Cinder City wants 64GB of RAM — and almost nobody has it
A new game has posted Steam system requirements so extreme they've stopped the PC gaming community cold. Cinder City, an open-world third-person shooter set in near-future Seoul, lists 32GB of RAM as the minimum to run the game — and 64GB as the recommended spec. According to Steam Hardware Survey data per Windows News, only 12% of Steam users have 32GB or more, and fewer than 3% have 64GB. In practical terms, that means the recommended experience is out of reach for almost everyone playing PC games today.
The numbers in context
To put 64GB in perspective: a PS5, Xbox Series X, and PS5 Pro each have 16GB of total system memory. All three together don't reach the RAM Cinder City calls "recommended." OC3D confirmed this is unprecedented for a consumer game on Steam — a threshold previously associated with professional workstations, not living-room PCs.
What makes the spec sheet stranger is the GPU pairing. The recommended graphics card is a mid-range RTX 4060 with 8GB of video memory. That's a reasonable pick for most modern games, but sitting alongside a 64GB RAM requirement it signals something unusual — the game appears to be offloading a massive amount of data into system memory rather than the GPU, possibly because of how it streams assets across an enormous open-world map.
Built on Unreal Engine 5
Cinder City is developed by Big Fire Games and published by NC Corporation. It runs on Unreal Engine 5, which is already demanding on GPU hardware due to its Nanite geometry and Lumen lighting systems. Most UE5 titles push RAM usage to around 18–24GB at high settings — Cinder City's 32–64GB requirement is two to three times that, with no official explanation from the developers yet.
The minimum GPU is listed as an RTX 2060, though some sources cite an RTX 4070 as the floor — the Steam page appears to have been updated more than once, suggesting specs are still in flux.
Optimization question mark
The game has no confirmed release date, so there's time for the requirements to change. Developers sometimes list conservative specs early to avoid complaints at launch — the Cyberpunk 2077 debacle remains a cautionary benchmark. A 64GB DDR5 kit currently costs $150–200 or more in the US, up around 94% since early 2025, so the financial stakes of taking these specs at face value are real.
If the numbers hold, Cinder City would mark a genuine shift in what "recommended" means for PC gaming — one that most players, and most hardware, aren't ready for.
