Star Citizen's NEW Minimum Spec GPU's... 

Upvote and comment to support a small niche YT creator spending his own money to help new players. I have a 4090 and am watching the whole thing. Keep it up brother, thanks for the testing.

I am so happy I found your channel! Been looking for this kind of info for a year now. I'm finally upgrading my PC with SC in mind and your testing data is just invaluable!

I actually tried playing SC on a UHD 750 iGPU. It was indeed unplayable. How can they recommend integrated graphics for such a heavy game is beyond me

I think they believe if the server runs at 5fps so can you!

Really appreciate the comprehensive performance tests, especially right before foundation festival. Thanks!

Always a good show! I think I'll keep my 4070, but it's great to have a channel that separates myth from reality regarding Star Citizen performance

Wao. You've gone down on a rabbit hole very deep. Thank you for these numbers! Should make a good point for me, what to upgrade.

Thanks for putting in the effort to make this video. Running around the game and hardware swapping to this degree, compiling data, charting it, a herculean effort!

I just built a machine last weekend with a 12400F, 32gb DDR4-3200 & 1080ti, with medium settings and the fancy crap turned off I get between 35-65fps. Needless to say, the little dude was VERY happy!

Thank you for testing, compiling, and sharing these real game-play minimum requirements. I do think a minimum requirement standard should be All settings set to Low instead of some set to Off. This at least proves the game is fully playable with this minimum hardware.

I will give you a one-word reason why they have it on the list... MONEY

Well done great review. CIG,......makes you wonder if they've actually played there own game?

I really appreciate you doing this work to find out what the real minimum specs are.

Wish the b-roll behind the charts reflected the data! Excellent video tho, good research.

Great work as usual, maybe after the new render pipeline is fully implemented they can actually get the minimum requirements into a realistic set. It was a little confusing that you kept switching between using TSR and TRS (guessing it was a typo in the script and you just stuck with it?)

Rocking a 7900xtx in my build but still love you videos!! Thank you for the comprehensive testing!

Not only did this video remind me of getting by with my 4th gen Dell & 1050 Ti LP for a few years while watching your videos, but by exposing CIG's new base specs scientifically like this, you've made it easier for me to use this video for when the few new people ask before buying the game. I'll stick with my Ryzen 5600 and covid era priced GTX 1070 until AMD APUs and Vulkan converge into not needing another GPU, which I think I'll make it till then. Thank you for taking all the time to do this one!

Finally, someone analysing things without measuring their epene while they're at it. Nice clip. Well done. I have a mate who's system might barely be able to run SC, so t his was highly useful. On a side note, I was considering building a livingroom pc and using an old i5 3570k (Sandy Bridge, 4 cores 4 threads) which coincidentally meets the minimum specs, not that I would actually want to play SC on it, but funny that I could, allegedly.

I am currently playing on a 2020 iPad Pro, game runs fine! It's over at the pledge store. Very smooth gameplay no bugs.

TEE ESS ARRR TSR jus playin', great video. Waiting until next year to upgrade PC anyway, Ryzen 9xxxX3D and RTX 5090. Think that will be sufficient at 4k

As usual very thorough. You should work as a consultant for CIG and they should mandate you to come up with the minimum specs 😊. Good job sir.

If you think Loreville is bad you should go to the distribution centers. I have what would have been considered a monster rig just under 3 years ago and on high settings I get as low as 14 FPS. In the remainder of the game I get close to 60 average. With with 150 plus in space and anywhere from 43 to 53 and landing areas. 5800X3D, EVGA FTW 3080, 32GB 3200mt and 4G. Gen 4 SSD @7000gps read. -- typed using voice to text in the Sun so apologies in advance for any typos.

I am on holiday atm. Running SC on i7 laptop 16 gb and 1060 6gb. It works. On Orison I got around 30 fps. It is manageable. No upscaling enabled.

While I'm not a 'minimum spec' kind of gamer, I appreciate all the work you do for those that are. Not everybody can spend $4k on a new PC. I hope you post in Spectrum suggesting your minimum specs. Maybe we can get them to increase that so gamers get at least 24-30fps. I used your channel to help in my purchasing decisions and have been really been happy with the performance of my new PC. You da best! ❤

one of my friends ran the game on a i7-3770, 1650, 16gb ddr3 1333mhz on a sata ssd he was able to do most things with us apart from travel to planets and cities.

How much Vram did you set for the IGPU for the HD 730 testing, The fps should be low, but the quantum travel frame rate being lower than that Orison is very strange

Thanks for doing these deep dives.

