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Sep 27, 2024 · #1. God of War Ragnarök PC - DF Tech Review - PC vs PS5 - Optimised Settings. Watch on. So, a number of issues in this port, which otherwise is quite good. PS5 Quality Mode and PC's Ultra are a visual match with DLAA obviously providing better image quality.
Sep 23, 2024 · In terms of image quality, the PS5 version of God of War Ragnarok runs at a native resolution of 4K (2160p) in Quality mode and around 1800p in Performance mode. Meanwhile, the PC has the option to deliver native 4K on capable hardware. In addition, better image reconstruction options like DLSS, XeSS, and FSR are available on the platform.
With the new game coming out, I’m trying to debate whether I should play it on the PC or the PS5. On one hand the PS5 is in a more comfortable playing space. Displays are the same for both locations. I can run the PC game at 4k@60fps ultra no problem.
Jan 12, 2022 · With our in-depth PC Performance review, we are going to smash through all the settings, boosts and more across 2 PC specifications along with comparisons to the PS5 Backwards Compatibility...
- 17 min
- 440.3K
- IGN
- Kratos conquers a new platform.
- What We Said About God of War on PlayStation 4
- God of War PC Features
- If you're planning to play God of War on PC, will this be your:
- How Does God of War Perform on PC?
- IGN Recommends
By Michael Thompson
Updated: Jan 27, 2022 7:29 pm
Posted: Jan 13, 2022 8:25 pm
“A little far from home, aren’t you?”
Kratos most certainly is! One of the biggest anti-heroes in the PlayStation family has moved home twice in the past four years. First, Kratos left the ancient Greek climes and mythology behind and hit the colder and harsher environment of the Nordic mythology. But by far the bigger move, though, is that he’s no longer a PlayStation-exclusive character, with PC players now invited into the fold ahead of the PS4 & PS5 release of the concluding chapter in this tale, God of War Ragnarok. The question left to be answered is: Is Kratos sorry or is he better?
It is fair to say that PlayStation Studios has been at the forefront of gaming technology and quality for the past couple of generations. This is borne out by one of the longest-serving studios, Sony Santa Monica, exploding onto the PS4 with arguably the game of the entire generation. Even though it may be four years old now, God of War is still a gorgeous looking game. With exceptionally high production values, incredible art direction, strong visual and technical implementation, and memorable and complex characters with a compelling story throughout, it really reinvigorated the plot-driven, single-player aspect of games whilst expanding on a pre-established character and lore with confidence and honesty. Name me a game that has a better opening 30 minutes than this? It sets the tone so well that I found it almost impossible to stop playing. The 2022 PC version loses none of that and is as excellent as the 2018 PS4 game, which – if you haven’t already read the IGN review of, now’s your chance.
I expected great action from God of War, and it delivers that handily. But I didn’t expect it to be a thrilling journey in which every aspect of it complements the others to form what is nothing short of a masterpiece. It’s a game in which Kratos, a previously one-note character, becomes a complex father, warrior, and monster, embattled both on the...
Check out the God of War PC system requirements.
So, what does this PC version offer other than, as the box states, “a refined and updated PC port of the PS4/Pro version?” With some minor but welcome additions, from a content perspective this is no different, but the visual makeup has made some leaps to leverage the spectrum of hardware available on PCs. Here are the big-ticket upgrades:
Both DLSS and FSR can achieve excellent results on cheaper hardware.
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Full pixel-pumping 4K is now available without the “checkerboarded 4K” God of War shipped with on PS4 Pro (and on the PS5 backward-compatible version, which only unlocked the framerate). AMD and Nvidia offer DLSS super sampling and AMD’s open-source Fidelity FX Super Resolution (also known as FSR). Both run on Nvidia RTX cards but only FSR is available on AMD cards. These both offer an improvement on image quality by rendering at a lower resolution and intelligently upscaling for an image that looks nearly as good as native 4K. In the case of DLSS, Nvidia is reconstructing the image using temporal data from previous pixels/frames, while FSR is a technique that performs a spatial upscale and then a contrast-aware dynamic sharpening pass. Both can still achieve excellent results on cheaper hardware. A nice touch here is that in the graphics options menu, God of War shows you the resolution being rendered by the engine and then the output target to the screen. This means you move through the same resolution levels, predominantly, across both technologies.
