Star Citizen System Requirements (2026)
Step 01 of the Star Citizen beginner guide: what the game actually is, and whether the PC you already own can run it.
Star Citizen has a reputation for demanding an expensive PC. It is a heavier game than most, but the reputation runs well ahead of the reality, and the published specification does a poor job of explaining the difference.
That is why the answer below comes in three parts rather than the usual two. There is the hardware that gets the game to start, the hardware that gives you a genuinely good time, and the hardware worth buying if you want it consistently smooth. Most people are already sitting in the middle column and do not realise it. Find the one your PC already matches.
It will launch
CIG MINIMUMA good experience
WHAT WE ADVISESteadier frames
RECOMMENDEDMemory and storage decide this, not the graphics card. Star Citizen streams a continuous world rather than loading it in chunks, so it leans on RAM and drive speed far harder than most games. It runs on 16 GB, with cities in the region of 15 to 25 fps.
The honest advice: give it a go before you spend anything to upgrade your hardware. The bar is lower than you likely expect. Plenty of people are playing happily on several year old graphics cards, and the game has even been coaxed into running on a Steam Deck. Not well, but it runs. There is a 30-day refund on game packages, so the cheapest way to find out how your PC does is to try it.
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What is Star Citizen?
Star Citizen is a persistent sandbox space MMO by Cloud Imperium Games. Players fly hundreds of ships, trade cargo, mine ore, salvage wrecks and fight across three star systems: Stanton, Pyro and Nyx. It is in Alpha 4.10, playable now and patched regularly. Squadron 42 is the separate single-player campaign and has not released. Star Citizen is Windows PC only, not on Steam, PS5 or any console, and not on macOS or Linux. You download it through the RSI Launcher.
Will Star Citizen run on my PC?
Short answer: look at your RAM first, not your graphics card. Star Citizen streams the entire universe in and out of memory continuously, and running out of RAM is what produces the freezes people mistake for a broken game. It is the single most common reason a PC that clears the published minimum still cannot play.
The bit the spec sheet does not tell you
An RTX 3070 is a perfectly capable Star Citizen card, and on 16 GB of RAM it can still stutter badly crossing between areas. The graphics card was never the problem, and buying a bigger one would not have helped. Published spec lists imply every line matters equally, and for this game they do not: memory and storage carry far more weight than the rest.
The practical version: if you are on 16 GB, set a pagefile on a fast SSD before you judge the game. It costs nothing, takes five minutes, and it is what turns those freezes back into a playable frame rate. There is a walkthrough below.
| System RAM | In space and open areas | In cities and landing zones | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 16 GB | Fine. Space, quantum travel and most missions hold together. | Roughly 15-25 fps in Lorville or Area 18, with some stutter crossing between areas and on the metro. | Playable, with a pagefile on a fast SSD |
| 32 GB | Smooth for the great majority of play. | Roughly 25-35 fps with the odd stutter, comfortable for what cities are for. | Recommended |
| 64 GB | Smooth. | Headroom for the heaviest streaming, Pyro stations, contested zones, big fleet fights. | Nice to have, not needed |
How to read the cities column: the big landing zones are the heaviest places in the game and they are slower for everyone, on every specification. They are also social and logistical hubs, where you take missions, shop, outfit ships and store them. The flying, the fighting, the bunkers, caves and ground missions all happen elsewhere, where frame rates are far higher. A lower number in this column is an inconvenience, not a verdict on the game.
16 GB is the published floor and it does launch the game. Whether that counts as “runs” depends entirely on whether you intend to spend time in the cities.
Star Citizen PC requirements: the official CIG specification
These are the minimum and recommended requirements published by Cloud Imperium, unchanged and uninterpreted. Our commentary is in the sections around them, not inside them.
| Component | Minimum requirements | Recommended requirements |
|---|---|---|
| Operating system | Windows 10 64-bit, latest service pack | Windows 11 64-bit |
| Processor (CPU) | Quad core. Intel i7 Haswell or later, AMD Excavator or later. Must support AVX, AVX2 and FMA3. | Quad to eight core. Intel i7 or AMD Ryzen 5 and above. |
| Graphics card (GPU) | DirectX 11.1 capable, 4 GB VRAM. Vulkan 1.2 driver support. | DirectX 12 capable, 8 GB VRAM or more. |
| Memory (RAM) | 16 GB | 32 GB or more |
| Storage | 150 GB free on SSD. An NVMe drive is strongly advised. | 150 GB free on NVMe SSD. Allow 300 GB if you install PTU alongside LIVE. |
Download size is roughly 150 GB, so budget 150 GB of free space for LIVE alone. PTU and LIVE can sit on different drives.
