007 First Light PC Specs are Here and Your RAM is in Danger
James Bond might have a license to kill, but your PC might have a license to melt if these new system requirements are anything to go by.
IO Interactive finally dropped the microfilm containing the PC system requirements for 007 First Light, and the community is currently in a state of synchronized panic. We are looking at an origin story for a young, 26-year-old Bond, but the hardware you need to run it feels like it’s from a decade in the future. While the game is built on the same Glacier Engine that made the Hitman trilogy run like a dream, the jump to 00 status is clearly coming with a massive tax on your system resources. With the game recently delayed to May 27, 2026 to "ensure quality," I was hoping for some wizard-level optimization, but these numbers tell a much more demanding story.
The 1080p Barrier and the 32GB RAM Elephant
The most jarring part of this reveal is that the "Recommended" tier only targets 1080p at 60 FPS. For a game launching in 2026, seeing 32GB of RAM as the recommendation for standard HD is enough to make any budget builder sweat through their tuxedo. Most people are still rocking 16GB as their baseline, and with AI companies currently gobbling up memory like a hungry hippo, an upgrade to 32GB is going to hit the wallet hard.
Minimum Requirements (1080p / 30 FPS)
Processor: Intel Core i5 9500K or AMD Ryzen 5 3500
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GTX 1660 or AMD RX 5700
RAM: 16 GB
Video RAM: 8 GB
Storage: 80 GB
Recommended Requirements (1080p / 60 FPS)
Processor: Intel Core i5 13500 or AMD Ryzen 5 7600
Graphics Card: NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti or AMD RX 6700 XT
RAM: 32 GB
Video RAM: 12 GB
The Confusing VRAM Mismatch
If you look closely at those recommended specs, there is a weird contradiction that reeks of early-access jank or a total lack of proofreading. The studio is recommending an NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti, which famously only carries 8GB of VRAM, yet the same spec list demands 12GB of VRAM for that category. It is a massive red flag that suggests the game might be heavily reliant on upscaling or that the 12GB figure is purely for higher texture settings that the 3060 Ti can't actually handle.
IO Interactive is leaning heavily on their partnership with NVIDIA, confirming that 007 First Light will support DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation for the RTX 50 series. It feels like the "Recommended" specs are a polite way of saying "you should probably just use AI upscaling to reach 60 frames". For a game featuring a villain voiced by Lenny Kravitz and high-fidelity volumetric smoke, the visual bar is high, but the price of entry is looking even higher.
Optimization Masterclass or Impending Disaster?
The Hitman games were absolute masterclasses in optimization, often running on hardware as simple as a Steam Deck without breaking a sweat. However, the gameplay trailers for First Light have already shown some noticeable framerate dips, and targeting only 1080p in 2026 feels like the devs are braced for impact. 80GB of storage is actually quite reasonable compared to the triple-digit bloated messes we usually get, but the lack of 1440p or 4K specs is highly suspect.
You are going to need those two extra months of delay for the devs to polish this thing, because right now it looks like it's going to eat GPUs for breakfast. If you are still sitting on 16GB of RAM, you have until May to decide if Bond is worth the upgrade.
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