Quoted from Bethesda's blog:

On the heels of our Gone Gold announcement, we’ve put the final touches on the recommended PC requirements for The Evil Within. These specifications are listed as “recommended” as they are the settings we’ve determined ensure that your gameplay experience plays as intended by the development team.

Note: We do not have a list of minimum requirements for the game. If you’re trying to play with a rig with settings below these requirements (you should plan to have 4 GBs of VRAM regardless), we cannot guarantee optimal performance.

Recommended PC System Specifications

• 64-bit Windows 7/Windows 8
  i7 with four plus cores
• 4 GBs RAM
• 50 GB of hard drive space*
• GeForce GTX 670 or equivalent with 4GBs of VRAM
• High Speed Internet Connection
  Steam account and activation

*It’s worth noting that the 50 GB of space required is for the PC install. When the installation is complete, the game will take up ~41 GB of HDD space.

Wow. Is this the first game to require 4 GB of video RAM? I get that the RAGE engine has some megatextures that it has to work with, but the Steam Tech survey says that only 1.64% of their users are running with 4 GB of video RAM. Going to be curious to see what happens on the Steam tech support forums when people start buying this without looking at the requirements.

That is indeed "cray-cray".

Well, PS4 it is, I guess.

Glad I finally got a next gen console so I don't have to worry about this stuff anymore.

The only thing on that list that kills my ability to play it is the VRAM. That's just fucking ridiculous.

@zeroregistry: These are recommended so I'm still wondering what kinda jump we'll see between this and something hovering between min and max.

Glad I didn't jump on getting the PC version of this

Let's hope that it uses all those resources effectively though. But I was planning on getting this on PS4.

That's not just cray-cray, that's batshit insane. It's certainly not a good looking game either.

I'm taking that with a grain of salt, I want to see how Evil Within actually runs on various systems once the game gets in peoples' hands.

According to those requirements, my GTX 780 Ti with 3gb of VRAM isn't enough. I don't think so, Bethesda.

Whoa! That's beyond my computer, that's for sure.

Japanese PC ports, y'all.

Yeah, no, I'll just hold upgrades to my computer til I know what Witcher 3 requires for smooth play. I run every other game I play fine on my old gtx560; cept I had some dismal results with Dead Rising 3.

Hmm...

Then again it's been years since I looked at required/recommended PC specs let alone consider them useful. Most games tend to get benchmarked, especially ones from high profile developers and publishers. This either means very little and they're just overshooting it for some reason or the game is really unoptimized. Otherwise I hope it's the former because woof. Obviously we'll get there at some point in the near future but the average enthusiast PC is probably running a Core i5 equivalent CPU and a 2GB GPU.

I'm sure Bethesda would love it but Evil Within isn't the game that's going to get people to ditch their video cards that run everything well now.

I have had situations in the past where simply turning down shadows was enough to drastically reduce a games requirements, but yes it could also just be a horrid piece of optimization.
It's great that more games in the future are coming to PC, but if they're gross technical messes it's going to be rough.

It'll still run better than Saints Row II.

These are recommended specs. Wolfenstien ran okay on 2GB.

Guys, games need more VRAM now. Both consoles have the potential to offer games a lot of it now, so you'll need more on your PC to get the most of PC ports.

That is weird for now, but 4GB is standard on cards going forward, so it won't be for long. It also probably just means you will need to swap down from ultra textures to high textures. Considering a 670 is the RECOMMENDED card, the game probably won't be terribly intensive. Just optimized for more VRAM than is typical at the moment for PCs.

Seems a bit weird. The visuals in this game doesn't look particularly amazing.

Except that VRAM isn't the be-all, end-all of performance. All the VRAM in the world doesn't mean a thing if the system doesn't also have a beefy GPU and CPU to process all of that data. Just look at the upcoming Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition...this is a game that easily runs at 1080p/60 on cards that are several years old, and yet is going to be 30 fps on consoles. You just can't directly compare a low power console APU to high end discrete graphics cards on PC.

It hasn't turned into a mess yet, but i'm increasingly paranoid about that 1000 dollar graphics card I bought that only contains 2 gig of RAM. I'm still hoping for another year out of it.

@rowr: Witcher 3 will probably require 3GB. You'll crack then.

I think my system is up to snuff, but fuck that 50 gb install. That's 1/3 my monthly data cap! Ps4 for me.

Noticed that as well when they announced NBA 2k15 for PC. Super psyched for the next gen graphics coming to pc then saw the 50 gb install for it. I guess that's just the age we're living in now where games are 50 gb downloads.

But I was under the impression that my 660ti would be considered good forever!?

Something like that?

But for serious though, lots of rawr rawr/lack of optimization screams and demands for a refund.

I know I will if that's the case.

I assume this means 'we haven't really been bothered testing this on different hardware configurations'.