The SSD rule has no exceptions
An NVMe SSD is mandatory, and this is not a settings problem you can tune around. The game streams assets continuously; a mechanical drive cannot sustain the read rate, and the result is missing textures, invisible geometry, broken missions and crashes. Put Windows on an SSD too, not only the game. A system drive that cannot keep up will stall the game regardless of where the game itself lives.
How your PC compares to everyone else’s
Requirements are easier to judge with something to measure them against. Valve publishes a monthly hardware survey covering millions of gaming PCs, and the August 2026 figures are worth putting next to what this page recommends, because the picture is more encouraging than the specification sheet suggests.
| Component | What most gaming PCs have | What this page recommends | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| System RAM | 16 GB is the most common at 41%, with 32 GB close behind at 37%. Around 88% have 16 GB or more. | 16 GB to play, 32 GB for consistency | Most people already clear it |
| VRAM | 16 GB at 27% and 8 GB at 26% are neck and neck. About 68% sit between 8 and 16 GB. | 8 to 16 GB | Two thirds are in the band |
| Graphics card | The single most common card is an RTX 3060, which has 12 GB. | Anything from 8 GB up | Comfortably inside |
| Resolution | Half of all gaming PCs run at 1920 x 1080. | 1080p or 1440p | Exactly right |
| Operating system | 71% are on Windows 11 64-bit. | Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit | Clears it |
| Free disk space | The most common amount free is 100 to 249 GB. | 150 GB free, on an SSD | The one to check first |
If you already own a 6 GB card
Do not go and buy one, but do not write off the one you have either. Six gigabytes still plays at 1080p, and this is not a guess: players running a GTX 1660 Ti, a 6 GB card, report 30+ fps in cities and 50+ everywhere else with the settings tuned and 32 GB of system memory behind it. Turn on upscaling, keep textures sensible, and a card of that generation is a perfectly good way to see the game before you decide whether to spend anything. 8 GB is still the floor we would tell anyone buying today.
Where we would set expectations lower: 4 GB of VRAM and below is genuinely tight, and 16 GB of RAM with no pagefile on a slow drive is the one combination that reliably disappoints people. Neither is a reason not to try, since the refund covers you either way, but both are worth knowing before you download 150 GB.
What that adds up to
The average gaming PC in 2026 is a 16 GB machine with an 8 to 16 GB graphics card, playing at 1080p on Windows 11. That is inside the range this page recommends, not below it. If your PC is roughly typical, the question is not whether you need to upgrade before you try Star Citizen. It is whether you have the disk space free and a pagefile set, and both of those cost nothing.
Does the minimum specification actually work?
It launches, which is what a minimum specification is for, and worth understanding before you spend anything. The minimum column is a compatibility check, not a performance promise. What it tells you is whether the game will start: whether your processor supports AVX2, whether your graphics card handles DirectX 11.1 and Vulkan 1.2, whether you have the disk space. It does not tell you the game will be enjoyable, and a machine assembled to exactly that specification is not a playable one.
Player reports say it from the other direction. A Ryzen 5 5600 with an RTX 3070 sits comfortably above the stated minimum on both processor and graphics card, and the game still struggled, because the limit was never the CPU or the GPU. It was 16 GB of memory. Meanwhile machines with far weaker graphics cards and 32 GB run the game perfectly well.
So read CIG’s two columns for what they each are. The minimum requirements answer will it launch. The recommended requirements answer will it play. And if you only take one number away, take the memory one.
