If you watched yesterday's Starfield Direct, you know that Starfield's gameplay and features scale quite well. It also seems to be quite demanding, so much so that Starfield's system requirements note the need for an SSD and a fairly powerful GPU. But these system requirements are a bit... Strange. I may have to wait a bit longer to buy a new PC just to play this game.

First, if you visit Starfield's Steam page, you will see a note that says "SSD required." This may be a sticking point for those still using HDDs as their primary drive (although it's well worth upgrading your machine.) However, the system requirements page on the Xbox website does not have an addendum to that effect.

We checked with Bethesda on this point, and in any case, they both agree that the game requires at least 125 GB of space. But beyond that, the recommended specs for Starfield are odd or simply misspelled.

For one thing, the Xbox site's minimum requirements state that an "AMD Raydeon RX 5700" is required. This is surprising, but on the same line there is no "GTX" for GTX 1070 Ti. Well, maybe I'm just being pedantic about this, but I think it's important.

Also, the recommended specs suggest at least an Intel Core i7 6800K. Now, this may sound like a normal Intel chip from the Skylake generation, but it is not. This is an X-series HEDT processor, which was quite niche when it was released, but is far more niche today; in 2023, neither Intel nor AMD make many such products, except for a few very high-end prosumer chips.

My guess is that Starfield really needs a six-core processor to run smoothly, and the usual consumer-grade Intel chips of the Skylake generation had no more than four. So the real recommended specs that most of us can relate to are probably the Coffee Lake generation Core 8600K, Core 8700K, or higher.

Anything above a Coffee Lake generation Core i5 is at least a 6-core chip, if not higher, as are most of AMD's Ryzen chips above Ryzen 5.

Starfield's requirement for at least 16 GB of system memory is not so surprising. Today, many games may only need 8GB, but in general, I feel that large AAA games are moving toward 16GB as the new minimum memory.

But the strange inconsistencies and ambiguities in these recommended system specs reek of rough-cut to me. I'm not saying that the final game won't be under severe strain, but as long as the current consoles have been shown to run at only 30 fps, it's a safe bet that it will. Also, upscaling technology will play a major role in getting "Starfield" to run smoothly at the high 4K frame rate. However, it is still too early to take these recommended systems at face value. Frankly, this is often the case, and the real performance litmus test paper will take place on or near launch day.

There is still time for Bethesda to determine system requirements before the September 6, 2023 launch of Starfield. If not Bethesda, we will know how the game performs closer to that date. That means there is plenty of time for inexpensive GPUs of this generation, like Nvidia's RTX 4060, to be released. In an ideal world, it would also be time for SSDs, RAM, and other key components that you might have to upgrade to play with to drop in price even further.