Over in consoleland there’s been a bit of a brouhaha over Starfield being capped at 30fps on the Xbox Sesies XeSesseses; there’s no reason to think the PC version might get similarly capped, but the last Bethesda-published game that launched with a 30fps lock on console was Redfall. And the less said about Redfall’s PC performance, the better. Here’s about 1500 words on it.

Still, let’s not clutch our pearls too tightly until we’ve seen Starfield running, at length, on a desktop. Assuming no further delays, it’ll release on September 6th this year.

About the Author
James Archer avatar

James Archer

Hardware Editor

James had previously hung around beneath the RPS treehouse as a freelancer, before being told to drop the pine cones and climb up to become hardware editor. He has over a decade’s experience in testing/writing about tech and games, something you can probably tell from his hairline.

Comments
Rock Paper Shotgun logo

We've been talking, and we think that you should wear clothes

Total coincidence, but we sell some clothes

Buy RPS stuff here
Rock Paper Shotgun Merch