Space Marine 2’s free 4K texture pack takes up more space than the entire base game, and you’re gonna need some serious hardware to run it

“The Emperor provides!” as the famous saying goes, and today the Emperor—in the form of Saber Interactive and Focus Entertainment—has provided a 4K texture pack for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, a big-time graphical upgrade that promises to make your squad of Ultramarines look as pretty as they possibly can.

The 4K texture pack is free, and installing it is simple: Just download it from Steam or Epic and restart the game. But there are a couple things you should probably know before you go rushing off to click. 

First of all, this thing is huge. Space Marine 2 requires 75GB of storage normally, but the 4K texture pack jacks that requirement up to 160GB. That’s right, the texture pack is bigger than the whole damn game. In fact, it’s bigger than a bunch of entire games on our list of the PC’s mightiest storage hogs from 2021.

Second, you’re going to need some real juice under the hood to make the effort worthwhile. The minimum system requirement for the 4K texture pack exceeds the recommended requirement for the base game. Dare to compare:

Base game recommended (1920×1080, 60 fps, ultra graphics preset)

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating systemOS: Windows 10/11 64-bitProcessor: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X / Intel Core i7-12700Memory: 16 GB RAMGraphics: 8 GB VRAM, AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT / Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070DirectX: Version 12Storage: 75 GB available spa

4K texture pack minimum (3840×2160, 30 fps, ultra graphics preset)

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating systemOS: Windows 10 (1903 min)/11 64-bitProcessor: 12 CPU cores, AMD Ryzen 9 5900X / Intel Core i7-12700Memory: 16 GB RAMGraphics: 12 GB VRAM, AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT / Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080DirectX: Version 12Storage: 160 GB available space

Just for fun, here’s the recommended spec for the 4K texture pack:

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating systemOS: Windows 10 (1903 min)/11 64-bitProcessor: 12 CPU cores, AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D / Intel Core i9-14900KMemory: 16 GB RAMGraphics: 12 GB VRAM, AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX / Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 SUPERDirectX: Version 12Storage: 160 GB available space

That’s a lot, and lest you think Saber and Focus are kidding around, early reviews on Steam strongly suggest otherwise. Those with truly heavy iron say it looks glorious, but players who have slightly less horsepower at their fingertips are struggling. I have no way to confirm it (all of this is just reminding me that my own personal rig is growing increasingly potato-like) but a few users have said the 12GB VRAM recommendation really isn’t adequate, and that 16 or 24GB is needed if you really want to run it full screamer.

The good news is that aside from an admittedly hefty chunk of download time and storage space, there’s really nothing to lose if you want to try your luck. If you find the performance isn’t where you want it to be, simply uninstall the texture pack and you’ll be back to the original, still-very-pretty textures.

Alongside the new texture pack, Focus Entertainment also said today that it’s aware of complaints about changes made in the recent 4.0 patch, and is now “actively working on another one including balancing fixes” that should be out next week.

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