Nivalis Nights System Requirements: Minimum & Recommended

What PC do you need to run it?

The final requirements were published in the September 24, 2026 launch announcement, five days before release — and one note on that spec sheet matters more than any single part: the targets are measured at native resolution, no upscaling utilised. No DLSS or FSR is doing hidden work in these numbers. Here is the full four-tier table:

What do these numbers actually mean?

The RAM floor stays unusual: 16 GB across the first three tiers, with 32 GB reserved for native 4K. Most life sims ask for 8 GB at minimum, so treat this as a real floor, not marketing padding — machines with 8 GB should expect problems rather than “low settings”.

On the graphics side the minimum tier is now a named class of card — a GTX 1660 SUPER, RTX 3050, RX 6600, or Intel Arc A750, all roughly 6 GB of VRAM — while the recommended tier jumps to an RTX 4070 or RX 7800 XT for native 1440p/60. ION LANDS’ previous game, Cloudpunk, was famously lenient with hardware; this one asks for genuinely gaming-class parts, which fits its larger, weather-simulated city. A May 2026 development update explained why: the city is built entirely from voxels but does not use a traditional voxel engine, which pushes polygon counts up — so the game leans heavily on multiple levels of detail (LODs) and overhauled light probes to hold performance without giving up the dense look.

Storage is the quiet requirement: a 42 GB SSD at every tier, replacing the 30 GB hard-drive-optional figure from the pre-final listing. And note the OS split — the 1080p tiers run on Windows 10 or later, but the 1440p and 4K tiers list Windows 11 outright.

What changed from the earlier spec sheet?

The requirements previously listed on the Steam page were vaguer: a generic “AMD / Intel CPU” line, “any dedicated card with 6 GB of VRAM” at minimum, a GTX/RTX 2070-class recommendation, DirectX 11/12, and 30 GB of storage. The final table replaces all of that with concrete CPUs, named GPU classes per tier, an SSD mandate, and the Windows 11 split — the DirectX row is simply gone. If you checked the old sheet and concluded your machine was fine, re-check the GPU column above before you buy.

Is a laptop good enough?

A gaming laptop with a GTX 1660 SUPER / RX 6600 / Arc A750-class GPU and 16 GB of RAM meets the minimum tier for 1080p/30 on Very Low settings. Thin ultrabooks with integrated graphics will not — there is no integrated-GPU tier anywhere in the final table.

What about Steam Deck and GeForce NOW?

The launch announcement on September 29 settled both. GeForce NOW works: ION LANDS confirmed Nivalis Nights is available on the cloud streaming service, which is one way to play on hardware that misses the tiers above. Steam Deck is not fully supported at launch — in the studio’s own words, the game “won’t have full support at launch,” but it is “already working on improving the experience”: performance will keep being refined after release as the range of supported hardware widens. Until the Deck shows up as officially supported, treat handheld play as a bonus rather than an expectation.

Has performance improved since launch?

Yes — officially, and quickly. Update #1 arrived on October 1, two days after release, addressing the bugs players reported in the game’s first 24 hours: performance improvements for character actions, animations, and physics, plus a fix for the camera gradually dragging performance down every time a save was loaded. Update #2 followed on October 2 and delivered the headline promise — a light culling system, exposed as a new “Lighting Details” graphics slider that caps how many lights can be active in your field of view (slid fully right, nothing is culled; lower values deactivate distant lights). The same update trimmed character rendering further (reduced bone weights on lower LODs) and removed the Low texture quality setting — anyone who played on Low is automatically upgraded to Medium, so minimum-spec machines should re-check their performance headroom against the Medium tier. One official known issue to plan around: fast travel to certain locations can hurt performance on some systems, and the studio’s workaround is to save after arriving and reload that save — the Update #3 notes do not list a fast-travel fix, so treat the workaround as current. Update #3, on October 5, then delivered the deeper character-simulation work earlier updates had flagged: improved crowd simulation and animation performance, a fix for light probes from unloaded scenes being kept in memory and dragging down The Stacks, and a footprints camera that no longer renders when it is not snowing. Update #3 also fixed the lighting issues the new Lighting Details slider had introduced. If your last session was on the launch build, it is worth re-testing now.

Can you test before buying?

There was never a demo or a preorder (the studio explicitly ruled both out), so this table was the compatibility guide every launch-day purchase decision leaned on. The financial side of that decision: the game launched at $24.99 with a 10% launch discount — the details are on our release date and pricing page.

Once it is running, our beginner guide walks you through your first days in the city, and the feature overview lists every confirmed system.