Banished: PC System Requirements & Best Hardware to Run It (2026)

Thinking about playing Banished on PC and wondering what hardware you actually need? Banished is a 2014 city-building strategy game in which you guide a group of exiled travellers who restart their lives in a new land with only the clothes on their backs and a cart filled with supplies from their homeland — the townspeople themselves are your primary resource. It is also, by modern standards, an extremely light game: the official minimum is a 2 GHz dual-core processor, 512 MB of RAM, a DirectX 9.0c card and 250 MB of disk space. Almost any PC built in the last decade can run it, so the real question is not whether your hardware is fast enough, but how little you actually need.

How Demanding Is Banished?

Not very. Banished released on 18 February 2014 with requirements that were already modest for their time, and it has not become heavier since. A 512 MB DirectX 9.0c card with shader model 2 support is the official minimum, and the recommended card is a 512 MB DirectX 10 part — a specification that integrated graphics from the last several generations clear comfortably. The graphics side of this game is essentially solved by anything modern: Intel UHD or Iris Xe graphics, an AMD Vega or Radeon 700M-class integrated GPU, or any discrete card from the past decade will run it without difficulty.

Where the game does lean on the processor is scale. Banished is a simulation at heart — every villager has to be tracked, fed, housed and given a job — and as a town grows into the hundreds, the simulation and pathfinding load climbs. That is why very large late-game settlements can feel slower on an old dual-core than the simple visuals would suggest. A modest modern CPU, such as a Ryzen 5 5600 or Core i5-12400 class chip or anything newer, removes that concern entirely. Memory and storage are equally undemanding: the game asks for 512 MB of RAM and 250 MB of disk space, so any PC with 8 GB and an SSD is vastly overqualified. Note that the published requirements are the ones to trust, rather than any generic “approximate” figures.

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Banished Official PC System Requirements

Source: the official Banished Steam store listing (app 242920), checked October 2026. Publishers can update these specs after patches.

The published specs date from the game’s 2014 release and list Windows XP SP3 through Windows 8; on a current version of Windows the same class of hardware is more than sufficient, and any modern CPU, any integrated GPU and 8 GB of memory will exceed both columns comfortably.

Best GPU for Banished by Resolution

1080p

At 1080p, Banished is limited by almost nothing. The official minimum — a 512 MB DirectX 9.0c card with shader model 2 support — covers it, which means cards as old as a GeForce GTX 750 Ti or Radeon R7 260X, and integrated graphics such as Intel UHD 630 or an AMD Vega 8, are enough. If you want a current card for this game and others, the AMD Radeon RX 7600 (or a comparable card) is far more than the job requires — it runs Banished without breaking a sweat and leaves plenty in reserve for newer titles.

1440p

1440p changes the pixel count, not the fundamental load. Anything that handles 1080p handles 1440p here, so a card like the AMD Radeon RX 7600 is massively overspecified — the game’s simple geometry and textures scale easily to a 1440p display, and even a 2014-era mid-range GPU or a modern integrated chip is sufficient. A current-generation card such as an RTX 5060 or a Radeon RX 9060 XT only makes sense if you also play demanding games; for Banished alone it is wasted.

4K

4K is not a heavy workload for this game — it is simply a lot of pixels, and the town-builder’s simple rendering scales to it without trouble. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 named here is far beyond the official recommended card, and even an older GPU with a suitable DisplayPort or HDMI output will drive Banished at 4K. Higher-tier cards such as an RTX 5070 or a Radeon RX 9070 are unnecessary for Banished; buy them for other games, not this one.

CPU, RAM and Storage for Banished

Because Banished simulates every villager individually, the processor is the component that genuinely matters as your settlement grows. The official recommendation is an Intel Core i5 or greater, and any modern six-core chip clears that easily: the AMD Ryzen 5 7600 is far more than the game needs, and the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D is complete overkill here, fast as it is. Intel fans can opt for the Intel Core i5-14600K for the same reason. Older quad-cores such as a Ryzen 3 1200 or a 4th-generation Core i5 also meet the published specification, though extremely large towns may slow the simulation slightly.

On memory, the official requirement is just 512 MB — a figure from the Windows XP era. Windows itself wants more than that, so 8 GB of system RAM is the sensible floor for any modern PC and is far above what Banished asks for; 16 GB is ample, and the Corsair Vengeance DDR5 32GB kit is more than this game will ever touch. Storage is the same story: Banished needs only 250 MB, so it fits anywhere. An Samsung 990 Pro 2TB NVMe SSD will trim load times, but the difference amounts to a second or two — any drive, including a hard disk, is perfectly usable.

Recommended PC Builds for Banished

Budget build: AMD Radeon RX 7600 + AMD Ryzen 5 7600 + 16 GB DDR5 — far above what Banished requires, and a sensible starting point if you want one PC that also handles modern games.

