Returnal on PC Recommends Ridiculous Amount of RAM

Can’t wait to play this on my steam deck!!!

One of my favorite platinums. PC players are in for a treat!

One of the best PS5 games imo (for PC players to enjoy)

@Amin1998 Not with those requirements!

@nessisonett I am pretty sure Steam Deck can handle it if they minimum cpu and gpu specs are correct, heck even the ps4 could handle it if it had more ram!

Wonder if this is a replacement for the super fast M.2 SSD. Instead of requiring an expensive SSD they just dump the needed assets into ram. I’m sure there are plenty of people here that have a better idea of how this works that could *confirm or deny this 🤔

32GB of RAM WTF

The minimum requirements are surprisingly not beefy aside from still requiring 16GB RAM. The 1060 is a fairly old card at this point, and my CPU runs circles even around the recommended one.

Oh yes, I'm ready for this and so is my rig. Honestly, it wasn't even that long ago since I finished it on PS5 yet I'm super eager to try it out with fancy ultra ray tracing goodness!

Surprising but not unexpected. I think anyone who has any real intentions of actually playing these modern AAA triple game on their PC have probably already upgraded to 32Gb by now. DDR4 kits are dirt cheap at this point.

Got 32 GB of RAM so I'm good, but I wonder how on earth is the SSD not stated in the minimum specs. I was told such games are not playable on hdds?

People will just tone it down. Like most games.

Most of the Top 10 cards on Steam are not high-end. And most Steam Players still playing at 1080p.

Same way 13% of steam players have 32 gig of ram.

It is a fantasy that PC players can simply meet the requirements to run games better than what you are playing on a PS5. Potato rigs are everywhere

Oh cool, another way of me being unable to get out of the first biome!

If they can get it stable enough to run on the Deck, then I'm ready to double dip. Definitely my game of the gen so far

Sorry Crysis, 'But can it run Returnal?'

32GB is exaggerating it I think. I have 32GB and far above the CPU and GPU requirements, but I am pretty sure 16GB is more than enough.

@AverageGamer Absolute tosh, Returnal is a nearly two year old game that was designed to run on the PS5. How much internal memory does the PS5 have again? Also, that's a very blanket statement about most people having already upgraded . There's been very little reason to have 32 gig in any gaming PC at this point, unless you need to run multiple programs.

I forgot that 32gb of RAM is considered 'a lot' Hahaha!!

I have that level of RAM but put the game down on launch day on PS5 as I truly dislike rogue , rinse and repeat games but unfortunately I never knew this going in as Housemarqe and Sony kept it pretty quiet.

Good to see PC gamers getting the game though as a mate told me it's phenomenal if you like this style of game.

@gollumb82
They are playable just not seamlessly

@thebizniznizbiz A PS5 isn't a system resource hog tho. Between Windows stuff running in the background, discord, multiple chrome windows, mouse/keyboard software, headset software.. etc. I've had older games eat more than 16Gb.

Sure if you only play indies and esports title then there no reason. But if you can afford to a bulid a system with a 2070s. There has been absolutely no reason you couldn't has easily future proof your system by grabbing a kit of 32gb DDR4 for less than $100.

@gollumb82
Dunno if your looking at the same page as me but an SSD is recommended on the mimimum specs section (though not on the recommend section.....presumably a typo)

Irrespective SSD have been pretty much standard for new builds for the past 6-7 years Id say.

@PegasusActual93
Yeah, I would never do that. Still have nightmares from playing Insurgency Sandstorm on a HDD equipped PC. By the time I had spawned on the map my SSD using teammates were already on the objective lol.
@Burntbreadman
True that. SSDs have been a gamechanger. Probably the biggest one this console gen. I will actually try to find a video on YT of someone playing this on a HDD. Should be interesting.

@Shstrick I think this is the case.

That does seem a tad high, very few games require that and I wouldn't have imagined that Returnal was a particularly taxing game even with how pretty it looks at times.

@Shstrick My thoughts exactly. I've been thinking about this for a while: how are PS5 games going to be ported to PC when they were originally designed for a system that has a much faster storage drive than the average gaming PC? That was my only concern about Sony bringing all PS5 games to PC; would they require their dev studios to limit SSD speed utilization in their games in order to ensure compatibility with PCs? I hope this Returnal port indicates that they are not going down that route.

That means you’ll need more then 32 unless all you do is run the game.

That's a whole lot of ram

@Shstrick nah PC has resizable bar now and can do the same fast SSD loads. It's not about the speed of the drive more the API they use to pull data to the graphics card. It's more likely they recommend this much ram because there will be higher render resolutions in play and also potentially higher detailed assets or something. But it is very strange, even flight Sim only uses less than 20gb on ultra 4k settings.

@xDD90x the add on ssd in the ps5 is the same that PC's use. it's a driver feature for current graphics cards that wasn't available on PC until 2 months after ps5 launched, but since around Jan 2021 PC has had the same feature.

@twitchtvpat not how it works. They don't recommend 32 just for the game.

@Denni5m You missed my point. I understand that PC supports the same PCIe 4.0 SSDs as PS5 does. But the vast majority of PC gamers don't have one of those in their rigs. Developers try to target a wide range of hardware when developing for PC. Otherwise they would be limiting their potential sales numbers. If they were to put out a game that required an SSD that matched or exceeded the PS5's in terms of speed, their customer base would be extremely small. This would not be feasible financially. Therefore this may be why the Returnal port requires so much more RAM compared to most games; it could be the solution the devs chose to solve this problem since 16GB+ RAM is more common and upgrading RAM is cheaper and much easier than upgrading storage.

@xDD90x they are not requiring that much more ram, they are recommending it, and the question is why. The game doesn't really use the direct access feature that much anyway, it would only mean for PC gamers that don't have the feature available is that when they teleport they would be in the white screen just before you materialise for longer which isn't that big of a thing.
If they were creating a virtual ram disk or access storage bin for this purpose you would need more than 32GB for it to work, I would bet that the recommendation for 32GB has nothing to do with that and more to do with the PC version having higher internal rendering resolutions, and all the shader effects being higher quality as well as higher quality geometry and lod,ssr, ssao and lighting maps, so what used to work on 16GB won't anymore as well now. And the next step up from 16GB is 32GB because PCs require dual channel memory so even if you had 8GB sticks you would need to have 32GB to make dual channel work. So they have to recommend 32GB.

Who's doing this port! This is really stupid amount of ram for a game that runs on PS5! Most game will run at 8, probably not in a good setting or with good performance but going for 16Gb of unified ram to 32Gb ram on PC is just ridiculously stupid!