Common symptoms, and what is actually causing them
Most “my PC cannot run this” reports are one of four specific faults, and three of them are fixable without buying anything.
| What you see | What it is | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Long freezes crossing between areas, near-zero fps on the metro | System RAM exhausted while streaming the next area in. | 32 GB is the fix. A pagefile is the stopgap, see below. |
| The game runs better on higher settings | Not a fault. The game is heavily CPU bound, so raising graphics settings shifts work onto a GPU that was sitting idle. | Leave settings up. Lowering them further will not help and may hurt. |
| Missing textures, invisible geometry, falling through floors or lifts | Asset streaming cannot keep pace, slow drive, or not enough memory to hold the load. | NVMe SSD, and more RAM. Falling through a lift is a streaming race you lost. |
| First launch takes half an hour before anything happens | Shader compilation. Entirely normal, and it happens again after some patches. | Wait it out once. Raising the Nvidia shader cache to 10 GB helps afterwards. |
Four fixes worth doing before you spend money
Set a pagefile if you are on 16 GB
Put Windows itself on an SSD
Raise the shader cache
Turn on upscaling
How to set a pagefile for Star Citizen
A pagefile lets Windows spill memory onto your SSD when it runs out of the real thing. It is slower than RAM, so it is not a substitute for buying more, but it takes five minutes, costs nothing, and it is the difference between Star Citizen stuttering and Star Citizen crashing. Do this before you spend money on anything.
Why this fixes crashes, not just stutter
Star Citizen’s out-of-memory crash is not really about how much RAM you have. It is about the Windows commit limit, which is your physical memory plus your pagefile added together. When the game reserves more than that combined figure, Windows refuses the request and the game closes with a memory error, even though Task Manager is still showing free memory. That is why players with what looks like plenty of RAM still get memory errors, and why enlarging the pagefile stops them. You are not making the machine faster; you are raising a ceiling the game keeps hitting.
The procedure
Check it worked
Open Task Manager, go to Performance and then Memory, and look at the figure marked Committed. The second number is your commit limit, and it should now be roughly your RAM plus 32 GB, so about 48 GB on a 16 GB machine. Play for an hour and look again: if the first number gets close to the second, that is the ceiling the crash comes from, and it is the strongest argument there is for buying real memory.
Worth knowing before you set it
What to expect from it
A pagefile is a bridge, not a destination. It is far slower than real memory, it adds write wear to the drive, and it will not give you the frame rate that 32 GB of RAM gives you. What it does is remove the crashes and take the worst edge off the freezing while you save up. When memory prices are sane again, buy the RAM.
Getting more out of older hardware
If your machine is a few generations old, the useful goal is not the highest number your card can produce. It is a number it can hold.
Cap your frame rate and chase consistency, not peak. Star Citizen will happily give you 110 fps in empty space and then drop you to 30 the moment you walk into Lorville. That swing feels far worse than a steady 60 everywhere. Capping the frame rate, in the graphics settings or your driver, gives up a peak number you were not keeping anyway, and returns something that actually feels smooth. Players who have tried it report the same shape of result: a slightly lower ceiling, noticeably less stutter.
Worth doing
The second ceiling: VRAM
Once your system RAM is sorted, VRAM becomes the next thing to look at, and it is where older cards start to feel their age. An RTX 3070 Ti paired with 64 GB of system memory still hits a wall, because the card itself only has 8 GB. The chip is capable; the memory on it is what runs out. In short: system RAM decides whether Star Citizen runs, VRAM decides how well it runs after that.
If you are on an 8 GB card, the most useful thing you can learn is how to stay inside your video memory budget. Players tuning these cards report usage sitting around 7.0 GB of 8 GB with the game asking for roughly 7.3 GB, and the moment you go over, the frame rate does not degrade gently, it collapses. Three levers control it:
Worth testing rather than trusting: HAGS
Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling, under Windows Settings > System > Display > Graphics, is contested. The same person who recommended it switched to disabling it after measuring a gain in Area 18. Try it both ways in the same location and keep whichever wins on your machine. Treat anyone who states it flatly with suspicion, including us.
The part that hardware sellers leave out
The big landing zones are slow for everybody. Lorville, New Babbage, Orison and Levski sit in the 20-30 fps range for players who have tuned exhaustively, and a reader running an RTX 3090 with a Ryzen 9 5950X and 64 GB reports about 25 fps at Levski. Past a reasonable spec this is the engine and the server, not your computer. Buy enough hardware to make space, missions and combat smooth, and do not spend more chasing a city frame rate that nobody currently has.
Should you upgrade now, or wait?
This is really two questions, and separating them is most of the answer.
