Dying Light 2 has easygoing system requirements, just not for ray tracing

dying light 2
(Image credit: Techland)

Techland's ambitious open-world zombie killing/parkour sequel Dying Light 2 arrives February 4 after a long and troubled development cycle. Techland has just released the game's system requirements, and they're surprisingly forgiving on the low end, but Dying Light 2's ray tracing recommendations are quite steep.

The i3 9100/Ryzen 2300X and 1050 Ti/RX 560 pairing for 1080p, 30fps is within reach of most PC gamers, according to the most recent Steam hardware survey. The recommended spec of i5 8600K/Ryzen 5 3600X with an RTX 2060/RX Vega 56 is also quite lenient, as is the minimum ray-tracing setup of the same processors with an RTX 2070. This is all mid- to high-end hardware that's several years old.

Then there's a huge jump from ray tracing minimum to high settings at 1080p, with Techland's recommended GPU being the RTX 3080, an allegedly $700 card for 4k warriors that you'd be lucky to find for anything south of $1,000 at this point. Presumably, these recommendations don't take DLSS into account, but it still looks like even the beefiest rigs out there will have to make some compromises to get Dying Light 2 running at high frame rates and/or resolutions with ray tracing.

The specs in full are:  

table of dying light 2 system specs

(Image credit: Techland)

Minimum (Ray Tracing off, 1080p 30fps)

  • CPU: Intel Core i3-9100 or AMD Ryzen 3 2300X
  • RAM: 8GB
  • GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti/AMD Radeon RX 560 4GB
  • OS: Windows 7
  • Available storage space: 60GB HDD
  • CPU: Intel Core i5-8600K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
  • RAM: 16GB
  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 6GB or AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 8GB
  • OS: Windows 10
  • Available storage space: 60GB SSD

Ray Tracing On Minimum (1080p 30fps) 

  • CPU: Intel Core i5-8600K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
  • RAM: 16GB
  • GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 8GB
  • OS: Windows 10
  • Available storage space: 60GB SSD
  • CPU: Intel Core i5-8600K/AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
  • RAM: 16GB
  • GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 10GB
  • OS: Windows 10
  • Available storage space: 60GB SSD

Dying Light 2 is set to come out on February 4, 2022. We got some hands-on time with it in November: What we saw of the story didn't impress too much, but the first-person parkour and combat was very satisfying.

Associate Editor

Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch.