System Requirements

Overview

The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is built on Unreal Engine 5, making full use of modern rendering technologies including Nanite (virtualized geometry for highly detailed environments) and Lumen (real-time global illumination and reflections). These technologies deliver impressive visual fidelity but come with meaningful hardware demands. The specifications listed below are based on the closed beta build and may be adjusted before the full game launches in Spring 2027.

PC Specifications

The following table outlines the minimum and recommended hardware for running the closed beta on PC:

The minimum specifications target 1080p resolution with Lumen enabled, though upscaling (such as DLSS or FSR) will likely be needed to maintain stable frame rates at this tier. The recommended specifications are aimed at a comfortable 1440p experience at high settings without requiring aggressive upscaling.

Both tiers require an RTX-class or RDNA 2 GPU at minimum. This reflects the game's reliance on modern rendering features. Older GPU architectures that lack hardware-accelerated ray tracing support will not provide an acceptable experience with Lumen enabled.

Console Availability

The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is also available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Console-specific hardware specifications have not been separately published, as console performance is managed by the development team through platform-specific optimization rather than user-configurable settings.

The game will be available on day one through Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, making it accessible to subscribers without an additional purchase. It is also designated as an Xbox Play Anywhere title, meaning a single digital purchase grants access on both Xbox consoles and Windows PC through the Microsoft Store.

Technical Notes

Unreal Engine 5 provides the technological foundation for the game. Two of its flagship features are central to the visual experience:

• Nanite: A virtualized geometry system that allows the game to render extremely detailed meshes without traditional level-of-detail (LOD) models. This means environments like space station interiors, asteroid surfaces, and ship hulls can have film-quality geometric detail that streams in seamlessly as the camera moves closer. Nanite reduces pop-in and allows artists to use assets at their full resolution without worrying about polygon budgets.

• Lumen: A fully dynamic global illumination and reflections system. Lumen calculates how light bounces off surfaces in real time, creating realistic indirect lighting, color bleeding, and reflections without baked lightmaps. This is particularly important for a game set in space, where lighting conditions change dramatically between sunlit areas and shadowed corridors. Lumen ensures that every environment feels physically grounded in how light behaves.

The CTO of Owlcat Games, Alexey Drobyshevsky, led significant modifications to the Unreal Engine 5 codebase, particularly around zero-gravity systems. Standard game engines assume a flat plane with consistent downward gravity, so major engine components had to be rewritten to support the game's zero-gravity mechanics.

Graphics API

The Expanse: Osiris Reborn requires DirectX 12 on PC. This is consistent with the demands of Unreal Engine 5's rendering pipeline, which relies on DirectX 12 features for both Nanite's virtual geometry streaming and Lumen's software and hardware ray tracing paths. Players running Windows 10 (version 1909 or later) or Windows 11 will have DirectX 12 support built in, provided their GPU drivers are up to date.

Because the game uses Lumen for global illumination, a GPU with hardware ray tracing support (NVIDIA RTX series or AMD RDNA 2 and newer) is required at every preset level. Lumen can operate in software tracing mode, but the official minimum specification of an RTX 3060 or RX 6700 XT indicates that Owlcat is targeting hardware-accelerated tracing as the baseline.

Performance Expectations

The system requirements published on the Steam store page are labeled as beta specifications and come with a disclaimer that the build is not fully optimized yet. Performance may vary and will not reflect the final quality of the game. Players should expect improvements between the closed beta and the Spring 2027 launch as the development team continues optimization work.

At the minimum specification tier (RTX 3060 / RX 6700 XT), the game targets 1080p resolution with Lumen active. At this hardware level, upscaling technology will likely be necessary to maintain smooth frame rates, since Lumen's real-time global illumination is computationally expensive even at lower resolutions.

The recommended tier (RTX 4070 / RX 7700 XT) is aimed at 1440p gameplay at high settings. Players at this tier should be able to run the game at native resolution or with only light upscaling, depending on the density of the environment. Space station interiors with complex geometry and dynamic lighting will be more demanding than open exterior sequences.

Unreal Engine 5 includes Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) as a built-in upscaling solution. TSR uses temporal data from previous frames to reconstruct a higher-resolution image, similar in concept to NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR. Whether Owlcat will integrate additional third-party upscalers (DLSS, FSR, or Intel XeSS) alongside TSR has not been confirmed as of the beta launch.

Engine Modifications

Owlcat Games assembled a team of roughly 180 in-house developers and approximately 100 external contractors for this project, making it three to four times the size of their previous studio efforts such as Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader. The expanded team includes veterans hired from studios that worked on Halo and Cyberpunk 2077, bringing experience with large-scale action games and open-world rendering pipelines.

A significant portion of the engineering effort went into modifying Unreal Engine 5 to support seamless zero-gravity mechanics. Standard game engines assume a fixed gravity vector pointing downward and build their character controllers, animation systems, and physics simulations around that assumption. For Osiris Reborn, the team had to rewrite core engine components so that characters, objects, and environmental interactions could function correctly in weightless environments while still avoiding player disorientation and motion sickness. Magnetic boots serve as the primary movement system in zero-G, keeping the player grounded on surfaces while preserving the visual and physical feeling of weightlessness.

The game's sound design also required custom technical work. In zero-gravity sequences, audio shifts to emphasize breathing, suit systems, and vibrations conducted through surfaces rather than traditional ambient sound. This reflects how sound actually propagates in environments without atmosphere.

Important Note

The specifications listed above are based on the closed beta build released on April 22, 2026. Owlcat Games has stated on the Steam store page that final system requirements will be shared closer to release and that the beta build is not fully optimized yet. Players may encounter performance issues during the beta that will be resolved before the full launch in Spring 2027. Hardware requirements may shift in either direction as optimization work progresses, so players should check the official channels for the most current specifications before purchasing hardware specifically for this title.