Yay! I can still hold on to my 1660 s for a while longer

Thanks for making this video. I will be passing this info to friends that haven't upgraded their pcs in a bit.

Apologies for the comment bombs but in no way should a minimum spec not include clouds when they literally have a city in the clouds. At that point you aren't even playing the game they sold you.

One thing that's very clear from your orison cloud comparison is that turning cloud rendering off gives one a definite tactical advantage.

Seems like marketing now also dictates the minimum specs :)

Quite apart from the price making a 4080 out of reach (but I am hoping a 4070 with more than 8GB of ram becomes affordable at some point) the power requirements and that dodgy socket for the cables make it a no no in my book.

My old Vega 56 (Last year) ran it pretty darn good for what it was, in 1440p. 4K was a no way but it did okay in 1440p. Then again, I was use to having total crap for gaming for years, R9 290 when I first started playing SC.

🍻Thanks for your work on this, mate! CIG quoted new min spec: 🤣 - My trusty old i7 2600 with a 1070Ti was _just_ playable in SC versions up to 3.16, with a fair bit of stutter. The bottom line here is that at the moment, SC is CPU bound and the low to lower spec GPUs you've tested here are likely to be paired with equivalently older and lower-spec CPUs and probably 16GB RAM, rendering SC as largely unplayable on those platforms. That you'd paired these older GPUs with a 7800X3D was telling! - Your tongue-twisted annunciation of "TSR" as "TRS" was appropriate -> Load into SC on your older rig ... Get the feeling of gaming on a TRS-80 Colo[u]r Computer! 😂 So, talking to this video, we're looking at RX5700 / GTX1070Ti GTX1660 as a min. baseline for GPU, 32GB RAM _and_ NVMe SSD and a fairly strong CPU. My now ageing i9-9900K, 32GB and RTX3080 give decent, but not outstanding results - but this machine (with an Arc 770) will be handed over to our smol person in a couple of weeks.

Wow, integrated graphics? I don't know who they're kidding there... Great video as always!

Hi, im curious, what is your 7800x3d clock speed set to? I jave a similiar setup up, 7800x3d @4.8-4.9 and a 4070ti super, and get the same frames in lorville at 1440p almost max settings as your graph for 1080p on low with a 4080. I also tested going down to 1080 and the performance was roughly the same as 1440. Could some cards benefit from turning the graphics up?

I am running a i7-8700k---cpu 3,70 ghz. with 32 gig ram. My gpu is a Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 ti. The game runs great and I can do everything fairly smooth but......When I jump into QT If I look into it I crash. I have to look down to not crash. Any Ideas? Other than that crash i enjoy being on planetside and moons and the space game. I just can't figure out crashing while in QT looking forward. Thanks, Great video! My home is Loreville and I have no problems.

You're doing god's work, sir. Thank you for your service. And I'm sorry about the GPU load on your wallet.

Time and time again you do an amazing job for SC I just wish they would your testing onboard and change the min spec to what you have said to me the 1660 is min spec but no point playing SC with it all turned off 9800x3d soon LOL with a RTX5090 lol Not changing my system though not for some years the 7800x3d and the RTX 4090 will have to do

Last time I flew into Loreville all my frames tanked hard, and yet I can go to A18, New Babbage, and Orison with no real issue. I'll be installing a Nvidia GeForce 4060 Ti 8GB so I hope it runs the game better.

My 5700XT still runs well in SC. However, I upgraded to 7800XT a few months back, and its nice, when the game wants it to.

I know it's not appropriate for the video, but did you try it with Lossless Scaling just to see? I'd love to hear how that turned out. Yikes, CIG. Not a good look for my guy, Chris.

If you can can you try the 16 GB version of the a770? I love to see what the performance is with this new patch and it's important because rarely does anybody do a benchmark with an Intel card on Star Citizen it's hard to find numbers with. Micro Center currently has an Intel bundle for 500 USD which includes the 16 GB version of the a770 a motherboard RAM and a 12700K

Wtf ! Come on CIG stop wasting money on these type of workers putting out this information to the public....

