Starfield system requirements

What are the Starfield system requirements? You don’t need space-age hardware to blast off with Starfield, as the sci-fi RPG runs on older components. However, Bethesda does say you will need to leave behind your mechanical hard drives to get on board.

Here are the Starfield system requirements:

The Starfield minimum requirements don’t call for a particularly powerful GPU, with the AMD Radeon RX 5700 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti setting the pixel-pushing floor. Alongside these relatively old GPUs, you’ll need similarly aged processors too, specifically anything as powerful as the AMD Ryzen 5 2600X or Intel Core i7 6800K, paired with 16GB of RAM.

Bethesda doesn’t tell us what level of performance you can expect from these minimum requirements, but comparing these specs with the Xbox Series S should be instructive. The Series S’s CPU is slightly more powerful than the AMD Ryzen 5 2600X specified above, but not by much.

In terms of its GPU, it’s slightly weaker than the minimum specs’ AMD RX 5700 or Nvidia GTX 1070 Ti, but can draw from a shared memory pool of 16GB, meaning it has a substantially higher VRAM capacity. With that said, we guess you’ll be able to match or exceed the performance of an Xbox Series S, which is set to enjoy 30fps at 1440p.

You won’t need a hyperspace drive to cover the jump to the Starfield recommended specs. In fact, the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 are just a modest jetpack boost away from the base requirements. It’s a similar story with processors too, with the AMD Ryzen 5 3600X and Intel Core i5 10600K. Suffice to say, you won’t need the best gaming CPU to enjoy your interplanetary journeys.

Again, these specs don’t explain what performance you’ll enjoy with this hardware, but we can look to the Xbox again, this time the Series X, to get an idea of what to expect. The Series X is roughly as powerful as a PC with the above specs, which we suspect is no accident, and is set to get 4K with 30fps using AMD FSR 2 upscaling tech. Although, the AMD FSR 3 release date may coincide with Starfield, so we could be in for even higher frame rates.

When it comes to Starfield size requirements, you’ll need to install the game on the best SSD you have with 125GB of space freed up. We recommend picking up the WD_BLACK SN850X in whatever capacity you can afford. That will more than help you get that precious bit of extra storage space, just in time if you’re lucky enough to have early access to the game.

Another thing to bear in mind is that Starfield could be beset by bugs, as it is Bethesda we’re talking about here. But you can give yourself a better chance of having a stutter-free experience by getting the best graphics card within your price range. That’s the piece of hardware likely to give you the best returns on investment if you’re keen to get your rig optimized for Starfield.

If you want to learn all you can about the latest big RPG from Bethesda, our new Starfield Database offers you daily news, updates on the Starfield PS5 edition, searchable databanks, and even interactive tools.

Take our Starfield system requirements PC benchmark test to answer the question… Can I run Starfield?