Mass Effect cover art

Can I Run Mass Effect?

BioWare released Mass Effect in 2021. It is an action role playing game, published by Electronic Arts. It offers a single player campaign. Metacritic places it at 86. At 5 years old it targets an older hardware baseline than most buyers now own. An age check at 17 sits in front of the store page. Windows is the only supported platform, which is what the figures below describe. There are 127 achievements to chase. Full controller support is present, so nothing needs configuring before a pad works. Steam lists support for 8 languages. Over 61 thousand players have left a Steam review, so this is a title whose performance is widely reported.

Developer BioWarePublisher Electronic ArtsRelease 2021Genre Action, RPG
Can your PC run it? →

System requirements

Minimum requirements

CPUIntel Core i5 3570 or AMD FX-8350
GPUGPU: NVIDIA GTX 760, AMD Radeon 7970 / R9280X GPU RAM: 2 GB Video Memory
VRAM2 GB
RAM8 GB
Storage120 GB
OS64-bit Windows 10
DirectX11

Recommended requirements

CPUIntel Core i7-7700 or AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
GPUGPU: NVIDIA GTX 1070 / RTX 200, Radeon Vega 56, GPU RAM: 4 GB Video Memory
VRAM4 GB
RAM16 GB
Storage120 GB
OS64-bit Windows 10
DirectX11

Verified from Steam · 9 Jul 2026 source

Scores are deterministic, computed by fixed rules and benchmark tables, not written by an AI. How we score. Maintained by Farhad Ali. Spotted a wrong specification? Tell us.

Setting and environment

Players spend their time in a science fiction setting, moving through combat arenas. The publisher supplies 10 storefront screenshots of these environments.

Why Mass Effect is demanding

Mass Effect sits in the middle of the demand range, targeting GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1070 / RTX 200, Radeon Vega 56, GPU RAM, a tier a mainstream card from the last few generations reaches without difficulty. Mass Effect expects 16 GB of system memory. The distance between minimum and recommended is wide, so Mass Effect at the floor and Mass Effect at the recommended tier are not the same experience. Mass Effect names just 4 GB of video memory, so the bottleneck sits in raw GPU throughput rather than VRAM. Mass Effect wants about 120 GB of disk space, which is a real consideration on a smaller drive. A 64 bit version of Windows is required.

This reading comes from the published requirements and our own benchmark tables, not from the store listing.

Can you run Mass Effect?

100%
Can run iton a typical modern PC (Ryzen 5 5600, RTX 3060, 16 GB RAM), the graphics card is the tightest fit.

Free up space before installing Mass Effect: it needs roughly 120 GB. Once it's on disk the rest is unremarkable, GPU: NVIDIA GTX 760, AMD Radeon 7970 / R9280X GPU RAM: 2 GB Video Memory and 8 GB of RAM meet the minimum, so most current PCs handle the compute side.

Bottleneck: GPU

Large install. Mass Effect needs about 120 GB of free storage.

Projected by resolution

ResolutionProjectionHeadroom
1080pRuns well1.31x
1440pBelow the bar0.74x
4KBelow the bar0.33x

A projection, not a measurement. We scale the published GPU requirement by pixel count, since 1440p draws 1.78 times the pixels of 1080p and 4K draws 4 times as many, then compare against RTX 3060 / Ryzen 5 build. The publisher did not state a target resolution, so 1080p is assumed as the baseline. We hold no frame rate data, so no FPS figure is claimed. Headroom above 1 means the reference machine has room to spare at that resolution.

Common GPUs

Graphics cardVerdict
GTX 1060 6 GBRuns well
GTX 1060 LaptopPlayable
GTX 1650 4 GBPlayable
GTX 1650 LaptopPlayable
RTX 2060 6 GBRuns great
RTX 2060 LaptopRuns well
RTX 3060 12 GBRuns great
RTX 3060 LaptopRuns great
RTX 4060 8 GBRuns great
RTX 4060 LaptopRuns great
RTX 3070 8 GBRuns great
RTX 3070 LaptopRuns great
RTX 4070 12 GBRuns great
RTX 4070 LaptopRuns great
RX 6600 8 GBRuns great

Each card is compared against Mass Effect's published GPU requirement, assuming an otherwise-capable PC. Laptop rows use the real mobile chip's benchmark, a mobile GPU is always slower than its desktop namesake.

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Frequently asked questions

Can my PC run Mass Effect?

Upload your DxDiag file to Idxdiag's free checker and get a component by component compatibility verdict for Mass Effect in seconds. No install required.

What are the minimum system requirements for Mass Effect?

The minimum requirements are CPU: Intel Core i5 3570 or AMD FX-8350; GPU: GPU: NVIDIA GTX 760, AMD Radeon 7970 / R9280X GPU RAM: 2 GB Video Memory; 8 GB RAM; OS: 64-bit Windows 10.

How much storage does Mass Effect need?

Mass Effect needs about 120 GB of available storage.

Can an RTX 3060 run Mass Effect?

The RTX 3060 runs Mass Effect comfortably, clearing the title's GPU requirement with room to spare.

What is the bottleneck for Mass Effect?

On a typical modern PC (Ryzen 5 5600, RTX 3060, 16 GB RAM), the tightest component for Mass Effect is the GPU.