Marvel's Spider Man Remastered PC - DF Tech Review - Graphics Breakdown, Optimised Settings + More!

[Applause] [Music] the much-loved marvel spider-man from insomniac games is the latest formerly playstation exclusive brought over to the pc platform and we at df have eagerly awaited this as the porting effort has been helmed by the evertown to nixies in the netherlands who are responsible for some of the better pc ports we've seen in the last decade in this first video covering the pc port of marvel's spider-man i will compare the pc version at its very best to the playstation 5 version of the game in its fidelity and rt performance modes i'll detail all the upgrades as well as giving you a rundown of optimized settings recommendations we'll be making other videos with gpu head to heads and i will be doing an image reconstruction face-off between dlss fsr 2.0 and insomniac's own temporal injection technique but those will be coming later and before i get to the comparisons i want to talk about how this port gives off very strong first impressions based upon quality of life features that you can see just when you start the game when doing so you'll be greeted by a classic pc options gui to configure display in graphical settings before the game boots there's a lot of juicy stuff in here of course but it's the thought that counts this type of menu is not too common in pc ports these days and i think it's greatly appreciated as it gives you the user the ability to change the game before it actually starts it respects the idea that each pc is different and the user can change it as they see fit there are three things though here i want to call out specifically for one you have display choice you can change the game to have any monitor you have set up and as a part of this there's a support for different aspect ratios yes the game supports 4x3 which i captured running on a crt that's definitely not expected in this day and age for sure but what is expected in a competent pc port these days is support for ultra ride resolutions yes the game of course starts with a basic 16x9 that you also saw on the playstation consoles but it also supports twenty one by nine which is ever popular these days and even supports 32 by nine ultra wide aspect ratios out of the box this ultra ultra wide aspect ratio of 32 by nine definitely increases the sense of speed that you get from that increased widescreen fov there and yes it is a proper 21x9 and 32.9 implementation here with a wider horizontal fov no zooming shenanigans here and even if you don't have an ultra wide monitor you can change the fov independently should you so wish making it even more zoomed in or even more zoomed out these type of options for changing the fov whether by monitor aspect ratio or otherwise are not exactly expected in a game that was designed purely around a fixed 16x9 display that the playstations support and the last option i really want to point out here in this precursor menu is the exclusive full screen support yes this is real exclusive full screen that means you can change the refresh rate and resolution independent of what your desktop resolution and refresh rate settings are this is genuinely rare to find these days and something i really wish every pc game had all these options are of course available in game as well and none of them seem to require as far as i can tell full restarts for their effect to be seen in fact changing any option in game is a treat unto itself as for one the menu controls are quick and sensible on keyboard and mouse or controller and because nixi's has adopted the style of graphical menu in-game that we also saw in the rather excellent pc port of days gone there the graphical menu in-game fades out into the background becoming transparent and you can see in-game rendered graphics as well as immediate changes when you change any graphical settings all happening in real time so you always have a pretty good sense of what the graphical change will be from an option that you're adjusting on paper all these things i mentioned should technically be mundane but we're in the era of pc ports where even the hugest aaa games coming from console to pc can lack all of these things nixies is really excelling in these quality of life features where other games have failed spectacularly and yes in case you're wondering i do not need to invoke the stutter struggle here in regard to shader compilation for marvel spider-man on pc based upon my play i don't think the game suffers from any incessant shader compilation stutter like i've seen in all too many pc titles as of late that doesn't mean you won't be cp limited in some other fashion but it doesn't seem to have shader compilation stutter this is once again a rather mundane thing technically but considering how poorly other titles have been doing this in the recent past i really need to praise this as far as i can tell shader compilation is handled during the first boot of the game for example where you can see a processor like the ryzen 5 3600 here just really going to town on those shaders in the background as well as it happening when you load the game up from the menu and perhaps on the fly asynchronously as the game is being played and new objects and models are streamed in this will theoretically increase cpu load while you're playing which is different than how it would be on consoles which could then depress cpu limited frame rates but it also means there won't be irritating stutter from shader compilation based upon my experience speaking of those intro videos one thing i like about this port is how fast it is to get into the menu after the first boot check this out every subsequent boot after the first allows you to skip the intro videos by hitting escape on the keyboard so you can have near instantaneous boot times this is rather rare in modern aaa games on pc if it's not clear at this point i think nixies have crafted a high quality of life user experience here just based upon the menus and the way it functions it deserves a good amount of praise but even with that praise i do have some minor nitpicks of course for one i'm not sure what the config files for this game are even stored or if there are any at all i would like a nice and easy to find text.cfg that