Returnal, the time-looping action title that came out on the PalyStation 5 back in April 2021, is finally coming to PC on February 15. Developer Housemarque and Climax Studios worked on implementing several features for this upcoming PC release. We have details on those new and updated features along with details about the game's system requirements.
Speaking of system requirements, the new PlayStation Blog post details several different configurations of hardware and tells you what sort of performance you can expect in each of them. These range from the "Minimum" which will get you 720p at 60FPS all the way up to the "Ray Tracing" configuration which will get you 4K at 60FPS.
| Requirements | Minimum | Medium | Recommended | Epic | Ray Tracing |
| AVG Performance | 720P @ 60FPS | 1080P @ 60FPS | 1080P @ 60FPS | 4K @ 60FPS | 4K @ 60FPS* |
| Graphics Settings | Low | Medium | High | Epic | Epic |
| GPU | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (6 GB) AMD Radeon RX 580 (8 GB) |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (8 GB) AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT (6 GB) |
NVIDIA RTX 2070 Super (8 GB) AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (12 GB) |
NVIDIA RTX 3080 (10 GB) AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (16 GB) |
NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti (12 GB) AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT (16 GB) |
| CPU | Intel Core i5-6400 (4 core 2.7GHz) AMD Ryzen 5 1500X (4 core 3.5GHz) |
Intel Core i5-8400 (6 core 2.8GHz) AMD Ryzen 5 2600 (6 core 3.4GHZ) |
Intel i7-8700 (6 core 3.7 GHz) AMD Ryzen 7 2700X (8 core 3.7 GHz) |
Intel i7-9700K (8 core 3.7 GHz) AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (8 core 3.6 GHz) |
Intel i9-11900K (8 core 3.5 GHz) AMD Ryzen 9 5900X (12 core 3.7 GHz) |
| RAM | 16 GB DDR4 | 16 GB DDR4 | 16 GB DDR4 | 32 GB DDR4 | 32 GB DDR4 |
| OS | Windows 10 64-bit (version 1903) | Windows 10 64-bit (version 1903) | Windows 10 64-bit (version 1903) | Windows 10 64-bit (version 1903) | Windows 10 64-bit (version 1903) |
| STORAGE | 60 GB HDD (SSD Recommended) |
60 GB SSD | 60 GB SSD | 60 GB SSD | 60 GB SSD |
These system requirements look downright low when compared to the stupidly high requirements for the Forspoken PC version.
Ray tracing on the PC includes ray traced reflections in addition to ray traced shadows. Housemarque says that in addition to the enhanced ray tracing support on PC, Returnal will also support ultrawide (21:9) and super ultrawide resolutions (32:9). Audio lovers should delight at how there will be support for "Dolby Atmos, two 3D audio solutions, or 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound." The game is said to also utilize ray traced audio.
Those of you who own a DualSense controller will also get to experience all of that haptic feedback and adaptive trigger goodness on the PC. Naturally, there is support for traditional mouse & keyboard use as well as support for other controllers.
Finally, Returnal will also include Nvidia DLSS, NIS, and AMD FSR scaling technologies. In fact, Housemarque flatly recommends that you utilize DLSS when running with both ray traced reflections and shadows.
You can pre-purchase Returnal for PC at either Steam or the Epic Games Store for $59.99 (USD).
