Arc Raiders is the rare modern game that's both a monster hit and genuinely well-optimized. Embark Studios — the ex-DICE crew behind The Finals — sold over four million copies in the first two weeks and took Best Multiplayer at The Game Awards, and they did it with a game that runs properly on hardware most studios abandoned years ago. That makes the "what PC do I need" question more interesting than usual, because the honest answer depends entirely on how you want it to look.
Straight from Embark's own support documentation:
For an Unreal Engine 5 extraction shooter, that minimum tier is remarkably forgiving — a nearly decade-old quad-core and a 1050 Ti gets you in the door at 60fps. Embark listing Intel Arc cards alongside Nvidia and AMD at both tiers also tells you the game is validated across all three driver stacks, which is not something every studio bothers with.
Two things I'd flag from watching this game run on customer machines. First, storage: the install is a modest ~30GB, but there's no official SSD requirement — and there should be. UE5's texture streaming leans hard on drive read speed, and on a mechanical hard drive you'll get long load-ins and textures popping in mid-fight on the bigger maps. Keep roughly 50GB free on an NVMe drive and the problem never exists. Second, the CPU floor is real: at the minimum processor tier, expect stutters in heavy encounters — the machines and the player count spike the CPU exactly when you can least afford it. The Recommended tier's Ryzen 5 3600 is where that goes away.
The Recommended spec targets 60fps, but this is a competitive extraction shooter — most people who get serious about it want 120fps or more, and the game scales beautifully if you feed it. FSR is supported on any GPU, and current-generation cards have headroom to spare: benchmark data published this year shows a Ryzen 9800X3D with an RTX 5080-class card holding 150–160fps at 4K on Epic settings with DLSS Performance. You don't need to spend anywhere near that for a great experience, though. Tom's Hardware's mid-2026 GPU rankings put the RX 9060 XT 16GB as the standout value at 1440p, and that card runs Arc Raiders at high settings and high refresh without breaking a sweat.
My realistic tiers: for 1080p/100fps+, any current entry card — RTX 5060 or RX 9060 XT class — paired with a Ryzen 5 class CPU and 16GB. For 1440p/144Hz, step to a 16GB-VRAM card, a Ryzen 7 (the X3D chips are the sweet spot for shooters), and 32GB of RAM so Discord, a browser, and the game coexist peacefully. Given where memory prices have gone this year, I'll be straight with you at quote time about where 32GB makes sense and where 16GB is the smarter hold.
Every custom PC I build in New Jersey gets quality parts, a clean Windows install with zero bloatware, and a 24–48 hour stress test before it leaves my Somerville bench — so your first raid isn't the stress test. If your current machine technically meets spec but stutters through firefights, my custom PC diagnostic figures out whether it's a settings problem, a thermal problem, or a genuine bottleneck worth upgrading. Start with a build consult or call (908) 428-9558 — 75 N Bridge St, Somerville, drop-offs welcome.