we can edit secondly the intro video skip only seems to work by hitting escape on the keyboard it would be nice to skip with a controller or have the option to just not show it at all after you load the game the first time much like you might see on the playstation 5 version of the game i think that's all of them now before i get into optimize settings and the upgrades i have to talk about the only quote unquote downgrade one gets on pc and that is in loading times while the game loads extremely fast on pc i would say it's not faster than the playstation 5 on the machines i have loading the same story save moment on ps5 took 1.9 seconds on similar settings with pc 1200k 3.5 gigabytes per second nvme drive it was around three seconds so an ultra high-end pc albeit with a middle-of-the-road nvme was around 50 slower on a load than the ps5 i tested a range of pcs using the main menu load to the campaign and saw that processor speed effects load time but not in a linear way you might think the 12 900k was barely faster than the 5950x and 3600 and those two were neck and neck i do not have a pcie 4 drive to test at hand but i did raid 0 to pcie 3 drives and found the game just being marginally faster there i imagine load times are great on pc but not as great as on ps5 due to things like shader compilation and the lack of direct storage gpu decompression beyond this one quote-unquote downgrade there are a few things as well that are just the same as ps5 for the most part for one you have texture quality here the very high textures represent the quality of textures found on ps5 in both its performance rt and fidelity modes but this isn't that surprising i did not imagine they would re-author art for this release in terms of optimized settings it's hard to get an actual grip on how much vram this title is using as i think it's maybe under reporting it i found the rtx 3090 for example at max settings 4k was only reporting a max of around 6.5 gigabytes usage in the process according to rtss and that seemed wrong to me based upon nixi's recommendation for 10 gigabyte gpus for the very highest settings still i have some recommendations for myself based upon my testing for a six gigabyte gpu i recommend using high textures for an 8 gigabyte gpu i recommend very high textures but you may have to avoid using higher levels of ray tracing detail 10 gigabytes and above can just max everything out though and i did not see any problems in my experience there another thing that is much the same as ps5 is ammunition the game does offer hbao plus as an option in the menu but i find it does not fit the game's artistic design well which seems to rely on the default ssao performing a lot of occlusion specular and otherwise so check out the scene here with this truck there's no visible occlusion like you might imagine should be there from the sky with hbao plus on the ssao setting has that occlusion there which i find more visibly plausible maybe hbao plus is not working correctly as of now but for the moment regardless of performance i recommend using ssao another aspect that is the same on pc as it is on ps5 is depth of field rendering here it seems that the ps5 appears to be using medium or high setting for depth of field which to me look the same and perform not identical on pc the medium and high settings run at quarter resolution while the low setting below that and very low as well run at 1 8 resolution but still manage this to look rather okay for my recommended settings i believe mid-range pcs should use the low setting as its performance impact in cutscenes will be profound as you can see here with an rtx 2060 super at 1440p where in moments the depth of field can be nearly 50 faster than it was before in terms of overall frame rate if you have a higher end gpu of course you can check out those medium to high settings if you find low not up to snuff the last thing that is the same as ps5 is hair ending quality pc can be better here but it depends on which mode you're comparing to on ps5 as you can see in the still of a character the performance rt mode uses less geometry to make up the rather performance intensive strand based hair that this game shipped with when it was remastered for ps5 if you try and look for a pc equivalent in the settings there's not one unfortunately ps5's rt performance mode hair looks to be in between medium and high for geometric density but still it's closer to medium there i would say if you are looking for an optimized setting for a mid-range gpu i definitely recommend medium as it will get rid of a lot of performance lurches you may see in cutscenes and when measured you can see a 30 performance increase in a worst case scenario or even higher if your gpu is lower end than something like an rtx 2060 super after this though the game starts having more tangible upgrades in its settings the first of which that goes without saying is image quality if your pc is up to the task if you have a big enough gpu you can definitely exceed the quality of anti-aliasing or detail that ps5's performance rt or fidelity modes will have you will also have access to better image quality through things like dlss but that is a topic for another video for my recommended settings i'll just generically say taa but i definitely recommend experimenting with fsr 2.0 with the lss and dla as you may end up wanting to use them in terms of core options in the menu though the sublist upgrade has to be in the shadow setting here with fidelity mode on the far left we can see how increasing the shadow quality from medium high and then very high gradually increases how much of the individual wiring is visible in the shadow from the fire escape above yeah it's really subtle stuff and if you compare you can see that the very high resolves a bit more detail there and fidelity mode on ps5 and performance mode as well is most similar to high here this minimal increase to shadow fidelity has a cost on mid-range gpus which you can see being around three percent here on an rtx 2060 super at 1440p i recommend using the high setting for shadows if you're rocking a mid-range gpu the next upgrade is thankfully more meaningful and that is an object lod as you can see here in this alleyway the very high option on the far right shows