Marathon system requirements

The full Marathon system requirements are finally here, with Bungie finally adding a recommended tier alongside the minimum requirements it released last year. What’s more, the new specs aren’t super high, meaning even owners of quite old PCs should be primed to dive into Bungie’s much-delayed new FPS.

The big news is you won’t need anything close to the best graphics card to run Marathon. In fact, for the most part, these specs are incredibly low, ensuring as many gamers as possible will all set to play, once the Marathon release date finally arrives.

Here are the Marathon system requirements:

Take our Marathon system requirements PC benchmark test to answer the question… Can I run Marathon?

The Marathon minimum requirements released last year were explicitly stated as for the closed alpha. However, since then, Bungie has released the final requirements, and they haven’t changed, remaining much lower than might have been expected.

You’ll need an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT, or Intel Arc A580 GPU alongside an Intel Core i5 6600 or AMD Ryzen 5 2600 CPU. These are mostly components that are both well over five years old and were only mid-range at the time anyway, so grabbing a cheap secondhand upgrade should be easy, if needed.

The RAM requirements also only sit at 8GB, which is surprising given how many modern games are starting at 16GB now. It’s a good thing, too, as recently RAM prices have gone through the roof, making upgrades far less affordable. I’d still recommend upgrading to at least 16GB of the best gaming RAM if you can, but there’s certainly no need to for this game.

As for the Marathon recommended specs, these are more demanding than the minimum requirements across the board, but remain very accessible. Either an Intel Core i5 10400 or AMD Ryzen 5 3500 CPU is needed while any of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 2060, AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, or Intel Arc A770 graphics cards will hit the mark.

Again, the biggest potential sticking point for particularly old systems is the recommendation of 16GB RAM. If you do need to upgrade, it could be costly right now, with memory prices being so inflated. However, I’d recommend you at least try the game with just 8GB and see how it performs for you, before considering a potentially costly upgrade.

Strangely, the Marathon download size still hasn’t been specified, despite the Marathon release date being only a few weeks away. However, if you want to ensure the best experience possible in terms of game load times and ensure you have enough storage, we recommend upgrading to one of the best SSDs for gaming.

Given how close the game is to launch, we suspect Bungie won’t be releasing an ultra requirements spec ahead of release, but based on the requirements so far, we suspect they wouldn’t be too demanding.

As for expected performance, again, Bungie hasn’t attached either a resolution or frame rate expectation to either the minimum or recommended specs. Generally, we’d expect 1080p/30fps/low settings for a minimum spec and 1080p/60fps/medium for a recommended spec, but Bungie could be aiming for a higher frame rate, given this is a competitive FPS.

If you plan to play on multiple platforms, you can check out the Marathon crossplay and cross-progression status.