After watching The Matrix Awakens – a massive tech demo showcasing the features of Epic’s Unreal Engine 5 – many PC gamers were probably left wondering if their current rigs would be able to handle such visuals.
Some good news was that the demo was rendering on the PS5 and Xbox Series X, respectively, which set a reasonably low bar for minimum hardware capabilities. Since late 2022, you have also been able to try the engine out in Epic’s own Fortnite, as it moved over to UE 5.1 for Chapter 4.
Then again, one game is not much to go by and Fortnite is unlikely to be the most demanding title.
Other UE5 games are on the way later in 2023 and some of them have been given tentative system requirements. We will have a quick look at them here and speculate as to what you might need to run them.
Key Features in Unreal Engine 5
To say that Unreal Engine is a big deal in the gaming industry would be an understatement. Previous versions have been used by a sizeable chunk of AAA titles in the past 20 years and UE5 will keep this tradition going.
Some of the most visually impressive (and demanding) features in the latest version include:
Lumen (lighting and reflection) –Lumen provides dynamic global illumination and ray-traced reflections, which add realism and atmospheric detail to the game’s environments.
Nanite(geometry) – Nanite is a method of rendering highly detailed geometry of buildings, architectural details and natural objects.
Virtual Shadow Maps (shadowing) – A shadow-mapping method that greatly enhances shadow resolution, matching the hi-res output from Nanite.
The engine also introduces or refines other interesting features such as the upscaling method TSR and the MetaHuman framework for creating realistic human characters. But the overall picture is that it looks challenging to run on older hardware.
Recommended PC Specs – What Is Known So Far
Like any other set of games that share the same engine, UE5-based games will not come with the same system requirements. Developers are free to add whatever hardware-intensive features they want and scale performance to specific hardware, e.g., the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X.
As we’ve seen with Fortnite, games can still run on low-end hardware. If you want to enable the headline features of UE5, however, the hardware requirements go up substantially.
| Recommended Hardware | Fortnite Epic Quality | Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl | Silent Hill 2 Remake |
| GPU (Nvidia) | RTX 3070 | RTX 2070S | RTX 2080 |
| GPU (AMD) | RX 6700 XT | RX 5700 XT | RX 6800 XT |
| CPU (Intel) | Core i7-8700 | Core i7-9700K | Core i7-8700K |
| CPU (AMD) | Ryzen 7 3700X | Ryzen 7 3700X | Ryzen 5 3600X |
| RAM | 16 GB | 16 GB | 16 GB |
Other than Fortnite, the recommended specs for Stalker 2 and Silent Hill 2 Remake have been published on Steam. One pattern is immediately apparent, which is that the graphics card requirements match or slightly exceed the graphics capabilities offered by the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.
Can You Run It?
The above are the recommended specs for these games, meaning that you can get by with less. That would of course also mean missing out on most of the generational improvements when it comes to visuals.
If you are aiming for the visual fidelity seen in some current gameplay trailers, it looks like you are going to need a graphics card that’s at least as fast as the GPUs found in the Xbox Series X and PS5.
The AMD GPU in the PS5 roughly corresponds to a Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card, so it is not surprising that this exact GPU is mentioned in UE5 recommendations. Enabling raytracing and 4K resolution will likely require more powerful cards as well as DLSS/FSR upscaling.