Having some really strange performance results last few days. I turned on photo mode and while the frames dropped from 45-70 to 30-45 however the auto scaling and cig-trs. It looked really gorgeous as photo mode clouds would expect…but the game ran so. Smoothly..almost smoother and pretty. I started to wonder if photo mode for clouds was pushing more anti aliasing and other variables favoring gpu even more. Sadly nvideo cpu and gpu data was frozen in overlay and only working on frame reporting. I had to avoid recording, and duel pc records and streamed to twitch because it performance tanks. I did see I was running full 12 GB vram 😅 and 43-48GB Ram usage out of 64. Specs and avg temps. i13600k /4070ti 64GB DDR5 5600mhz trident gskill and slightly some cpu watt capping as this is micro itx Motherboard build and summer temps 😂 65-75 C temps but can 45-99% gpu (4k) and 2k second screen. CPU 65% load most time. 65/70-111/120 FPS I cap my monitor to 120hz and thus 120 frames. All graphic on high other than water sim which is off or at medium until further game optimization. So curiously does photo mode improve performance to the GPU? Afterthoughts… curious if the 3090 with 24GB vram and bigger memory bus 384 bit runs better or worse compared to the 4070ti 192bit. Since you are the master of all things SC CPU GPU I thought I’d put this here. Since 4070ti compute wise with 40 series features supposed to be a 3090 equivalent, I might test this out again on my 3090 12900k ddr4 128GB ram is also not tuned, and cpu has n been capped at around 180 watts if I recall 95 % performance but save 40watts of crazy heat.

They're crazy. Im still using a i7-6700k, gtx 1070, with 32gb ram and game plays rough. With nvidia settings tweaks I can get a pretty steady 30 fps but its a terrible experience. I wont be back until I can afford to build a new PC. Either way interesting video.

good stuff, thanks

Yo tenner, any chance you could chuck some timestamps in the description for the boyz

Vulkan might change some of these results. And to be fair, 1080p might just be too much for the worst of these results. Drop it to 720p (or even lower) and revisit.

Great vids like this can save new Citizens a lot of pain. Cheers.

do you upscale from the drivers or from the game settings ? because I use upscaling ingame and the quality is the same even all the way to the lowest setting

@3:01 I don't think you understand, those frame rates are the same as what the server sees, so in effect, if the server performance is adequate, then that client performance is also adequate. That is their logic.

That was a lot of Data. It was just 3 years ago I was on a i7 GTX 970 went from doing ok to nothing. Now the 1060. I hope it lasts the duration so others can at least get into the game. Surprisingly the RX 6800 does decent except during events 😢

Had an RX6700 two years ago, and 170fps on Planets and 220fps inspace (with 1440p high details without RSR or AFMF) Since 2024 i got a RX6800 and i got now over 500fps inspace with 1440p high details with RSR and AFMF. Its Insane.

happily scooting along at around 30fps with my 1070TI paired up with a 6700k 32gb ram and an M.2 tb drive. and running it at 2k resolution.

i'd reccomend if you are going around RX 560 budget maybe try to find an msi Armor 8GB 256-bit RX580 2048SP... it's a decent GPU runs a little hot so make sure your case cooling is decent enough... but paired with a Ryzen 5 5600X even it will do a fairly descent job at 1080p it did for me heck that was before they added TSR and I was getting 30fps minimum... I'd warn you to keep clouds off though this specific card isn't great with volumetrics of any kind it struggled with the fog on valheim!

FYI, you can play star citizen on an rog ally. I didn't play a lot because FPS was kind of garbage I was getting about 20 at grim and about 30 in deep space.

Oh yeah the optimization is just about right 😂 NASA PC for space game makes sense :)

Im running it on a laptop with 3050ti and a 12gen i7 with 64g of ram when my desktop is not available. it runs pretty smooth. I dont know how much better is 3050ti compare to 1060. I imagine is not much.

I have an issue: RTX 3090Ti... I went down to 1080p and then upscaled with DLLS Quality.. wonderful FPS increase. Issue was.. game conflicts. 1. Press F and scroll mouse forward to zoom and it makes you look up at the sky. 2. Open inventory and mouse would not move to the right side of the screen or the lower left. 3. ASOP terminals when activated makes me look up at the sky. I turned back to 1440p and all the issues went away.

Hi, have you tried to put high settings for graphics settings ( just cloud off) motion blur off and film grain off?

im playing "decently" well on an older 1660super card.....but i realize i need to eye upgrades soon X_X

CIG needs to turn off their always on in house auto upscaling tech. Their in house solution is atrocious and moving objects have significant ghosting resulting in low quality of things like ramps going up and down, doors opening, anything with a grid like texture...etc

assuming a 7800x3d and 64gb ddr5-6000, what gpu to achieve 4k60 in the most demanding areas? looking to build a system cuz my 7700hq/rx580 laptop isn't cutting it!

