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

A galaxy is big, turns out

An explorer stands looking over a rocky planet in a Starfield screenshot.
Image credit: Bethesda Game Studios
James Archer avatar
News by James Archer Hardware Editor
Published on
39 comments

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.

Was Starfield worth the wait? Liam and Alice B discuss this question - and more - in the video above.Watch on YouTube

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.

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