DLSS starts at 1280x720 with Ultra performance, and that is one rung lower than FSR, which starts at performance, but both target 1920x1080 base outputs. Then we move to Balanced, then Quality, and finally Ultra-Quality which is available for FSR only.
First time playing
Second (or higher) time playing
The two biggest improvements, in my view, are shadows and ambient occlusion (AO), with the higher amount of foliage being drawn now meaning that, at Ultra settings, you not only get sharper more detailed shadows, but also more shadow-casting objects. This adds more depth and contrast to scenes, and allows Kratos and other characters to be bathed in more light and shade. Boosting this further is the bump up to what’s called “ground-truth” AO, or screen space directional occlusion, which again just embeds details into the scene much better.
The two biggest improvements are shadows and ambient occlusion.
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Look at Kratos’ eyes, his beard, and even the little leaves on the trees (you have to watch the video for that). They all show a darker, more realistic contact within close objects occluding itself and shadowing onto the surface. The higher resolution and filtered shadows can also be seen here with a sharper cleaner edge, no dithering present and again simply more of them within the scene. I think these two boosts are the ones that add the most to the visual impact, with even the difference between 4K checkerboard and native 4K here on PC not really jumping out at you. This shows how good the checkerboard solution was in many first-party games and reinforces that it’s a good idea to use FSR and DLSS where you can. The fact the PS5 version runs at 60fps helps a little more than on PS4 Pro because you are getting twice the temporal resolution at the same time, but still, shadows and lighting offer a bigger uplift than the increase in pixel density. And, unsurprisingly with very a powerful GPU capable of 4K, Ultra can be very impactful.
How does it run, you ask, when using my RX6800 paired with a Ryzen 3600 at 4.1Ghz? Maxed out at 4K with no reconstruction options, we are often sub-60fps, and that can feel bad even on a controller – let alone mouse & keyboard. Once again, this just shows how costly effects scale with resolution, and even here with a GPU that is more powerful than the PS5, even it cannot run this game maxed out at 4K/60. Some of this will be due to the fact that the engine is still using DirectX 11 rendering, and can at times stall the GPU utilisation when capped at 60fps. That means some drops are not due to maxing out the GPU but rather to underutilisation within the frame-to-frame jobs. Even though the benefit of running at Ultra settings is welcome, the sub-60fps is not viable as an option.
Luckily, we can jump to the FSR options here and choose the Ultra Quality that we touched on above. We now see that 60fps lock is maintained almost all the time in combat and exploration sections, which means you would struggle to notice the small reduction even on a large 4K screen. You certainly can notice the smoother gameplay action at 60fps. Be aware, though, that the target for 120fps requires a very powerful single-core CPU, and as such on both my Ryzen 2700 and 3600 CPUs, even at 4.1GHz it can become CPU bound on the main worker thread above 80fps. It often sits at sub-100fps even in quiet scenes with far more GPU headroom left; 90fps is an easier target but even that is not always locked.
Moving down the stack to my RTX 2070, which is overclocked to be closer to an RTX 2070 Super and paired with a Ryzen 2700 at 3.8Ghz, it is not a CPU-bound game at 60fps. But this GPU, even at Ultra Performance DLSS settings, does not hit 120fps, largely due to the CPU throttling performance. So the option to run at that spec is not possible, since you will often become CPU-bound.
A locked 60fps is achievable, and you have a few ways to do it.
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A locked 60fps is achievable, though, and you have a few ways to do it. 4K Original settings again delivered 30fps-like performance, with a troll fight hovering between 40 and 50fps, but cinematics are even heavier. By choosing Quality mode at original settings we are close enough to that 60fps level to not drop below it in any meaningful way. This obviously matches the PS5 backward-compatible version on visuals, and at around 12% lower pixel rendering than the 1920x2160 the PS5 Pro/PS5 version uses it looks close enough to not be of a huge consequence.
To run the game on the God of War Ragnarök recommended specs, you'll need an NVIDIA RTX 2060 SUPER GPU, an Intel Core i5 8600 CPU, and 16GB of RAM. Of course, in order to run the game with full ray-tracing options and on the highest possible resolution, you'll need to meet a higher benchmark.
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Sep 27, 2024 · Alex goes in-depth on the PC version of the PlayStation 4/5 juggernaut, revealing a highly accomplished port - with just a few edge-case problems that should be resolved in upcoming patches.
- 22 min
- 162.4K
- Digital Foundry