They're obviously not the same thing, but it might help to have a look at the minimum requirements for the recent Resident Evil games on Steam:

Resident Evil: Revelations

• OS:Windows® XP
• Processor:Intel® Core™ 2 Duo 2.4Ghz or better, AMD Athlon™ X2 2.8 Ghz or better
• Memory:2 GB RAM
• Graphics:NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800GTS or better, ATI Radeon™ HD3850 or better
• DirectX®:9.0c
• Hard Drive:8 GB HD space
• Sound:DirectSound supported with DirectX9.0c or better
• Other Requirements:Broadband Internet connection

Resident Evil 6

• OS:Windows Vista®/XP, Windows 7, Windows 8
• Processor:: Intel® CoreTM2 Duo 2.4 Ghz or better, AMD AthlonTM X2 2.8 Ghz or better
• Memory:2 GB RAM
• Graphics:NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800GTS or better
• DirectX®:9.0c
• Hard Drive:16 GB HD space
• Sound:Standard audio device
• Other Requirements:Broadband Internet connection

Resident Evil 4 HD

• OS: Windows XP/ Vista®, Windows 7, Windows 8
• Processor: Intel® Core™ 2 Duo 2.4 Ghz or better, AMD Athlon™ X2 2.8 Ghz or better
• Memory: 2 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800GTS or better, ATI Radeon™ HD 4850 or better
• DirectX: Version 9.0c
• Hard Drive: 15 GB available space
• Sound Card: Standard audio device

Also, other id Tech 5 games:

Wolfenstein: The New Order

• OS: 64-bit Windows 7/Windows 8
• Processor: Intel Core i7 or equivalent AMD
• Memory: 4 GB RAM
• Graphics: GeForce 460, ATI Radeon HD 6850
• Hard Drive: 50 GB available space

Rage

• OS: Win XP SP3, Vista, Win 7
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo or Equivalent AMD
• Memory: 2GB
• Hard Disk Space: 25GB
• Video Card: GeForce 8800, Radeon HD 4200

Megatexture is the future.

What I find really weird is how it wants 4gb of VRAM but also only 4gb of RAM, that is pretty low for recommended specs of a new pc game.

What is up with Id Tech 5 games requiring a massive amount of hard drive space? That textures aren't even extraordinarily high res. Are there a bunch of prerendered videos in these games?

I look at this and say, "Yep, console!"

It all made sense to me after you mentioned Id. I didn't know this games uses Id tech. The games have megatextures for some stupid reason.

Rorie, you've justified my use of cray cray early on as a mod. Thank you.

Also, holy shit, what do they think we're running here, Cray Cray Supercomputers? Get it? Get it? Huh?

Yep, I hate myself for that one.

That one physically hurt a little, and yet I applaud you.

Isn't this supposed to be id Tech 5? I recall that running Rage buttery smooth on a goddamn Xbox 360 and nothing in Evil Within looks remotely as large or as attractive as the stuff in that game.

@ezekiel:

I really hope Bethesda kills ID Tech 5 soon, none of the recent games lol look better nice last gen games, they use a lot ram, and require an ungodly amount hard drive space.

Seriously, Wolfienstein is around 50 gigs,the only two other games that come are the last of us remastered (not kinda big, but it does multi player maps, too) and battlefield 4 (that includes the all season pass dlc packs).

Mega textures seem like big bust to me.

That shit cray.

Well, that's why I bought a black Thingy™ that spins disks and makes graphics ... it spins them like cray-cray.

Smells like a lazy port. I'm all for games with high requirements to max out, we 've been skating by for a long time. However, i don't see anything about this game that looks like it should need all that. Wolfenstein ran beautifully on my 7870.

I don't think the Sega CD will run this game, unfortunately.

i7 as recommended? 4GB of VRAM? What the shit? I'm pretty excited for The Evil Within, but even I can say that the previews of this game didn't exactly paint it as a graphical behemoth. I refuse to believe that the game actually needs these specs, isn't this like 3 times the power of a PS4/Xbox One?

Hopefully my GTX 770 with 2GB VRAM can pull through. It did so for AC4, Dead Rising 3, Thief, Wolfenstein and Watch Dogs.

That's a pretty low bar. That game won't even run for me on a 16:10 aspect ratio monitor. It doesn't seem to support those resolutions. Just 16:9.

Get ready for a 15 gb day one patch, just you watch. id Tech 5 games are notorious for that kind of crap.

@ben_h: Yeah, I was joking!

I wonder how this game stacks up against Craysis.

Whenever I see something like that it just screams "bad optimization!" to me. Unless that game is doing next-level shit with graphics and such, I can't see how it would require that much horsepower to run. The reason why those specs are so high is because that's the only thing they could get it to run on because they fucked something up.

I saw Rorie tweet about this. This thing doesn't look good (graphically or otherwise) enough to be that intensive. It's definitely appearing to be from a lack of optimization which means lots of fun frame rate drops and day one bugs. PC would not be the way to go with this, if at all.

I know the PC MASTER RACE will always defend the pc as the best option for playing games but stuff like this is honestly why I just don't bother anymore with pc. I'm perfectly fine with playing console games.

I think that is an unfair assumption. It's an id Tech 5 game, just look back at the recent Wolfenstein and the differences between console & PC. I doubt the system requirements are going to turn out to be that much different once people actually get it installed on a variety of PC hardware and we can see how demanding it really is. I bet this is just Bethesda padding their numbers on the recommended requirements in an attempt to save themselves from complaints about a bad port.

I mean come on, Evil Within is coming out on 360 & PS3, too. Those platforms are ten years old - unless the versions are significantly different, there is no way these recommended specs are going to be anywhere close to realistic. Not only that, but "i7" is awfully generic for a CPU, that could be anything from a 4790k released this quarter all the way back to the first generation i7s from years ago. I'm just going to wait and see with this game.

That is by far the worst port I've ever come across. Having motion blur turned on made everything transparent, it couldn't properly interact with windows 7 to request access to as much RAM as it really needed and it ran at completely the wrong speed, dependent on your cpu clock speed, the fix for which involved a mod and a stopwatch.

I still played it for 90 hours though...