Sony announced at last week's Game Awards (opens in new tab) that "Returnal," which has been leaked many times, will finally be available on PC. Nice. Now, courtesy of Steam, the PC system requirements have been announced. Sorry, but the recommended RAM requirements are probably eye-watering.

The minimum system requirements are no big deal:

But the recommended specs are where things get a little hairy:

32GB is a lot of RAM for the recommended specs. Currently, this much DDR4 might cost $105 to $150 (open in new tab). The majority of gaming PCs are still running with 16GB or less: for example, a semi-scientific Steam hardware and software survey (opens in new tab) reveals that three-quarters of the systems surveyed are running with either 8GB or 16GB installed (5.72% of the systems in the survey had either 8GB or 16GB installed and running. (5.72% are still running with 4GB of RAM. This is inadequate. At this point, you probably need a whole new PC.) Only 13.38% of respondents have 32 GB installed, while 1.42% have 64 GB or more.

So why does Returnal eat so much RAM? Sony didn't state specifics, but in its announcement (open in new tab), it said that PC gamers "will face a cutting-edge Housemarque challenge, and rest assured that there will be bells and whistles to support the gameplay experience." Sept. According to the leak, these bells and whistles will include DLSS, FSR, and possibly ray tracing. These are all fairly hardware-intensive, and 32 GB of RAM will help keep all of this running comfortably and smoothly.

Of course, it is possible that Sony will lower the RAM requirement to 16GB so as not to cause panic and PC envy, as EA has done; there is still time to work this out, as Returnal is not expected to appear on PC until early 2023.

While Returnal is not the first PC game to recommend 32 GB of RAM, it is still rare. For example, "Spider-Man Remastered" (open in new tab) also recommends 32GB RAM, but only for the Ultimate Ray Tracing (4K, 60fps) graphics preset; all others recommend 16GB. Star Wars Jedi" recommended 32GB: "Fallen Order" (open in new tab) initially recommended 32GB, but eventually reverted to 16GB; Rocketwerkz's sci-fi survival game "Icarus" (open in new tab) still recommends 32GB, but you really don't recommended, but not because it is really necessary: Rocketwerkz founder Dean Hall said in November 2021 that "additional RAM is helpful, but the game is optimized to run without it." Icarus also recommends an Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti The company also recommends the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti.

We have contacted Sony for more information on this and will update if we hear back. In the meantime, if you're tempted to make the jump to 32GB, you'll be happy to know that now is a good time to make it happen (opens in new tab).