Every time I check out the new system requirements for an upcoming release these days, I hold my breath as I scroll down to the storage requirement.
Stalker 2 wants a massive 160 GB. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 demanded 102 GB (at least, depending on how much COD you wanted to download). And God of War: Ragnarok? A truly gigantic 190 GB of precious SSD space.
Obsidian's upcoming first-person RPG slash-and-magic-athon, Avowed, however, seems rather light by comparison. According to the Steam page, you'll need 75 GB of free storage space, and there's no current mention of an SSD requirement—although I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that you really, really should be running your games on one these days regardless.
The rest of the specs look relatively achievable for most PC gamers, too. While no detail is given for target resolutions or settings, the minimum specs demand an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 or Intel i5 8400, 16 GB of RAM and either an AMD RX 5700, an Nvidia GTX 1070, or an Intel Arc A580.
I'd hazard a guess that's for 30 fps 1080p low settings. There's no mention of whether upscaling is factored in, although a teaser video has already confirmed that DLSS 3 will be supported from launch.
Looking at all the Lumen lighting and ray-traced reflections, I'd say its likely to be needed with all the settings turned up for a super-smooth framerate, as Unreal Engine 5 can be quite the demanding engine with all the visual gubbins set to kill.
There's also been no mention of FSR support to date, so one can only hope there might be a choice of upscalers for those of us not running an Nvidia card.
Speaking of turning the settings up, however, the recommended requirements are substantially chonkier. Obsidian reckons you'll need a Ryzen 5 5600X or Core i7 10700K, in combination with 16 GB of RAM and either an RX 6800 XT or RTX 3080.
Those are still pretty beefy GPUs in this day and age, although again we've no idea if that's for 1440p High, 4K Ultra, or anything in between. As expected though, UE5 strikes again with some fairly demanding hardware requirements with the shiny stuff engaged, although whether ray tracing is included in those recommended specs is unclear.
It's also worth noting that the game has already caused a bit of controversy in the console community with the declaration from the devs that "you don't necessarily need 60 frames" for a first-person single-player RPG, with 30 fps targeted for both the Xbox Series S and Series X.
Presumably, given the custom AMD GPUs at their hearts, that means we'll be getting some sort of FSR upscaling involvement—even if 30 fps is the target. Time will tell, I guess.
Still, your SSD can breathe easy, at least. Should 75 GB be too much for those of you on a 512 GB model or less, this is the part where I shout out our cheap SSD deals page and its Black Friday SSD deals equivalent. Sure, prices have been up and down this year, but it's still possible to find a good deal on something roomy.
