What recent PC games actually ask for

Every "will it run" answer starts from the same place: the minimum and recommended hardware the publisher writes on the game's own store page. It is the only part of the question that is a fact rather than an estimate. We keep a snapshot of those lists for the games in our catalogue, taken from Steam on 12 September 2026, and this is what the 25 released since 2023 ask for.

Memory: 16 GB is the floor now

Seventeen of the 25 ask for 16 GB as a minimum, not as a recommendation. The eight that still list 8 or 12 GB are either older (Baldur's Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy), free-to-play (Delta Force, Path of Exile 2) or console ports with modest PC minimums (God of War Ragnarök, Helldivers 2).

Six ask for 32 GB in the recommended tier: DOOM: The Dark Ages, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Palworld and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. Two of those, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and Indiana Jones, pair the 32 GB with a 1440p target rather than 1080p, which is part of why the figure is so high.

Storage: an SSD, and a lot of it

The median recommended install is 100 GB. Twelve of the 25 want 100 GB or more, topped by God of War Ragnarök at 190 GB, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 at 160 GB, and Baldur's Gate 3 and Horizon Forbidden West at 150 GB each.

Nineteen mention an SSD and thirteen state outright that one is required, DOOM: The Dark Ages going as far as specifying an NVMe drive. This is the requirement that has changed fastest: five years ago an SSD was a comfort, and today it is the difference between a game running and a game stuttering while it streams textures.

The graphics card: the model barely moved, the memory did

The recommended cards cluster around hardware released in 2020 and 2021 — RTX 2060 Super, RTX 3060, RTX 3060 Ti, RX 6700 XT. What changed is what publishers say about memory. Assassin's Creed Shadows recommends an "RTX 3060 Ti 8 GB"; Star Wars Outlaws lists "RTX 3060 Ti (8 GB)"; Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 simply writes "8 GB VRAM" in front of the model. Indiana Jones asks for 12 GB in the recommended tier and 8 GB in the minimum, and DOOM: The Dark Ages for 10 GB recommended.

Two games in the list, DOOM: The Dark Ages and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, require hardware ray tracing to start at all. There is no fallback path: a card without it is not a slow experience, it is no experience.

Things that were never in a requirements box before

• Windows 11. Dragon's Dogma 2 lists it in both tiers. Battlefield 6, Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced and Palworld recommend it.
• TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot. Battlefield 6 requires both, along with virtualisation-based security — an anti-cheat requirement rather than a performance one, and one that will stop a machine that otherwise exceeds every figure in the table.
• Upscaling baked into the numbers. Six of the 25 — Black Myth: Wukong, Dragon's Dogma 2, Monster Hunter Wilds, Silent Hill 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and Star Wars Outlaws — say in the notes that their figures assume DLSS, FSR or XeSS is on. Monster Hunter Wilds goes further and assumes frame generation as well for 1080p/60 at medium settings. "Recommended" has stopped meaning native resolution.

The whole table

What it means for a machine you are about to build

• 16 GB of system memory is the entry point, and 32 GB is the safe choice if simulators, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2-scale open worlds or heavy modding are on the list.
• Budget 1 TB of SSD as the practical minimum. Four installs at the median size fill half of it.
• 8 GB of video memory still clears most recommended tiers, but it is now the figure publishers write next to the card rather than an afterthought, and two games already ask for 10–12 GB.
• The processor is rarely the problem. The minimum tiers still name an i5-8400 or a Ryzen 5 2600, and the recommended ones rarely go past an i7-10700 or a Ryzen 7 3700X.

To check a specific card against a specific game, the "can it run" pages place each card and the publisher's stated hardware on the same scale, and link the store page the requirements came from. How that estimate is built — and what it deliberately does not claim — is on the methodology page.