The upcoming zombie hit will push even powerful gaming PCs to their limits

Anyone who saw the first gameplay scenes of Dying Light 2 knows that the new zombie hit looks damn good. But that has its price, at least on the PC. A look at the official system requirements reveals that even a high-end computer should apparently reach its limits – at least if gamers rely on ray tracing.

Dying Light 2: High system requirements shock PC gamers

Actually, Dying Light should appear in early 2020, then it was postponed to December 2021. The team from the Techland development studio could not keep this date either and therefore announced a few months ago that the release would have to be postponed to February 4, 2022. After all, as a reparation, there was new gameplay material to see almost two weeks ago.

Now the system requirements for PC gamers have finally been announced. And they have it all – at least if you want to play with activated ray tracing:

If you believe the studio’s recommendation, Dying Light 2 seems to make even high-end gaming PCs work up a sweat on high settings – and even on Full HD. Players will at least a GeForce RTX 2070 recommended if you want to achieve around 30 FPS in 1080p with low ray tracing settings. Should the frame rate double to 60 FPS and the full range of ray tracing effects flicker across the screen, an RTX 3080 is even required.

In relation: Due to the current hardware crisis the high-performance Nvidia graphics card costs just under 1,500 euros. Techland does not make hardware recommendations for playing in WQHD or even 4K. No wonder, after all, even the RTX 3090 could reach its limits with these resolutions, if the RTX 3080 in Full HD only achieves around 60 FPS on average.

The official trailer shows how ray tracing affects the graphics in Dying Light 2:

A mid-range PC is sufficient without ray tracing

After all, the developers still have an ace up their sleeve: Nvidia DLSS. The upscaling technology is likely for a significantly better performance worry, especially at high resolutions. However, it remains to be seen how well Techland can implement the graphics technology. Especially with fast games, DLSS likes to provide a rather blurred picture.

However, if you can do without ray tracing, you don’t need to worry too much about the system requirements. According to Techland, an i3-9100 or Ryzen 3 2300X together with a GTX 1050 Ti or RX 560 4 GB is enough to get the game running on low settings in Full HD with 30 FPS. If you want high settings and 60 FPS, at least an i5-8600K or Ryzen 5 3600X and a GeForce RTX 2060 or AMD RX Vega 56 are required. That sounds quite frugal.

But it’s not just PC gamers who have to make a difficult decision when it comes to graphics settings. Console gamers are faced with a similar choice. PS5 and Xbox Series players can choose between a quality mode with ray tracing and a performance mode that targets a frame rate of 60 FPS.