The Metro games have always been beautiful to behold. However, that beauty always came with a price. Metro Exodus won’t stray far from its predecessors, judging by the PC specs released earlier today. Those with lower-tier machines better look away. This won’t be pretty.

For the most part, Metro Exodus won’t stop you from playing if you’re rocking a mid-tier machine. The recommended settings don’t demand much beyond 8 gigs of RAM and a GTX 1070, or the AMD RX Vega 65 equivalent. You’ll also need Windows 10 for recommended settings and beyond. But it’s the higher settings that are causing us to quietly whistle our interest. To play the game in high settings – that is, 1440p at 60 frames-per-second – you’ll need a GTX 1080Ti, with 16 gigs of RAM and an Intel Core i7-8700K GPU.

In order to run the game in 4K at a stable framerate of 60, you’ll need a bank loan. The game requires an i9-9900K CPU, 16 gigs of RAM, and the latest 2080Ti GPU. The latter makes sense, as Metro Exodus includes ray tracing, which isn’t possible on other GPUs outside of the 2080 and 2080Ti.

Time To Max Out That Credit Card

Here an easy-to-read list:

Minimum

  • OS: Windows 7 | 8 | 10
  • CPU: Intel Core i5-4440 or equivalent
  • RAM: 8GB
  • GPU: GeForce GTX 670 | GeForce GTX 1050 | AMD Radeon HD 7870
  • VRAM: 2 GB
  • Direct X: 11 |12

Recommended

  • OS: Windows 10
  • CPU: Intel Core i7-4770K or equivalent
  • RAM: 8GB
  • GPU: GeForce GTX 1070 | GeForce RTX 2060 | AMD RX Vega 56
  • VRAM: 8 GB
  • Direct X: 12

High

  • OS: Windows 10
  • CPU: Intel Core i7-8700K or equivalent
  • RAM: 16GB
  • GPU: GeForce GTX 1080 Ti | GeForce RTX 2070 | AMD RX Vega 64
  • VRAM: 8 GB
  • Direct X: 12

Extreme

  • OS: Windows 10
  • CPU: Intel Core i9-9900K or equivalent
  • RAM: 16GB
  • GPU: GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
  • VRAM: 11 GB
  • Direct X: 12

While we’re all excited to play Metro Exodus when it launches on February 15, the specs have created a discussion on which of us can play the game on high settings. I know my GTX 970 has gotten a little long in the tooth. Metro Exodus is on my “must play” list, so this could be the push I need to finally go for an upgrade. I suppose I’ll make the decision once I see how much smoke this game causes to come out the back of my machine.

Looks at 970. “I’m sorry, little one.”