The videogame medium in recent years has expanded, bringing the video game not only to be a mere means of entertainment, but a real tool for sharing stories, emotions and important messages. This is the case with Death Stranding, the last effort of the master Kojima and which saw the light on PlayStation 4 last fall. A controversial work that clearly divided the audience. Today we are here to tell you about the version of the game, soon to be released, for the glorious PC Master Race.
The announcement of the arrival of Death Stranding on Windows systems caused a great stir, also because together with Horizon Zero Dawn, it represents the first landing of an exclusive PlayStation on PC. In this case the publisher will no longer be Sony Interactive Entertainment but rather 505 Games and it will be It can be played starting July 14 and purchased on Steam and the Epic Game Store. We had the opportunity to try the PC port of the title, coming to play up to the fourth chapter. Of Death Stranding we have talked about it in abundance and we will not be bothering you again with what the title wants to convey, but we will talk about what were our first impressions of this epic and what are the improvements introduced in this version.
Let's start immediately by telling you that the Decima Engine, that is the graphic engine on which the title rests has been developed and designed to work best only on two types of Hardware, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro. Although the current consoles adopt the same architecture as our home PCs, thus facilitating porting from both directions, having to optimize a title on an infinite possibility of hardware configurations turns out to be a great challenge even for the most talented teams. The requirements released by the development team suggest that this conversion work has been meticulously performed, thus giving everyone the opportunity to play the title. To be able to run the game at maximum details in Full HD and with an average frame rate of 60 FPS, it will be enough to have a GTX 1060 or an RX 590, or video cards from now 4 years ago.
But why should a person who has not yet played Death Stranding prefer the PC version over the PlayStation 4 one or better still than the PlayStation4 Pro one, where the graphics sector was already of the highest level? The PC version of the master's title offers a Unlocked frame rate capable of reaching a maximum of 240 FPS, always if our hardware allows it, thus guaranteeing an extremely greater fluidity than the console counterpart, where the refresh rate is blocked at only 30 frames per second. Furthermore, we have the support not only for 16: 9 aspect ratio monitors, but also 21: 9 ones so as to have greater immersion during the delivery phases of our packages.
PC titles, especially those developed with the aforementioned platform in mind, offer a lot of graphics settings in order to adapt the game to most gaming PCs. On Death Stranding we have clear proof that the Tenth Engine was developed specifically to best adapt to the PlayStation hardware: in fact, the title shows few graphics options and all of which can be set on a four-step level.
Despite this, Death Stranding is well optimized, extremely fluid and able to adapt to many gaming PCs, even the most dated ones. Accomplice of this fact is also the game map, which contains a very sparse vegetation, but which at the same time manages to be extremely suggestive, especially when accompanied by the inspired soundtrack in the background.
Depending on the video card that we will have installed on our PC, Death Stranding will offer us various improvements both visually and in terms of performance. With Nvidia GPU of the RTX family we will be able to enable the DLSS 2.0, instead with an AMD Radeon video card we will be able to enable the Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) and the FidelityFX Upsampling.
For the uninitiated DLSS 2.0 (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is a rendering technology based on the use of artificial intelligence that will allow us to have greater fluidity without sacrificing visual quality. To use it we must necessarily have a GPU from the RTX family on board because DLSS will use the tensor cores that are normally used for Ray Tracing.
Contrast Adaptive Sharpening and FidelityFX Upsampling are two AMD technologies capable of increasing the visual detail of textures and increasing contrasts, so as to make the image quality even more beautiful.
We tested Death Strandig with an Enthusiast-grade PC equipped with: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X, nvidia geforce RTX 2080 Ti and 32GB of 60MHz Adata Spectrix D3200G.
The title turns out to be extremely fluid even at high resolutions. We tested it in 4K with maximum details and the frame rate never dropped below 75 FPS. Thanks to the video card supplied we could also try the DLSS 2.0, further gaining fluidity and bringing the Average FPS at 93.
The title has excellent graphics performance, far superior to its PS4 Pro counterpart, offering even sharper images combined with extreme cleanliness and a much higher depth of field. The textures are of the highest level, especially those of the protagonists where, during the cutscenes, we often witness such realism that we forget that we are in front of a video game.
In this test we have not encountered any type of problem: Death Stranding is well optimized and we have not found any type of bugs or graphic glitches that could affect our adventure.
The title makes decent CPU usage: it's the first time we've seen 30% usage on our 3950x, a 16-core CPU, which is a good thing, a sign that we're working to make the most of the processor and spread. the workload on as many cores as possible.
Obviously we will reserve the final judgment in the review phase and concluded. For the moment we can tell you that the port of Death Stranding on PC seems to be done in a workmanlike manner and able to run on any type of PC at a sufficiently high frame rate.
For the final judgment we give you an appointment on July 14th, while if you want to have more information about Death Stranding we recommend you read our review of the PlayStation 4 version.
► Death Stranding is an Adventure-type game developed by Kojima Productions and published by Sony for PC and PlayStation 4, the video game was released on 08/11/2019 The version for PC came out on 14/07/2020
Death Stranding is a game to own at all costs: we decided to evaluate it with a 93%, if you are interested in learning more you can read the Death Stranding Review
