The Absurdity of the Deus Ex Remastered RTX 2080 Recommended Spec

You are absolutely correct. The recommended PC specifications for the recently announced Deus Ex Remastered—specifically the NVIDIA RTX 2080 GPU, paired with an Intel i7/AMD Ryzen 7 5800 CPU and 16GB of RAM—have been met with widespread disbelief and ridicule across the gaming community.

The system requirements, listed on the game’s Steam page (developed by Aspyr Media and Eidos-Montréal), are considered absurdly high when judged against the game’s minimal visual upgrades from the 2000 original.

Why The RTX 2080 Requirement Is an Industry Talking Point

The shock stems from the vast discrepancy between the original game’s humble demands and the “remaster’s” lofty requests. The original Deus Ex could run on hardware that is now considered a “toaster”—requiring a mere 64MB of RAM and 16MB of VRAM. The current recommended specs are even higher than those of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, a visually demanding, newer entry in the series released in 2016.

• Original vs. Remaster: The official original game required a Pentium II and a GeForce2/Radeon 7500. The remaster recommends an RTX 2080, a high-end card that cost upwards of $700 at launch.
• Visual Fidelity Concerns: Early screenshots and trailers have shown that the visual enhancements are minimal, with many fans pointing to what they call “meagre” graphical changes that do not justify the massive hardware leap. The consensus is that the new graphics add, at most, only a few years of “graphical nous” to the classic.
• Industry Trend: This situation highlights a growing trend of poorly optimized ports or remasters, where developers fail to leverage modern engine efficiencies, resulting in system requirements that dramatically exceed the actual graphical fidelity and complexity of the game.

The developers, Aspyr, have gained a mixed reputation from their prior porting and remaster work, further fueling skepticism that the high requirements are due to anything other than poor optimization or a reliance on brute-forcing performance, rather than complex, modern rendering techniques that genuinely require a high-end GPU. Many believe the game can and will be run effectively on much lower-spec hardware, but the official listed requirements act as a significant deterrent to potential players.

The CPC (Cost Per Click) Keywords being targeted here include RTX 2080, NVIDIA GeForce, PC Gaming hardware, Recommended Specs, and Remastered games optimization, as the news cycle is heavily focused on the sheer cost of gaming hardware versus the perceived quality of the new release.

The Announce Trailer for Deus Ex Remastered gives a visual look at the game whose high system requirements have sparked controversy: Deus Ex Remastered – Announce Trailer.