Why it matters: Are you excited about playing the upcoming remake of horror classic Dead Space on your PC in January? If you're using aging hardware and want to see the game in all its gore-filled glory, now might be a good time to upgrade, as the system requirements are pretty demanding.
The Dead Space remake rebuilds the game from the ground up, offering improved visual fidelity thanks to the switch from the RenderWare engine to the newer Frostbite engine. Limb dismemberment of the Necromorphs, a major element in the previous games, has also been overhauled to appear more realistic.
The Dead Space remake's Steam page has now been updated with the minimum and recommended PC specs. It's good news if you're happy to stick with the former: minimum specs ask for only an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X or Intel Core i5 8600 CPU combined with an RX 5700 or GTX 1070 graphics card. It also requires a pretty hefty but increasingly standard 50GB of storage space and 16GB of RAM rather than the 8GB we often see listed as a minimum requirement.
As expected, the recommended specs up the hardware quite a bit. CPU-wise, you need at least a Ryzen 5 5600X or a Core i5 11600K. As for the graphics cards, Dead Space asks for at least a Radeon RX 6700 XT or an RTX 2070. Memory and storage requirements remain the same.
Those recommended specs are pretty high. A quick look at the latest Steam survey shows the most popular card remains the GTX 1060, followed by the GTX 1650---both less powerful than Dead Space's minimum GPU requirement. The RTX 2060 and GTX 1050 Ti are the third and fourth most popular cards, respectively, among Steam users. Only when we reach the fifth and sixth position (RTX 3060/laptop variant) do we satisfy the game's recommended graphics card.
There's no mention of what resolutions/frame rates each set of specs will allow, those will likely come later, but it could be that the 'recommended' list aims for 1080p@60fps.
Dead Space lands on PC ($60), PlayStation 5 ($70), and Xbox Series X|S ($70) on January 27.