Sweet-spot build: AMD Radeon RX 7600 + AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D + 32 GB DDR5 + 2TB NVMe SSD — more than Banished will ever use, with CPU headroom that helps in very large towns and in other simulation games.

4K build: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 + AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D + 32 GB DDR5 + fast NVMe SSD — comfortably drives Banished at 4K; the extra graphics power is there for other titles, since Banished itself does not need it.

Is It Worth Upgrading Your PC for Banished?

Almost certainly not for Banished alone. The game’s official minimum is a 2 GHz dual-core with 512 MB of RAM and a DirectX 9.0c card, and the recommended spec is a 512 MB DirectX 10 card with an Intel Core i5 — hardware that has been commonplace for well over a decade. If your current PC runs Windows 10 or 11 at all, it will run Banished. The only upgrade with a real case behind it is the processor, and only if you are still on a very old dual-core and like to grow towns into the hundreds, where the simulation load is what you would feel. Otherwise, upgrade because you want to play newer games, not because of this one. If you do have an old machine, adding memory up to 8 GB and putting the game on an SSD are cheap quality-of-life improvements, but neither is required to play.

Can You Play Banished on a Laptop or Handheld?

Yes — easily, and this is one of the best cases for it. Because the game needs only a 512 MB DirectX 9.0c card and 250 MB of storage, virtually any laptop from the last decade will run it, including thin-and-light models with integrated Intel Iris Xe or AMD Radeon graphics and no discrete GPU at all. A gaming laptop with something like an RTX 4060 is far beyond what Banished needs. On handhelds such as the Steam Deck and ROG Ally, the game is trivially light and runs comfortably, making it a great fit for short sessions on the move, with excellent battery life because the hardware is barely working. Storage is a non-issue at 250 MB, so a modest SSD or microSD card is plenty.

How to Boost FPS in Banished

Banished predates modern upscalers, so there is no DLSS, FSR or XeSS support in the game and the usual advice about switching those on does not apply here. In practice, if the game feels slow it is almost always the simulation rather than the renderer: very large towns with hundreds of villagers put load on the CPU, and no graphics setting will fix that. What does help is closing background applications so the processor has more room, avoiding power-saving laptop profiles that throttle the CPU, and keeping your graphics drivers current. Lowering the game’s resolution or overall quality level reduces the rendering load, and driver-level scaling can help on a very high-resolution display, but on most systems the difference will be small, because the game was never demanding to begin with.

Graphics Settings That Matter Most in Banished

Banished’s options are deliberately minimal compared with a modern 3D title, so there is no long list of effects to tune. The settings worth knowing about are resolution and overall quality: dropping resolution is the most effective way to lighten the load on a weak GPU or older integrated chip, and if the game offers a quality or effect level, lowering it reduces the rendering work further.

Texture quality is not a concern here — the game’s assets are small and were built for 512 MB of video memory, so any card meeting the official minimum can hold everything it needs. Anti-aliasing and shadow quality, where available, are the most expensive options and the first to reduce if you are chasing a smoother experience on very old hardware. On a modern PC, none of this should be necessary.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can my PC run Banished?

Very likely, yes. The official minimum is a 2 GHz dual-core CPU, 512 MB of RAM, 250 MB of storage and a 512 MB DirectX 9.0c card with shader model 2 support; the recommended spec raises the CPU to an Intel Core i5 and the graphics card to a 512 MB DirectX 10 part. Any PC with a modern dual-core or better processor and integrated graphics — Intel UHD or Iris Xe, or AMD Vega or Radeon — clears both. A GTX 1050 or RX 560-class card is far beyond what the game asks for.

Is Banished demanding on PC?

No. It is a 2014 city-builder with a 250 MB install and a 512 MB DirectX 9 minimum, so it runs on hardware that would struggle with almost anything else. The only place it can feel heavy is the simulation in very large towns, which is a CPU matter rather than a graphics one.

What GPU do I need for Banished at 1440p 60fps?

Effectively any GPU. A 1440p 60fps target is well within reach of the official recommended card, and a AMD Radeon RX 7600-class graphics card is enormously more than Banished needs at that resolution — it would be a sensible pick for the newer games you play alongside it, not for this one. Integrated graphics handle 1440p here.

How much RAM does Banished need?

Officially, 512 MB — the same figure appears in both the minimum and recommended specs, a holdover from the Windows XP era. In practice Windows needs more than that on its own, so 8 GB is the sensible amount for any modern system and is far beyond what the game uses. Going to 16 GB or 32 GB makes no difference to Banished; it will use a small fraction of it.

Do I need an SSD for Banished?

No. The game occupies only 250 MB and its load times are short on any drive, so a hard disk is entirely workable. An SSD such as the Samsung 990 Pro will trim a little off loading, but with a game this small the gain is marginal — buy an SSD for your other games and your operating system, not for Banished.