TL;DR:
Minimum Specs:
- OS: Windows 10 version 21H1 (10.0.19043)
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, Intel Core i7-6800K
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 5700, NVIDIA GeForce 1070 Ti
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: 125 GB available space
- Additional Notes: SSD Required
Recommended Specs:
- OS: Windows 10/11 with updates
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, Intel i5-10600K
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080
- DirectX: Version 12
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 125 GB available space
- Additional Notes: SSD Required
SSD Required? Wat
Yes. Now that all the consoles have ssds, devs are going to design their games around them. That means asset streaming is the norm. And that means hdds will cause massive pop-in and stutters.
Honestly if you don’t have an SSD save 50$ and get one. Especially for crappier pcs it’s the most significant upgrade you can do and not even for gaming. 10 years ago SSDs were somewhat niche. They were expensive as well. Now I won’t even touch a computer without one basically.
It is not at all sustainable to game on HDDs anymore. They are still good for slow cold storage, though.
It wasn't sustainable 5 years ago.
It's probably not 100% necessary; even Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (which was designed to use the PS5's fast loading speeds to switch between worlds on the fly, and supports the latest DirectStorage implementation on PC) can be played off a hard drive, tests have shown. But any PC recent enough to play Starfield on really should have an SSD.
"Playable" and "good experience" don't necessarily mean the same thing though. Those rift transitions in R&C are rough on anything less than a decent NVMe SSD. Though there may be some room for improvement, as even high end NVMe drives struggle to handle these transitions as gracefully as the PS5.
Whether or not playing off an HDD is truly a dealbreaker though depends on where in gameplay the storage speed bottleneck causes problems. For Rift Apart, it's mostly just an issue with these rift transitions, and the gameplay effectively pauses while it waits for them. For an open world game it could be more problematic (i.e. pervasive traversal stutter during combat.)