Highly anticipated: When Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) was first announced for Xbox One and PS4, PC gamers readied themselves for a long wait. Now, roughly a year after its initial launch, RDR2's PC port has finally been confirmed, with a release set for November 5, 2019. It'll arrive first on the Rockstar Games Launcher and the Epic Games Store, with a Steam version coming sometime during December.

Due to RDR2's impending launch, Rockstar has decided to release the western-themed epic's system requirements. Given the title's fantastic visuals on lower-specced consoles, you might reasonably assume that you'll need some pretty beefy hardware to run it. However, it seems that won't quite be the case after all.

You can see the minimum requirements below:

  • OS: Windows 7 - Service Pack 1 (6.1.7601)
  • Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-2500K / AMD FX-6300
  • Memory: 8GB
  • Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 2GB / AMD Radeon R9 280 3GB
  • HDD Space: 150GB
  • Sound Card: DirectX compatible

Even budget-conscious PC gamers will likely already have hardware equivalent to, or better than the specs above, so getting the game to run at a playable (likely 30 FPS) frame rate on PC won't be too big of a hassle.

Even the recommended requirements aren't particularly demanding (they're slightly lower than the requirements for Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order). See them here:

  • OS: Windows 10 - April 2018 Update (v1803)
  • Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-4770K / AMD Ryzen 5 1500X
  • Memory: 12GB
  • Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB / AMD Radeon RX 480 4GB
  • HDD Space: 150GB
  • Sound Card: DirectX compatible

While the GPU, processor and RAM requirements are all fairly reasonable, RDR2's storage needs are a different story. It's not hard to see why the game needs 150GB of space – just look at how many details, graphical or otherwise, Rockstar has shoveled in – but that's still a lot of drive capacity to dedicate to a single title.

If you use a multi-terabyte hard drive for your game installations, it might not be such a big deal, but for those that prefer to install their games on SSDs, it could be tricky to clear up that much space. Regardless, many PC gamers will likely see this as a worthy trade-off; after all, they'll finally be able to play Rockstar's latest adventure on their preferred platform.

So, with the system requirements out of the way, let's briefly discuss some of RDR2's PC-specific upgrades. On the graphical side of the coin, we're looking at increased draw distances, higher quality snow trails, improved global illumination and ambient occlusion, tessellated tree textures, better grass and fur textures, and boosted reflection quality.

For those with the setup and budget to support it, RDR2's PC port will include HDR and multi-monitor support, as well as unlocked resolution and framerate options. The game is also getting a number of free singleplayer-oriented feature updates. These include three new Bounty Hunter missions, two new Gang Hideouts to raid, two new Treasure Maps, a new mission, numerous horses, several fresh trinkets, and a handful of new pistols.

Regardless of how you feel about Rockstar's other business practices, one thing is certain: they know how to make a proper PC port. If they'd simply released the game on PC in a fairly well-optimized state, that would have been enough for most players – but they've clearly decided to go above and beyond.

Obviously, we can't say for sure how good (or bad) the play experience will be on PC without testing it ourselves, but for now, we're cautiously optimistic. As a side note, all of the screenshots in this post were taken from the PC version of the game, and Rockstar has a 4K, 60 FPS trailer for RDR2 in the works right now (it should drop soon).