Red Dead 2's PC requirements are gonna put a bullet in your SSD

Rockstar have quietly added the PC requirements for Red Dead Redemption 2 to the game's Rockstar Launcher page. The good news? It's not going to murder your PC. The bad news? It will absolutely gobble up your PC's storage banks, as it's currently recommending you keep at least 150GB set aside for it.

I know it's a big game and all, but that's another 50GB on top of its already hefty console counterparts, which came in at 99GB for the PS4 and 107GB for the Xbox One, according to Rockstar's support page. Heck, even Final Fantasy XV and its 4K texture pack don't top 150GB at the moment, so I'd jolly well hope that Rockstar are packing some ludicrously lovely PC effects into this release to justify its storage-hogging install size. Still, provided you've got enough space for the darn thing, most PCs should be able to wrangle it into pretty good shape when it rides out on November 5th. Here they are in full:

As you can see from Red Dead Redemption 2's minimum PC requirements below, even PCs that are several years old should be able to get the game up and running. My rather decrepit Radeon R9 270 might struggle a bit, admittedly, but even those of you still hanging on to old R9 290s / GTX 970s should be in the clear here.

To be honest, I was surprised by Red Dead Redemption 2's recommended PC requirements as well. Given how there was so much talk about which box looked best when it originally launched on consoles last year, I was expecting the recommended specs to be a lot more demanding than the 6GB GTX 1060 / 4GB RX 480 listed below.

Minimum PC requirements:
OS: Windows 7
CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K / AMD FX-6300
RAM: 8GB
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 (2GB) / AMD Radeon R9 280 (3GB)
Storage: 150GB

Recommended PC requirements:
OS: Windows 10
CPU: Intel Core i7-4770K / AMD Ryzen 5 1500X
RAM: 12GB
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB) / AMD Radeon RX 480 (4GB)
Storage: 150GB

Of course, until Rockstar go into a bit more detail about what kind of performance you can actually expect from said PC requirements, it's highly likely that these particular specs will be for playing the Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1920x1080 only. If you're hoping to play it at 1440p or even 4K, I wouldn't be surprised if you needed a heftier PC specification than what's listed above.

It's also not clear yet whether Red Dead Redemption 2 will be supporting Nvidia's RTX ray tracing tech, either, or indeed any other special effects currently offered by AMD's new Radeon RX 5000 cards. If it does end up supporting ray tracing, then you'll obviously need at least an RTX 2060 at your disposal, if not one of the three RTX super cards depending on the extent of their ray tracing implementation.

On the whole, though, I think we can all breathe a big sigh of relief. The GTX 1060, after all, has been the most popular graphics card in Steam's hardware charts for absolutely yonks, and is still one of the most widely used GPUs in PCs today. Sure, you might need to shift some of your game installs around depending on how much storage space you've got left (or buy one of our recommendations to make sure you'll definitely have the fastest loading speeds etc), but at least you won't also need to upgrade your PC in the process.