According to Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics, the PC requirements for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach are finally out. We’ve been waiting for this. The game’s arrival on PC is practically here, and everyone expected our graphics cards to start sweating.
Hideo Kojima doesn’t really do “small.” His games are massive, sweeping spectacles. You look at the trailers for this sequel. You see the sweeping vistas, the horrifying tar monsters, the hyper-detailed pores on Norman Reedus’s face, and you naturally assume the final product is going to melt your desktop computer into a bubbling puddle of expensive plastic and silicon.
But it won’t. And honestly, that is the most refreshing news PC gamers have had in months.
A Lifeline for Aging Hardware
The minimum specs are remarkably kind. Seriously kind. We’re talking about an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 or an AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB. Pair that with an Intel Core i3-10100 or a Ryzen 3 3100, and you are officially ready to reconnect the world.
Sure, that gets you 1080p at 30 frames per second on the “low” graphics preset. It’s going to look a little rough around the edges. You might not see the microscopic dirt particles on Sam’s boots. But it works. It makes the game totally accessible to millions of players who haven’t had the cash to drop on a massive GPU upgrade since before the pandemic.
Let’s be real. PC gaming hardware prices got entirely out of hand over the last few years. Not everyone has a giant, power-hungry card sitting under their desk. In fact, according to the Steam Hardware & Software Survey, older mid-range cards like the GTX 1650 and 1660 series still hold a massive chunk of the global player base. They stubbornly refuse to leave the top charts. Sony knows this. Kojima Productions knows this. They aren’t building games just for the one percent of players with water-cooled supercomputers.
The Engine Running the Show
This is where we have to talk about the underlying tech. Guerrilla Games built the Decima engine, handed the keys to Kojima years ago for the first game, and that partnership is still paying massive dividends today.
This engine scales beautifully. It squeezes every last drop of performance out of whatever silicon you throw at it. Think about the sloppy, unoptimized PC ports we’ve suffered through recently. You know the ones. The blockbuster titles that demand a top-tier rig just to stutter through the opening tutorial menu. Developers often rely on brute-force hardware to compensate for rushed coding. Not here.
Optimization is an art form that many studios have simply abandoned. When a game scales from a seven-year-old budget GPU all the way up to an enthusiast rig, it shows a fundamental respect for the player’s time and money.
PC Gaming Hardware Analyst
To get a massive, open-world title running on a tiny four-core i3 processor in 2026 is a feat of engineering. It requires intense CPU thread management and a deep understanding of memory allocation.
Pico Upscaling Makes Its PC Debut
Here is where things get genuinely fascinating. Death Stranding 2 is bringing something totally new to the PC ecosystem.
Pico upscaling.
If you haven’t heard of it, don’t worry. It’s making its Windows debut right here. Guerrilla Games built this custom upscaler originally for the PlayStation 5 to handle the heavy lifting of modern rendering. Now, it’s making the jump to desktop.
Native rendering is almost dead in modern AAA gaming. The graphics pipelines are just too heavy. Ray tracing, volumetric fog, high-resolution global illumination—these things crush frame rates. Image scaling algorithms are basically visual black magic. They take a lower-resolution image and use heavy math to guess what the higher-resolution version should look like. DLSS and FSR have dominated this space for years, fighting a stubborn two-horse race.
Seeing a proprietary console upscaler cross over to PC is wild. It shows how blurred the lines between console and PC architecture have really become. It also gives players choices. If you don’t have an Nvidia card for DLSS, or you aren’t thrilled with AMD’s FSR implementation on your specific rig, Pico gives you a third door to walk through. Options are always a good thing.
A Director’s Dream: Ultrawide Support
Kojima is a frustrated movie director. I think we all accept that by now. He loves cinema, and he desperately wants his games to feel like interactive films.
So naturally, the presentation here is off the charts. The game officially adds deep support for ultrawide displays. Gameplay can run at a ridiculous 32:9 aspect ratio, while the incredibly long cutscenes play out in 21:9. It’s vast. It’s panoramic. Playing a game at 32:9 is essentially like having two standard monitors glued together seamlessly. In a game heavily focused on scanning the horizon for terrain hazards and invisible enemies, that extra peripheral vision is a massive advantage.
And the best part? You don’t even need an expensive ultrawide monitor to use it. You can just slap some letterboxing on your standard 16:9 screen and pretend you’re sitting in an IMAX theater. This toggle is available on both the PC and the PS5 versions of the game.
It might sound like a niche feature, but ultrawide gaming is steadily crawling out of the enthusiast basement. Gamers are actively seeking out wider fields of view for deep immersion. A recent industry report by the International Data Corporation (IDC) noted that premium gaming monitor shipments have remained a bright spot in the broader tech market, driven heavily by larger, wider screens that break the traditional 16:9 mold.
The Shifting Sands of PC Ports
We are living in a very different era of PlayStation games right now.
A few years ago, the idea of a flagship Sony exclusive hitting PC was a pipe dream. Then it became a reality, but with a massive multi-year delay. Now, the windows are shrinking. Sony realizes there is a massive ocean of players who will happily pay full price for their games, provided they don’t have to buy a console to do it.
Will my older CPU bottleneck the game?
If you’re running something older than the recommended Intel Core i3-10100, you might hit some snags in heavily populated areas or during complex physics calculations. But the Decima engine is highly thread-efficient, so as long as you meet the four-core minimum, you should maintain a playable framerate.
What do I need for high-end performance?
While the minimums are low, the ceiling is high. If you want 4K resolution at 60 frames per second with all the graphical bells and whistles turned up, you will absolutely need a modern, high-tier GPU and CPU combo. PC gaming scales up just as hard as it scales down.
The fact that Death Stranding 2 requires such reasonable minimum specs is a huge win for consumer preservation. Games shouldn’t have an arbitrary expiration date just because hardware cycles march on. By keeping the floor low, Kojima Productions ensures that Sam Porter Bridges’ latest weird, haunting, beautiful journey can be experienced by almost anyone with a passing interest and a modestly equipped tower.
It’s nice to know the floor hasn’t fallen out from under budget gamers just yet.
This article is sourced from various news outlets. Analysis and presentation represent our editorial perspective.