No Man's Sky still doesn't have recommended system requirements, so we made our own

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You may have heard about the big new No Man’s Sky ‘Worlds Part 1’ update that dropped yesterday. Well, with a massive amount of changes being made to the game, many of them graphical, we were surprised to see that the devs haven’t (yet) revised the game’s system requirements. Though they do mention some performance improvements in their update blog, there is some uncertainty, with some users actually saying the game runs worse.

Truth be told, No Man’s Sky has never been known to be the most well-optimized game out there. The minimum system requirements give something for users to compare against, but it’s about time some recommended specs were available.

No Man’s Sky hasn’t gotten any new system requirements despite the recent 5.0 update

No Man’s Sky system requirements, source: Steam

Check out the Steam store page and you’ll notice that the recommended settings lay bare, aside from the usual “Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system”. We were almost tempted to run a virtual machine on 32-bit to test it out, but decided against it in the end – we’ll leave that to anyone who can be bothered to do so for minimal gain.

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Anyway, we can see that the current minimum specs suggest at least an Intel Core i3 processor paired with a 3GB GPU or even Intel UHD 630 integrated graphics, plus 8GB of RAM. Nothing too difficult to reach, but don’t expect amazing performance with this kind of hardware.

Our recommended specs for No Man’s Sky in 2024

Moving on to our recommended requirements now, we’ve tried to be lenient while maintaining specs that are still relevant in 2024. The game is pretty old at this point, and since the new update should bring performance upgrades, the very latest hardware isn’t exactly required. It would be nice to have it, but we’d say that ‘recommended’ specs are all about maintaining a stable framerate on above-average settings. So, here’s what we’ve come up with.

Operating System: Windows 10/11, 64-bit
Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X / Intel Core i5-12400F or higher
Memory: 16GB RAM or higher
Graphics card: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 / AMD Radeon RX 6800 or higher
Storage: 15GB available space, SSD recommended

If you do have the luxury of grabbing some current-gen hardware, or you’re simply due an upgrade right now, we’d recommend some of the GPUs and CPUs we’ve reviewed recently such as the RTX 4070 Super, RX 7800 XT, Ryzen 7600X, or i5-14700K. Or you can check out our best GPU for No Man’s Sky guide too.