It’s amazing how quickly technology advances, isn’t it? Yesterday’s high-end is today’s bare-minimum, and so shall it ever be. See, this is why PC, despite being the superior platform in many cases, still doesn’t enjoy as much popularity as the console market. It’s not enough to have a PC, you gotta continually upgrade and replace components if you wanna keep enjoying things at about the same level. Case and point: Returnal on PC’s RAM requirements.

According to WCCFTech.com, Housemarque and Sony have announced the PC specs for the upcoming release of Returnal. In particular, it’s RAM requirement really stands out at 32GB, yet perhaps that really shouldn’t be so surprising. PC requirements in general have always advanced ahead of console baselines, so it was really just a matter of time before we got here.

Thirty-two GB of RAM sounds incredibly massive, but then how many PC players have already been there for years anyway? The only real change here is that 32GB is no longer “a stupid amount of RAM”, it’s just the new baseline. It’s the price PC players are going to have to keep paying so long as we keep chasing graphical fidelity over everything else. Personally, I don’t really get it since things have looked pretty darn good since the PS4 got released, but hey, graphics are still what sells for some reason.

As for PC vs. Console, this is also why console will never catch up to PC. It’d just be too expensive to try to achieve parity, especially one that would only last about 6 months or so. No, I think many console gamers are fine with that and are just happy to have a consistent experience throughout their machine’s lifespan. Not everyone feels like that, but then they’re the ones those super-expensive mid-gen upgrades are for.

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What do you think? Is 32GB a lot to require for a game? Are you primarily a PC or console gamer?

Image from the Returnal Steam Store Page