Something to look forward to: After five years of trying to make sense of Mundfish's strange-looking but well-hyped first-person shooter Atomic Heart, players will be able to try it for themselves in a couple of weeks. The system requirements seem slightly less demanding than other recent AAA games.
Mundfish has released the full system requirements for its upcoming FPS Atomic Heart (one of our PC most anticipated games of 2023). The developer also revealed more details about what features PC players can expect when it releases later this month.
The only potentially serious demand Atomic Heart makes is for 90GB of storage space. The CPU, GPU, and RAM requirements look similar to other Q1 2023 releases like Forspoken, Returnal, the Dead Space remake, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.
On low graphics settings at 1080p, an Nvidia GTX 960 or AMD Radeon R9 380 should get you a minimum of 30 frames per second. The GeForce GTX 1060 and Radeon 580 – still two of the most popular graphics cards – are good enough for 60fps at those specs.
Mundfish stressed that those frame rates should be the minimum players expect to see on the listed hardware, even during intense gameplay situations. At 1080p on low settings, a GTX 1060 or Radeon 580 should reach far higher than 60fps much of the time, even approaching 100fps.
Given this, the rest of the requirements should be taken as a conservative estimate. For medium settings at 1080p and 60fps, Mundfish recommends a GTX 1070 or Radeon 5600 XT. For high settings at the same performance metric, a GTX 1080 or 5700 XT.
The GeForce RTX 2070 Super and Radeon 6700 XT have started appearing under the recommended specs for recent games. Atomic Heart suggests them for ultra settings at 1080p and 60fps. The spec sheet only pulls out recent high-end GPUs like the 3080 or 6800 XT for ultra settings at 4K.
Thankfully, unlike some other titles, this one isn't recommending 32GB of RAM. In fact, Mundfish said 8GB is enough if players choose to go without shader precompilation.
Stuttering during gameplay due to compiling shaders has been a prevalent issue in recent PC games like Elden Ring. Similar to the Dead Space remake, Atomic Heart will start compiling shaders as soon as it boots, with a visible progress bar, to avoid stuttering. However, the feature requires at least 12GB of system RAM.
The system requirements don't say whether they account for ray tracing or image reconstruction (probably not), both of which will be available in Atomic Heart. The game will support DLSS 3 and FSR 2, but won't include Intel's Xess before launch. Mundfish has showcased Atomic Heart's ray-traced shadows, reflections, and ambient occlusion since its 2018 development videos.
The game launches on February 21 on Steam, Game Pass, Xbox One and Xbox Series, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.
