Star Citizen Gets New PC Requirements for Alpha Version (No, It’s Not Done Yet)

Star Citizen has been a bit of a running joke in the industry, as the funding money keeps pouring in and the team at Cloud Imperium seems intent on making a living by cashing pay cheques as developers, but never fully transitioning to actually publishing the game. Alas, these days, it’s actually pretty playable and there’s something formed that is very much a game, so maybe it will be out before I retire. However, if you’re playing the Alpha version of Star Citizen, you’ll be interested to know that there are now some revised PC requirements. Of course, not the first revision, since the game’s first Alpha was like ten years ago, and hardware has moved along a lot since then.

Star Citizen Gets New PC Requirements

Cloud Imperium say that Star Citizen requires a PC with the ability to run AVX instructions and that any CPU that can not do this will not be able to launch the game. Furthermore, it would help if you had a GPU with at least 4GB of VRAM (ideally at least 8GB) and support for Vulkan 1.2, but to be honest, you can’t play a lot of modern games with anything under that anyway.

You’ll need at least a quad-core CPU and 16GB of RAM too, which again is pretty modest, as that’s now a requirement for a lot of modern PC games of the last decade anyway. You’ll want either an Intel i8, or the AMD Bulldozer as the minimum requirements, so again, pretty modest, but remember you still need AVX support.

As for graphics cards, anything from the Nvidia GTX 1060, AMD RX 5700 or Intel A380 should do just fine, so budget gamers aren’t quite out of the race just yet. However, don’t expect to be hitting high frame rates with such hardware. Just be sure you have 8GB of VRAM and DX12 support and you should be reasonably OK.

Finally, you’ll need about 100GB of storage space for the game, and they recommend an SSD too, but again, these days that’s not that surprising and actually less than I would think, but this is the Alpha, and I suspect the final game, if we ever see it, will surpass that number.