these decals and doodads on the building at the end of the alley while both modes on playstation at that same distance do not here the high setting on pc in fact has the exact same lod distance behavior as found on playstation 5. the very high option is nice and will definitely pay dividends when you walk around foot in the city at a slower pace but otherwise i don't think you'll notice the difference between high or very high when swinging around at a fast speed even in panorama shots you'll only see small advantages like you can see here for example where there's more bushes on this rooftop that are missing on playstation 5. it's a nice advantage but i find high the most compelling setting for performance from mid-range pcs you can see around a two percent gpu performance win and similar cpu gains there if you're looking for them so high is my optimized setting here tangentially related to lod are the settings for crowds and traffic and here we can see pc has some advantages over rt performance mode but the settings do not align with what the ps5 is doing as far as i can tell medium and high crowd density seem to be extremely similar to one another and both of these look similar to ps5's fidelity mode low is obviously worse as you can see missing civilians in the stands and in the middle in that pedestrian zone with red brick in rt performance mode though there's a weird mash of settings that is below medium in some aspects and even below low for one it has people in the stands here and in the red brick pedestrian zone like medium yet the amount of people is easily halved or more and they do not stretch out as far into the distance that puts it decidedly below medium but it does not line up with low because low doesn't have people in the stands or in that red brick zone funnily enough but it has a lot more pedestrians on the sidewalk it doesn't line up for some odd reason but in terms of overall npcs i want to say it's similar to low low offers substantial performance improvements as you might imagine like here we are seeing five percent performance improvement on the rtx 2060 super at low even though it looks a little bit awkward in times square i'm going to recommend the low for optimized settings and even though i can give an informed recommendation for this setting i don't really have one for traffic density as for the life of me i cannot figure out what the differences are as you're seeing here from very low to high they all just look like variations of one another so i really can't tell what is going on nor what the ps5 setting is and i just say use low for the time being to be on the safe side the next upgrade that happens to be one of the largest is in texture filtering quality on playstation 5 in both modes and even in fidelity mode the texture filtering is what i would describe as poor anytime you're on the ground a spider-man it becomes rather obvious in the midfield where textures almost kind of cease to exist on pc this can look a lot better due to much higher texture filtering as you can see here the texture at a distance looks much much better i would say as far as i can tell the playstation 5 uses 4x anisotropic filtering in both modes due to anastropic filtering being so cheap on pc gpus i recommend an 8x or 16x setting which will look mostly the same and also have a similar performance cost you guys all right we were just about to call for backup i think i'm it lead the way okay so so far we've only seen rather modest upgrades with the most visible of them being upgrades to image quality or anisotropic filtering but the actual biggest upgrade is that which i'm going to describe last and that's how ray tracing is handled on pc to show this off let's look at an area here where i walk right up to this window and move the camera so you can see the windows full mirror-like reflection taking up most of the screen now let's compare this between platforms on the far right is pc max in the middle is fidelity mode and on the far left is performance rt mode one of the plain differences i think everyone should be able to see is how the textures on the ground here are much higher resolution in the reflection on the pc version this does not only affect ground textures but it also affects buildings as well everything is a much higher fidelity now like here maxed pc on the right playstation modes on the left notice how the building behind spider-man and the reflection here has all these details on it that are otherwise missing on playstation 5. on ps5 buildings in reflections were represented mostly by low level detail proxies of a sort and they lacked any finer detail most geometry was instead represented by textures windows like you can see really well in this shot were turned into textures instead of geometry so where you have rather handsome looking building models and reflections on pc they're reduced to something much more simplified on playstation 5. i would say this is a massive upgrade and the pc setting that corresponds to ps5 is setting the geometry detail setting for reflections to high versus very high this upgrade also means smaller incidental details on the ground are also now represented in ray tracing where they were not before so in this shot here you can see extra wires on the ground in the ray tracing that you can't see on playstation 5. so you're going to see a lot more details and reflections now than you did before that also includes more accurate self-reflections so going back to this shot i showed earlier we can see how the door's push handle is now reflected in the glass on the highest settings on pc which is otherwise missing on playstation 5 due to that lower detail geometry being used for reflections another upgrade visible here is the change to reflection resolution on playstation 5 in both modes the reflection is rendered at half resolution and is checkerboarded up to the internal resolution on pc it's full resolution at the highest settings so you can see a gradual increase of sharpness here from left to right in practice this means more mirror-like reflections like you can see here on pc are clearer and more accurate for rougher surfaces like the sheen you would see on a wet road that means there will be less swimming pixels or pixelation artifacts found there