Minecraft has been out a whole 17 years now, which makes me feel very old as I played it as a teenager when it launched, using (I believe) an AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition and 9600 GT. Oh how times have changed. Now, Microsoft has updated its system requirements to 16 GB of RAM and an RTX 2060 or equivalent GPU for recommended performance in the Java version of the game.
Comparing this to an archived snapshot of the requirements from May last year, that’s 4x the RAM that was previously recommended, although another snapshot strangely does suggest that Microsoft recommended 4/8 GB back in 2022. And regarding the GPU, well, last year Microsoft still suggested a 700-series Nvidia GPU or equivalent for recommended performance. In other words, a big shift.
Here are the new requirements in full:
Note that the minimum requirements have been upped, too, from 2 GB of RAM to 8 GB (or 12 GB if you’re on an integrated GPU) and from Intel HD Graphics 4000 or equivalent to a GTX 950 or equivalent. CPU requirements have all been upped too, of course, with the recommended now being a Core i5 12400 or Ryzen 5 5600.