Starfield’s PC Requirements Are Pretty Intense

Oliver Brandt
·3 min read

Starfield key art

Starfield is likely to be one of the biggest games of the year, despite only coming to a couple of platforms. You can play it on Xbox Series X|S, of course, but we imagine most players will be exploring the stars on PC, where Bethesda-developed games typically find their biggest audiences.

If you’re playing on Xbox, you can be sure that the game will run just fine, but what if you’re playing on PC? What kind of rig would you need to run the game? Fortunately, just like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Armored Core 6, we have a solid idea of what the minimum and recommended specs will be for it on PC, thanks to Starfield's Steam page. Unfortunately for some, the requirements are pretty high, even for the minimum specs.

Starfield: Minimum Specs

If you want to play Starfield on PC, you’ll need a fairly beefy gaming rig, with parts from as recent as 2019. First-gen Ryzen CPUs won’t cut it here, with Bethesda saying that you’ll need at least an AMD Ryzen 2600X, or an Intel Core i7-6800K on the Intel side of things. Both of these were pretty pricey at the time of their release, but can be picked up for fairly cheap secondhand, if you’re willing to take that risk.

For graphics, you’re looking at a similar timeframe for parts, and a similar price tier. If you’re going with Nvidia, you’ll need a GeForce 1070 Ti or above, and if you’re going for AMD, you’ll want to be running a Radeon RX 5700. Both cards are on the upper end of mid-range, but you should expect decent performance at medium settings on either.

You’ll need at least 16GB of RAM, whether you’re going to the minimum or the recommended, and it’ll take up 125GB on your SSD — and yes, an SSD is apparently required (though as we saw with Baldur’s Gate 3, that might not be true).

Full Starfield minimum specs:

  • OS: Windows 10 version 21H1 (10.0.19043)

  • Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, Intel Core i7-6800K

  • Memory: 16 GB RAM

  • Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 5700, NVIDIA GeForce 1070 Ti

  • DirectX: Version 12

  • Storage: 125 GB available space

Starfield: Recommended Specs

Moving up to the recommended specs does see a boost in the hardware requirements, in most cases asking for the next generation and the next tier up from the minimum specs. You’ll need an AMD Ryzen 5 3600X or an Intel i5-10600K on the CPU side of things, both mid-range processors that aren’t too pricey but still cost a fair amount — if you can even find them these days.

On the GPU side, you’ll want either an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT or an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080, though obviously if you want to push the game as hard as you can, you’ll want to have something a little more recent. As with the minimum specs, you’ll need 16GB of RAM and 125GB of storage space.

Full Starfield recommended specs:

  • OS: Windows 10/11 with updates

  • Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, Intel i5-10600K

  • Memory: 16 GB RAM

  • Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080

  • DirectX: Version 12

  • Storage: 125 GB available space

Can Starfield Run on Steam Deck?

Unfortunately, Starfield won’t be Steam Deck compatible, or at least it probably won’t be Steam Deck Verified. It’s not hard to see why — Valve’s handheld specs just don’t come close to even the minimum required specs for Starfield. Still, if you want to spend ages fiddling with settings, and don’t mind it looking very rough, you can probably get it running in one form or another. It just won’t be very pleasant to play.