With 32 GB as a minimum and 64 GB as the recommended amount, Cinder City's RAM requirements are all kinds of wrong in today's AI-mangled memory market

As big-budget, blockbuster PC games have become increasingly more packed with cutting-edge graphics over the years, their minimum hardware requirements have naturally scaled upwards too. But there's one forthcoming game that has taken that quite a lot further than you'd expect, with the memory specs likely to cause more than a few raised eyebrows.

It's called Cinder City, and it's being made by one of NC Corporation's studios (Big Fire Games), a South Korean company better known for its many MMORPGs. As an "open-world cinematic third-person shooter set in a fallen near-future Seoul", you'd naturally expect the graphics to be all-singing, all-dancing, and the handful of images and footage I've seen all suggest that it's going to be heavy on your hardware.

A quick glance at the game's Steam listing suggests otherwise, as the recommended graphics card is merely a GeForce RTX 4060. However, to reach that point in the listing, your eyes will have passed over the minimum and recommended system memory requirements, and those are frankly absurd.

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The bottom line amount is 32 GB, with the publishers recommending that your PC has 64 GB of DRAM.

Either there are a couple of mistakes in those specs or the game is an unholy mess of non-optimisation. The CPU and graphics card min specs of a Ryzen 5 3600 and GeForce RTX 2060 are in line with current games, but 32 GB of RAM certainly isn't. And it gets really odd with the recommended specs, as the CPU jumps to a Ryzen 7 7800X3D. That processor paired with an RTX 4060 makes no sense whatsoever.

[CINDER CITY] Developer Preview - YouTube

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But all of that pales in comparison to the 64 GB memory recommendation. That's at least $800 of DDR5 right there, and while there are plenty of PC gamers who loaded up their rigs when memory was cheap, few people are going to be doing that now in order to play Cinder City with high-level quality settings.

Although no confirmed release date has been given yet, there's still plenty of time for NC and BigFire Games to either correct the specs (assuming they're a mistake) or work on some optimisations to reduce the memory consumption. Cinder City is getting quite a bit of attention at the moment but perhaps not for the right reasons.

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