Genshin Impact setup: 110 GB is the requirement that matters
Official Genshin Impact PC and mobile requirements, why storage beats the GPU, and the three purchases worth making. Every price carries its check date.
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TL;DR
A 6th-gen i5, 8 GB of RAM and a GTX 1050 clear HoYoverse’s minimum — the specification almost nobody fails on compute and almost everybody fails on storage, because Genshin now wants 110 GB free on PC and up to 60 GB on a phone. Buy a drive, not a graphics card.
Official requirements
HoYoverse publishes these on its own support portal. Our fetch of that page was blocked with a 403, so every row below is flagged in verify and must be read off the official article before this goes live. We are printing the numbers because they are consistent across the search index of that page, not because we personally loaded it.
| Minimum | Recommended | |
|---|---|---|
| OS | Windows 10 64-bit | Windows 10 / 11 64-bit |
| CPU | 6th Gen Core i5 / Ryzen equivalent | 7th Gen Core i7 / Ryzen 5000 or better |
| RAM | 8 GB | 16 GB |
| GPU | GTX 1050, or Intel Iris Xe integrated | GTX 1060 6 GB or better |
| DirectX | 11 | 11 |
| Storage | 110 GB or more | 110 GB or more |
Mobile, same source:
| iOS | Android | |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum | iPhone 8 Plus / iPhone X+, iOS 14.0+, 3 GB RAM, 40 GB free | Snapdragon 660 / Helio G88+, ARMv8-A 64-bit, non-PowerVR GPU, 4 GB RAM, Android 10.0+, 40 GB free |
| Recommended | iPhone 12 series / iPad 9th gen+, A13+, 4 GB RAM, 60 GB free | Snapdragon 855 / Dimensity 1000 / Kirin 980+, 6 GB RAM, Android 12.0+, 60 GB free |
Apple’s own App Store listing gives the installer size as 3.8 GB, published by Cognosphere Pte. Ltd. That is the download, not the install.
What the minimum spec actually gives you: a stable 30 fps at low settings, which is genuinely how a lot of the playerbase experiences this game and is perfectly fine for overworld content. What it does not give you is a comfortable Spiral Abyss, where dodge timing and burst windows live, or a comfortable co-op session in a crowded Serenitea Pot.
Note the minimum GPU row carefully: Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics are named as acceptable. Genshin is a six-year-old mobile-first title. This is not a demanding game by 2026 PC standards, and pretending otherwise sells hardware nobody needs.
The real bottleneck
Genshin has two bottlenecks and neither is the one people buy for.
On PC it is storage — capacity first, speed second. 110 GB is a lot of a 512 GB laptop drive, and HoYoverse has raised that figure repeatedly across versions. You need the space to exist permanently, plus temporary headroom at every major patch. A mechanical drive technically works and will hand you a loading hitch at every teleport and a twenty-minute patch install.
On mobile it is thermal sustain and battery, in that order. The daily rhythm of Genshin is a twenty-minute commission run, which is almost exactly the window in which a phone transitions from cool to throttled. The chip is fast enough; the chassis cannot keep it fast. And because most players open this game two or three times a day, battery life determines how many sessions you get, not how good any of them is.
What this means practically: if your Genshin problem is “it stutters when I enter a new area”, that is storage. If it is “it feels fine for ten minutes then gets worse”, that is heat, and no purchase at the chip level fixes it. If it is “my phone is dead by 4pm”, that is a battery problem with a fifty-dollar answer.
What’s worth buying
Three products, each aimed at one of those three symptoms. The cards above carry the full verdicts and the defects — read the cons, they are the point.
The SSD solves the 110 GB install and the loading hitches. The 8BitDo pad makes exploration genuinely more pleasant on PC, where Genshin has native controller support in its own settings menu. The power bank buys you extra sessions on mobile without charging while you play, which is the habit that makes heat worse.
One caveat on the controller worth repeating from the card: HoYoverse’s officially named pads are the PlayStation and Xbox families. Android controller support arrived later than iOS and is tied to specific official models. A third-party pad in Xbox mode usually works, but “usually” is the honest word, and that is why this is the budget pick rather than the top one.
If you already own an Xbox or DualSense controller, use it and spend the money on the drive instead.
Recommended settings
Lower these in order. Stop as soon as the game feels right — there is no prize for turning everything off.
- Render resolution. 0.9, then 0.8. The single largest lever on both PC and mobile, and the least visually damaging at the first step.
- Frame rate target. On mobile, pick 30 and hold it rather than chasing 60 and collapsing to 40 after twelve minutes. A consistent frame time feels better than a higher average.
- Shadow quality and volumetric fog. Expensive, and invisible during combat.
- Crowd density and environment detail. These are the settings that cause stutter in Liyue Harbour and in co-op, which is where most people’s complaints actually come from.
- Anti-aliasing. Set to FSR / low rather than off. Genshin’s art style suffers badly from aliasing on thin geometry.
- Motion blur. Off. It is a frame-time cost with a legibility penalty in a game with fast camera swings.
Leave texture quality high unless you are at 3–4 GB of RAM. Textures cost memory, not frame time.
What’s a waste of money
The expensive mistakes, specifically for this game.
A new graphics card. The recommended GPU is a GTX 1060 6 GB — a 2016 part. If you are running anything from the last five years and Genshin stutters, the cause is storage, CPU single-thread performance, or a background process. A new card will change nothing and you will be annoyed.
A Gen5 NVMe drive. Genshin’s loading is not sequential-read bound. A mainstream PCIe 4.0 drive is the right call; the premium tier is wasted here.
A gaming phone. Shoulder triggers and a 165 Hz panel do nothing for a game that targets 60 fps and is played with virtual sticks and four skill buttons. The vapour chamber helps with the real problem — heat — but you are paying several hundred dollars for a cooling solution you could get for a fraction of it.
A high-DPI gaming mouse. Not a shooter. Not an RTS. Your 800 DPI office mouse is fine.
A 240 Hz monitor bought for Genshin. The game’s own frame cap tops out at 60. Buy high refresh for other games.
A passive cooling case. A graphene or metal back plate with no fan has nowhere to put the heat it collects. Taking the case off entirely is free and works better.
A fast charger used during play. The charging circuit is a heat source next to the SoC. If you must be plugged in while playing, use the slowest brick you own.
FAQ
Will Genshin Impact run on integrated graphics? Yes — HoYoverse names Intel Iris Xe in the minimum row. Expect low settings and 30 fps. That is a supported configuration, not a compromise you are sneaking past the launcher.
Is 8 GB of RAM really enough? It is the official minimum and it works, but it is the row you will feel first if you have a browser open with twenty tabs. 16 GB is the recommended figure and it is the cheapest meaningful upgrade on an older desktop.
How much free space do I actually need on my phone? HoYoverse’s minimum is 40 GB free and the recommended figure is 60 GB. On a 64 GB phone that is not achievable alongside a normal photo library. This is the single most common reason people stop playing Genshin on mobile, and no accessory fixes it.
Does a controller work on Android?
Official Android controller support came later than iOS and is tied to specific named models from the PlayStation and Xbox families. On iOS it has been supported for far longer. We have put the exact version history in verify rather than printing a version number we have not read off an official announcement.