It already is, and that gets missed. Star Citizen is seeing real, measurable performance gains patch to patch at the moment. Optimisation work is landing rather than being promised, and the hardware you need to get a decent experience has been steadily coming down, not going up. New content and rising fidelity still push the other way, so do not bank on some enormous future drop, but the direction of travel right now is in your favour, and it is a reason to try the game sooner rather than later.
The more useful point: most of the game already runs fine. Space, quantum travel, bunkers, caves, ground missions and FPS combat, where the flying and the fighting actually happen, and where most of your hours go, hold up well on modest hardware today. The heavy part is the big landing zones, and those are social hubs where you take missions, shop and outfit ships. So you are not waiting for the game to become playable. You are waiting for one type of location to get faster, and it is getting faster.
That one has nothing to do with Star Citizen. It is a components-market question, and at the moment prices are high, memory in particular, to the point where a large DDR kit costs what a graphics card used to. If your machine already plays acceptably, there is no Star Citizen reason to spend right now. If it does not, the section below is the order that gets you the most for the least.
What to upgrade first
The upgrade worth thinking twice about
Dropping a new graphics card into an old platform. It tends to underdeliver, for two separate reasons. First, Star Citizen is heavily processor-bound, so on an ageing chip the card was often not the thing holding you back. You pay for a card and the frame rate barely moves. Second, current cards below the xx70 tier run only eight PCIe lanes and are designed around PCIe 5.0; put one in an older board and it runs at half the bandwidth it expects. If the platform is old, budget for the platform. If you are buying a card alone, buy one tier higher than feels necessary.
Prebuilts are not a compromise right now
With component prices where they are, a discounted prebuilt is frequently the better deal. Players report machines in the region of $1,300 with a current i7, a 12 GB card and 32 GB of memory running the game comfortably, which is difficult to match part by part today. One practical warning: if the launcher refuses to install to a particular drive, install it to a different one before assuming the machine is at fault. It is a known and drive-specific annoyance, not a hardware verdict.
Building or buying a PC for Star Citizen
If you are buying rather than diagnosing, three rules matter more than any specific model number:
CPU before GPU
Buy VRAM, not a badge
32 GB is the target, 64 GB if you can
| Target | CPU | GPU | RAM and storage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1080p, playable | Ryzen 7 7700X or 9700X, or Core i5-13600KF | RX 9060 XT 16 GB or RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB | 32 GB DDR5-6000, 1 TB NVMe |
| 1080p-1440p, comfortable | Ryzen 7 7800X3D or 9800X3D | RTX 5070 Ti or RX 9070 XT | 32-64 GB DDR5-6000, 1 TB NVMe |
| 4K and fleet battles | Ryzen 9 7950X / 9950X3D or Core i9 | RTX 4090 / 5090 or RX 7900 XTX | 64 GB DDR5-6000, 2 TB NVMe Gen 4 |
Buy current-generation parts where you can. The game is moving to Vulkan and tends to reward recent hardware over older parts that merely benchmark well.
If it does not run, you are not stuck with it
Cloud Imperium offers a 30-day money-back refund on game packages. That is the honest reason it is reasonable to try the game on a borderline PC: if the frame rate is not acceptable to you, you can request a refund and walk away. Try it, set a pagefile, and judge it on your own machine rather than on somebody else’s.
Common Star Citizen bugs and workarounds
Most of what goes wrong in your first session is a known alpha bug rather than your hardware, and every one of them has a workaround: quantum drives that will not spool, inventory that will not drag, and oxygen you did not know you were losing.
The workarounds are collected in step 05, the Star Citizen tutorial guide.
Before you install: hardware checklist
Star Citizen system requirements FAQ
Is Star Citizen CPU or GPU intensive?
Will Star Citizen get easier to run when it is finished?
Can I play Star Citizen with 16GB of RAM in 2026?
Why does Star Citizen run better on higher graphics settings?
Do I absolutely need an SSD for Star Citizen?
What graphics card do I need for Star Citizen?
What processor is best for Star Citizen?
How big is the Star Citizen download?
Why does Star Citizen take 30 minutes to start the first time?
Does Star Citizen run on Steam Deck?
Can I run Star Citizen on a laptop?
What if it will not run acceptably on my PC?
Your PC can run it
Your hardware meets the Alpha 4.10 thresholds. Claim your 50,000 aUEC sign-on bonus below to begin your download. The referral code is pre-injected into the link, no manual entry required. Code must be entered during account creation; it cannot be applied retroactively.