PC requirements & benchmarks

Minimum & recommended PC specifications

Every hardware requirement below comes directly from the Lucas-blip-png/dkb-pc-recomp README and release notes for v0.3.0:

Operating system

Windows 10 / 11 x64 (supported); Linux x86-64 with kernel 6.7+ (preview); macOS 14.4+ on Apple Silicon (preview).

Graphics card (GPU)

NVIDIA GPU with a recent driver strongly recommended (tested on GeForce RTX 5060 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti Laptop). AMD and Intel GPUs are experimental due to device-lost faults (#3, #84, #99, #122, #124, #142, #193, #204).

System memory (RAM)

16 GB RAM plus a large page file minimum (commit limit ≥ 24 GiB); 32 GB RAM is comfortable. Default first-level commit is ~13.5–14.5 GiB, or ~9.3 GiB with TOTK_HEAP_LAZY=1 on Windows.

Processor (CPU)

Modern x86-64 or Apple Silicon CPU. In tools/lowend_bench.py, the first level held 60 fps on 16 and 8 logical processors, 58.9 fps on 4, and 55.6 fps on 2 logical processors.

Controller

SDL3-compatible gamepad recommended (Xbox, DualSense, Switch Pro, 8BitDo, GameSir), or keyboard and mouse with direct mouse camera enabled.

Game dump

Your own decrypted copy of Donkey Kong Bananza base 1.0.0 or update 3.2.0 (v458752) as a .nup file or ExeFS + RomFS folders.

Measured GPU & scene benchmarks

Upstream release notes and contributor profiling PRs (#161, #195, #207, #211) report the following real-world frame rates:

CPU core scaling (tools/lowend_bench.py)

In v0.3.0, upstream added tools/lowend_bench.py (documented in docs/dkb-lowend.md) to pin the game to the first N logical processors on the opening level:

Memory commitment & TOTK_HEAP_LAZY=1

Without lazy commitment, DKB Recomp commits roughly 13.5 GiB at startup and 13.75 GiB after 40 minutes (growing ~6 MB/min), peaking near 14.5 GiB on the first level. On 16 GB RAM systems, Windows must have a page file large enough to keep total commit limit above 24 GiB. In v0.3.0, setting the environment variable TOTK_HEAP_LAZY=1 on Windows commits guest heap pages on first touch (backed by spin-lock patches in 1.0.0 and 3.2.0, #126), dropping first-level commit from 14.5 GiB to ~9.3 GiB. You can inspect memory allocation with TOTK_MEM_REPORT=N.

DLSS, HDR10, 4K & Frame Generation in v0.3.0

• Temporal DLSS (experimental, NVIDIA RTX only): Feeds sub-pixel jitter, depth and camera-only motion vectors to NVIDIA NGX. DLSS output matches the game’s 3D resolution directly, and the HUD displays the upscaler’s true input/output dimensions. (Note: if combining DLSS with multi-threaded pass slicing, track PR #209.)
• Native HDR10 (experimental, off by default): Configured via hdr, hdr_peak_nits and hdr_game_nits. On update 3.2.0 with hdr = 1, setting DKB_HDR_NATIVE=1 lets Bananza render its own HDR10 pipeline and scales highlights past the stock 1.36x paper-white tonemap up to your display’s peak nits (#150).
• 4K & Ultrawide: 3840x2160 and 5120x1440 dynamically grow the render-target pool (#152), joined by 3840x1600 and 5120x2160 presets (#168).
• Frame generation (FRAME_GEN=2x): Displays an interpolated frame half an interval before each real frame in mailbox or immediate present mode, automatically skipping generated frames on hitches or crop transitions (docs/dkb-framegen.md).