Cyberpunk 2077 Is Quietly Changing Its System Requirements Again

Heads up, choombas — if you’re still running Windows 10, CD Projekt Red has some news you’re not going to love. The studio is bumping up the minimum PC requirements for Cyberpunk 2077 yet again, and this time it’s all about cutting the cord on Windows 10. The good news is that if you can’t or won’t upgrade to Windows 11, you’ve still got a couple of options to keep playing. The not-so-good news is that they’re both a bit of a gamble.

This isn’t CDPR’s first rodeo with raising the bar, either. They’ve quietly done it twice before, and each time a chunk of older hardware got left behind in the process.

CDPR Is No Longer Testing Cyberpunk 2077 on Windows 10

The change showed up quietly on CDPR’s official Cyberpunk 2077 support pages in late May 2026 — no big announcement, no splashy blog post, just a notice tucked away on the technical support section. According to that notice, Windows 11 is now the minimum required OS for the game, following Microsoft pulling the plug on Windows 10 support.

Here’s a small wrinkle worth knowing: the notice points to Windows 10’s original end-of-life date of October 14, 2025. But Microsoft’s Extended Security Updates (ESU) program actually keeps Windows 10 patched until October 13, 2026. So the OS isn’t quite as dead as the notice makes it sound. Either way, the bottom line from CDPR is the same — they will no longer be testing future Cyberpunk 2077 updates on Windows 10. Full stop.

A Quick History of Cyberpunk 2077’s Requirement Changes

For some context, this is the third time CDPR has shuffled the game’s minimum specs since launch. Here’s how it’s gone down:

• December 2020 — The original launch specs. Windows 7 was fine, a GTX 780 or RX 470 would get you in, and you only needed 8GB of RAM and a 70GB HDD.
• February 2022 — Windows 7 support got axed (Windows 10 became the floor), and the minimum GPU was bumped to a GTX 970.
• September 2023 — The big one. This overhaul touched everything: CPU jumped to a Core i7-6700 or Ryzen 5 1600, GPU to a GTX 1080-class card, VRAM up to 6GB (8GB on AMD), RAM to 12GB, and storage moved from HDD to a 70GB SSD.
• October 2026 — The newest change. Hardware specs stay the same, but the OS requirement jumps to Windows 11.

The Weird Part: Capable PCs That Still Can’t Run It

Here’s where it gets genuinely frustrating. This change creates a bizarre situation where millions of PCs that easily meet — or even exceed — the hardware requirements could be locked out simply because they can’t run Windows 11.

Why? Because Windows 11 is picky in a way that has nothing to do with raw power. Microsoft mandates a supported processor list, plus the TPM 2.0 security chip and Secure Boot. Plenty of beefy gaming rigs built in the late 2010s and early 2020s — machines that would chew through Cyberpunk’s recommended specs without breaking a sweat — flat-out fail Microsoft’s compatibility check. So you could have a monster of a PC that’s technically “too old” for the OS, even though it’s more than strong enough for the game itself. Wild.

Your Options if You’re Stuck on Windows 10

If you meet Cyberpunk’s hardware specs but can’t make the jump to Windows 11, you’ve basically got two paths forward, and neither is perfect:

• Downgrade to an older version of the game. Roll back to a build that was tested on Windows 10 and stick with it. The trade-off is no future updates.
• Do nothing and cross your fingers. CDPR never actually said future versions won’t work on Windows 10 — only that they won’t be tested on it. So newer patches might keep running fine. They also might not. It’s a roll of the dice.

That “we’re not testing it anymore” language is the key thing here. It’s the same hedge CDPR used back when it dropped Windows 7 support — the game didn’t instantly stop working, it just stopped being officially guaranteed.

The Witcher 3 Is Getting the Same Treatment

Cyberpunk isn’t alone in this. The exact same Windows 11 provision got attached to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, whose requirements were revised right alongside the May 27 announcement of the Songs of the Past expansion — the game’s third major story expansion, due in 2027.

And The Witcher 3’s overhaul actually goes further than Cyberpunk’s. On top of requiring Windows 11, the updated specs make the game DirectX 12-only, ditch hard drive support entirely in favor of SSDs, and ask for 12GB of RAM and a 6GB-class GPU like a GTX 1660. For a game that launched in 2015 running happily on mechanical drives and Windows 7-era setups, that’s a pretty dramatic line in the sand. It really drives home that CDPR is treating Windows 10 as legacy territory across its whole catalog now, not just one game.

So What Does This Actually Mean?

Here’s the thing that’s interesting about all this. Since 2023, CDPR has repeatedly hinted that it was done updating Cyberpunk 2077 — and then kept circling back to it anyway. The fact that they’re bothering to update the minimum requirements at all is a pretty strong tease that more updates could be on the way. You don’t tidy up the spec sheet for a game you’re truly finished with.

And honestly, while locking out Windows 10 holdouts stings, the move itself isn’t shocking. Windows 11 overtook Windows 10 in popularity nearly a year ago, so the writing’s been on the wall. This is just the moment it became official for Night City. If you’ve been putting off that upgrade, now might be the time to finally deal with it — or at least back up a version of the game that still runs on your current setup.

For more gaming news, check out our coverage of the Pragmata devs discussing a potential sequel, the Dragon Quest 11 S Switch 2 port and its big upgrade catch, Bungie’s plans to end Destiny 2 support in June 2026, and the wild Pokemon TCG heist where thieves were arrested over a $213K Tokyo van robbery.