Keeping its recent promise to release one of the best PS5 games to date, Returnal, on PC “in early 2023”, Sony announced that HouseMarque’s successful shoot’ em up will be available for Windows on February 15th. It is the latest of a number of great PlayStation hits finding its way to the PC gaming market — from Days Gone and Horizon Zero Dawn to God of War and Marvel’s Spiderman — so Sony seems to be getting the hang of it now, offering all the extras that PC gamers expect from a quality port of a AAA console title. HouseMarque’s Mikael Haveri outlined those in a post in the official PlayStation blog, while also listing the hardware requirements for each level of graphical fidelity Returnal can be played at.
Sony’s latest PC port features support for both NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR technologies, so owners of both brands of graphics cards can enjoy higher frame rates, as well as ray-traced reflections and shadows (the PS5 version only featured the latter). There’s also support for Ultrawide (21:9) and Super Ultrawide (32:9) resolutions, as well as support for advanced sound, be it Dolby Atmos or 3D (via two different audio solutions). It’s worth noting that Returnal also supports ray-traced audio, which means that sound effects are calculated and played back in the same positional, real-time way that graphics are.
This is also one of only a handful of PC titles supporting the DualSense controller’s haptic feedback and adaptive trigger functionality (just not wirelessly), which was impressive in the PS5 version, adding an extra layer of immersion to the frantic action. PC gamers need not worry, though, as Returnal will obviously be offering keyboard and mouse support with a wide range of customization options, as well as support for traditional wireless controllers.
As for the system requirements of Returnal, as laid out by Housemarque itself, things are a bit better than what most of us previously anticipated. The title was supposedly asking for 32GB of RAM at a minimum (!), according to its Steam page, but it turns out that this is only the case for the Epic and Ray Tracing set of requirements. What’s more, at the lowest quality settings Returnal can be played off a hard disk, which many of us did not think would be possible given the PS5, SSD-based version. Here are the five presets Sony has assigned to specific hardware requirements (at least some adjustable image quality settings are expected too).
Minimum (720p/60FPS/Low graphics settings)
OS: Windows 10 64-bit
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (6 GB) or AMD Radeon RX 580 (8 GB)
CPU: Intel Core i5–6400 (4 core 2.7GHz) or AMD Ryzen 5 1500X (4 core 3.5GHz)
RAM: 16GB DDR4
Storage: 60GB HDD
Medium (1080p/60FPS/Medium graphics settings)
OS: Windows 10 64-bit
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (8 GB) or AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT (6 GB)
CPU: Intel Core i5–8400 (6 core 2.8GHz) or AMD Ryzen 5 2600 (6 core 3.4GHZ) 3.5GHz)
RAM: 16GB DDR4
Storage: 60GB SSD
Recommended (1080p/60FPS/High graphics settings)
OS: Windows 10 64-bit
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 2070 Super (8 GB) or AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (12 GB)
CPU: Intel i7–8700 (6 core 3.7 GHz) or AMD Ryzen 7 2700X (8 core 3.7 GHz)
RAM: 16GB DDR4
Storage: 60GB SSD
Epic (4K/60FPS/Epic graphics settings)
OS: Windows 10 64-bit
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3080 (10 GB) or AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (16 GB)
CPU: Intel i7–9700K (8 core 3.7 GHz) or AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (8 core 3.6 GHz)
RAM: 32GB DDR4
Storage: 60GB SSD
Ray Tracing (4K/60FPS/Epic graphics settings)
OS: Windows 10 64-bit
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti (12 GB) or AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT (16 GB)
CPU: Intel i9–11900K (8 core 3.5 GHz) or AMD Ryzen 9 5900X (12 core 3.7 GHz)
RAM: 32GB DDR4
Storage: 60GB SSD
Returnal is one of those PlayStation5 games that just played more like a PC game than a typical console game from the very beginning, so it’s great to see that Sony took the time to offer a version of it PC gamers can enjoy to its fullest. It’s easy to imagine it looking spectacular e.g. on an Ultrawide monitor, the field of view much wider during a boss fight, the shooting much more accurate with a mouse in tight situations. Here’s hope that it will be as accomplished a production on a technical level as the PS5 version was in 2021 terms. Only a few weeks to find out!
