If you're planning on swinging your oversized sword around "The Planet" when the PC port of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth releases on January 23, you might need to say goodbye to some other games to make room—and perhaps take a look at upgrading some older components, too.
The system requirements are here, and that big 'ol slab of metal appears to take up a mahoosive 155 GB of precious storage space.
Mind you, that's somewhat par for the course these days, what with Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl taking up 160 GB (and regularly updating with gigantic patches, I'm told)—and it still looks like small potatoes compared to God of War: Ragnarok and its 190 GB install size.
Still, plenty of room is required, so it's probably a good excuse to finally tidy up that partition.
Otherwise, it's looking like quite the demanding game if you're planning on upping the settings while still maintaining a silky smooth frame rate. The 1080p Low requirements are relatively modest, so you'll technically only need an AMD Ryzen 5 1400 or Intel Core i3 8100 CPU and an RTX 2060 or RX 6600 to get a'slashing.
Still, that's with a 30 fps target, and while the RTX 2060 is getting on for six years old it's still not what I'd call catastrophically slow. Bumping things up to 1080p Medium at 60 fps, Square Enix says you'll need a much more powerful CPU—with the Ryzen 5 5600, Ryzen 7 3700X, Core i7 8700 and Core i5 10400 given as suitable examples.
GPU-wise you'll be looking at either an RX 6700 XT or an RTX 2070. Again, this is 1080p Medium settings, so what sort of mega-rig do you need for smooth frames at 4K?
Well, out come the big guns. 2160p at 60 fps high settings demands either an RX 7900 XTX (the fastest AMD graphics card available) or an RTX 4080. Of course, it's not quite the big RTX 4090, but the RTX 4080 is still a GPU that's out of reach for many gamers at current prices.
Square Enix says DLSS will be available from launch, although there's no mention of whether Frame Generation is included—and neither FSR nor XeSS are mentioned as hardware-agnostic alternatives. Rebirth might be one for the Nvidia card users if high resolutions and mega framerates are what you truly desire.
All I'm really hoping for is a fix for the massive stutters and hitching I experienced when I played the first Final Fantasy 7 Remake a few years ago. Rebirth looks even prettier, so here's hoping the asset-streaming has been streamlined to deliver all those details in the smooth manner they deserve.
