Subnautica System Requirements

The Subnautica system requirements ask for a minimum of 4 GB RAM installed. If possible, make sure your have 8 GB of RAM in order to run Subnautica to its full potential. The cheapest graphics card you can play it on is an Intel HD 4600. Furthermore, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti is recommended in order to run Subnautica with the highest settings. To play Subnautica you will need a minimum CPU equivalent to an Intel Core i5-4200M. However, the developers recommend a CPU greater or equal to an Intel Core i5-4460 to play the game. The Subnautica requirements also ask for 20 GB free storage space to install the game.

Subnautica Performance Guide

Subnautica’s graphics options aren’t the most extensive, but if you’re having trouble getting a stable frame rate there’s certainly things to be tweaked. 

• To begin with, turn the Game Quality down. This generally downgrades texture and rendering quality, which can help a lot. 
• Dithering is a process to help your GPU render specific colours, though it doesn’t seem to have too much effect on performance. 
• Surprisingly, neither does Water Quality, as it principally affects the appearance and animation of the ocean surface (which you won’t be seeing all that often). 
• Depth of Field, on the other hand, can have a big impact on performance, so make sure to turn that off if you’re having trouble. Same goes for screen space reflections and ambient occlusion. 
• The game has excellent lighting effects, but turning off bloom might also give you the boost in performance that you’re after. 
• Motion blur and FXAA should always be turned off, as they don’t improve visual quality particularly and cause unpleasant blur. If this isn’t enough, you can access additional settings by hitting Tab and then F3 in-game. From there, disable light shafts and set shadow cascades to 2. If nothing else works, this should give you a sizable performance boost.

Latest Subnautica game

Want to dive into the latest Subnautica experience? Check out the Subnautica 2 system requirements. 

Subnautica will run on PC system with Windows Vista SP2 or newer, 64-bit and upwards. Additionally it has a Mac version.

Looking for an upgrade? Try our easy to use Subnautica set up guides to find the best cards. Filter for Subnautica graphics card comparison and CPU compare. We'll help you find the best deal for the right gear to run the game.

Subnautica FPS - what frame rate can you expect?

How many FPS will I get on Subnautica? We reference thousands of reports from PCGameBenchmark users running our FPS tracking app to tell you exactly how Subnautica performs across a range of different settings and resolutions on the most popular PC gaming setups.

What frame rate does Subnautica run at?

Here are the typical frame rate samples

Avg FPS	CPU	GPU	RAM
112	Intel Core i7-10700K	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070	16 GB
45	Intel Core i5-6300U	AMD Radeon R7 M350	16 GB
36	Intel Core i7-8700K	Intel UHD 630	16 GB
29	Intel Core i7-4720HQ	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M	16 GB
12	Intel Core m5-6Y54	Intel HD 515	8 GB

What frame rate does Subnautica run at? Check our FPS Calculator

Are you experiencing Subnautica FPS drops and stutters? Want to know exactly how the game performs on your system? You can get a free easy FPS test for all your games using the PCGameBenchmark FPS monitor tool - your first step to understanding how the parts in your gaming PC are actually performing in real-world conditions.