I am guessing these are CIG's targets for minimum spec once Vulcan is done? Perhaps Vulcan will allow an Rx580 and a 1060 6Gb to be playable. It is not going to look great but it could be played. I do agree the 1660 should work well and I do think that the RX 5700 should work as well if they will fix the AMD issue. I would be happy if they could get most 8 GB cards to run the game on medium or low settings. So many systems out there have 8 GB cards. Running well on an 8 GB card will allow most budget gaming cards and gaming laptops run the game ok.

I bought gtx 1060 on 2017 to play Star Citizen. First versions run very well…….now, what a pity

In my experience, you need a quantum computer. Still ❤ SC!

'We don't care about their experience. We just want their money & our practices are are within legal boundries'. Mega Corps

grayzone warfare also did something like this with minimum spec... they just want to get more money even if the players dont run the game...

CIG seems to put out minimum specs based on their future selves telling them some secret but they don't realise it is an alternate reality.

My 2nd PC has a Vega 64. Turning Vulkan on caused a crash to desktop. :(

my 5700 works just fine with vulcan. there seems to be an issue on your side

Vulkan works on my 7900 XTX if i deactivate Radeon Image Sharpening in Adrenalin software for Star Citizen. As it is default on it might be the same problem for the RX 560? Could be worth a try.

since 3.23 came out my game crashes all the time now, i have a i7-9700k intell and a 2060 gpu with 64 ram and since that update i can play for about 5 min then the whole computer freezes and i have to reboot, was going to upgrade my power and gpu to a 3060 and get new ram and new coolers for a temp fix till i can save for big new stuff.

I have a 5700XT the game loads in vulcan but it won't let you open the hab

A good minimum spec is 11400f , 1660 super, and 32gigs at 3000 or 3200 speed

they might have tested the hardware on a newer and better version of Vulkan, or they are insane.

Well, I'm running star citizen 30 fps on low graphics, with a ryzen 5 8600g with 4gb vram and 28gb RAM.

Its honestly baffling how CIGs minimum spec basically amounts to whether it will run or not, and if it will they give is the ok. 30 fps should be the minimum standard for any game these days, and their min spec system should be aimed at that level of performance. I guess marketing don't want to discourage people from potentially donating to the development.

Yeh to be fair the GTX 1080 still a champ. It upscales ok i can run it 1440p but the CPU is what bottle necks my 6700K is on it's last legs and i can't even think about upgrading till i know where I'll be LIVING in the near future.

So what is the cheapest computer you can build to play SC with acceptible FPS.

I don't know my radion 6500 XT sapphire has been running the game just fine this whole time

Right off the bat, I expect the A380 to perform the best, followed by the RX5700 because of VRAM amount, with the 6GB(?) 1060 bringing up the rear. Maybe I'm wrong. Edit: I was wrong on the A380. Must be that the driver isn't configured for Star Citizen yet. I was way off on the 1060. I was correct the RX5700 was better than the 1060, but it is debatable because of the frame times. I didn't see the RX560 or the intel integrated graphics in the list and I even paused the video to look at minimum recommendation screenshot. My brain must have blocked them out. That said I am now curious how the integrated graphics on the 7800X3D would perform!

If you FPS matches the server... The NPCs work

Love my A380 GPU... in my plex server!

TRS or TSR and CIG or CRG??

Why even consider anything before the 3000 series.

I have several PC's. The weakest oldest being an i7 8700K with 32GB RAM and a 3060 12GB . On this PC, its runs extremely well and is very playable. The servers are the worst.

It's embarrassing to be honest, I can't imagine the face of the person who approved the new requirements, I mean the UHD series struggle with Minecraft, how did they think it's good for SC ?

Some of the recommendations are due to third party partnerships. They get bid big bucks to put that on the list and any discrepancy can be explained away by blaming dozens of other hardware/software/configuration variables.

New minimum spec: Nitrogen cooled quantum computer.

Seems like they completely lost contact with reality over at CIG. They are too accustomed to communicating their hopes and dreams instead of the real deal.

minimum means does it load.. not does it play recommended is wat ya should be aiming for on ANY game title not minimum ... lol that just means the thing comes on... always remember that :P

CIG can't even deliver a patch to completion, idk why anyone would trust them to say anything remotely true

Lol, it seems mimimum recommendations are also in Alpha state, so don't complain about.

Well as long as they get more customers in the door what's a straight up lie about if you can play it or not.

Why does 1660 works better than 5700, that's confusing

When optimized and servers get 30 fps, I think these cards will work a lot better. While running any other UE 5 games will demand a GPU specs minimum of 2070 to be any good.

You can run SC on a steam deck, you wouldn't want to buy I tried. For science.