making the reflection look more stable and correct the last upgrade from ray tracing is in the distance of objects in the bb-8 structure as you can see here between pc max and ps5 modes there's a difference in the amount of objects like pedestrians and more at a distance with rt performance mode having noticeably fewer pedestrians and objects there to figure out which setting ps5 uses i set the game to use lower geometry quality like ps5 and move through the 10 different settings and when doing so it appears that ps5 fidelity mode is actually closest to 10 and performance mode is somewhere between 7 and 8 so both are rather high with that in mind let's talk about recommended settings for mid-range gpus and rt for one i say use half res reflections with a high resolution setting which on an rtx 2060 super saves an impressive 53 performance at 1440p when right up next to a reflection similarly use the lower quality geometry option as well which is also high and that will save a further 26 when right next to a reflection the last setting is object draw at a distance and this one requires a bit of thought yes it has tangible gpu wins like you see here when you turn it down for example the default six has around five percent performance increase over the maxed 10 on an rtx 2060 super at 1440p if we were just gpu limited i would say use eight but the setting is more important to the cpu moving down from 10 to six improves game performance by a very significant 23 percent on a ryzen 5 3600 when cpu limited so it's kind of hard to say which setting you should use it depends more on your cpu actually as to which setting a mid-range cpu like this should use it's hard to say but i did a test where i swung around times square which is very heavy on the cpu and i found that the one option was the only one that really kept it above 60 the entire time other values like 6 8 or 10 definitely drop below given that i don't find one very visually appealing i say u6 on a ryzen 5 3600 and just live with the performance drops for the moment but cpus with greater core counts and speed should go for eight and the latest cpus should try 10. now this is what all my optimized settings look like i find it a shame that some settings do not line up with the playstation 5 here like what's happening with crowds for example but still you can have some great wins with these settings overlooking times square on a ryzen 5 3600 with a 2060 super at 1440p we can see a 43 increase in performance over maxed using our optimized settings in fact we're cpu limited here on the 3600 so they're probably actually higher with an even better cpu and that's the thing about this game it's incredibly cpu limited as you can see in this shot here with the 12 900k producing 75 higher average frame rate than the ryzen 5 3600 with optimized settings and rt object range set to 8 like in ps5 performance mode i asked nixie's why the game is so heavy on the cpu and we learned that the bvh building there is very expensive as well as the extra cost on pc of decompressing game assets from storage into memory by using the cpu the actual ssd throughput though while doing this is far below what modern nvmes are actually capable of here i'm running the aim at 1440p native at my optimize settings flying through new york with a completely uncapped frame rate as you can see on the top left the ssd's usage is shown in megabytes per second here sometimes it's barely being used other times it's using a middling 50 to 70 megabytes per second and at the worst moments it may be perhaps 200 megabytes a second with my highest recorded usage being a flat 500 megabytes per second so modern nvmes like this on pc that can do something like 3.5 gigabytes per second while they're not the limiting factor if you have a modern ssd and a good amount of cpu power like you can see here with the sped up footage you can definitely get a flawless 60fps on spiderman on pc and even go for much higher performance in the 90 to 120 fps range but once again this game is very super limited with rt on so keep that in mind if you have something worse or near a ryzen 5 3600 [Music] but after optimize settings there's one last thing you should consider and that is using dynamic resolution scaling vermont nixies has told me dynamic resolution on pc works differently it is more responsive in the resolutions it will show as far as i understand it whereas ps5 had a list of resolutions it would run and switch to like 1440p down to 1296p or 1080p for example so pc will have more fine-grained dynamic resolution in that aspect and will be less coarse this is good for image quality but it may not be as good as playstation 5 for example when it comes to having headroom and responding aggressively to heavier frames as you're seeing here the dynamic resolution scaling works really well using our optimized settings at 1440p with the rtx 2060 super it helps achieve a steadier frame rate in areas where the native resolution definitely would not but i'm a little remiss that we don't have a drs setting which is more similar to the ps5s which i have a feeling might be more aggressive at cleaning up dropped frames either way i recommend turning on drs so there we have it for all my comps and optimize settings and all i really have left to say is that although i did not have to invoke stutter struggle for shader compilation here i have to partially invoke some sort of stutter struggle for mid to low energy views as if you read our article covering the game rich describes how the game throughout the review process showed issues with lower end gpus where regardless of settings and cpu frame time spikes would show up when swinging around the city so like here you can see the older version of the game and the day 1 patch version of the game where it's running on an rx 580. look at the frame times it's better in the new release but it's definitely not great still it is even worse technically when you would spin the camera around so frame times are not very good on lower end gpus like you're seeing here and i've seen them manifest i believe at gpus of rtx 2060 super class or maybe even a bit higher so this is something you really need to consider if you want to try out this game as i don't find it really great right now for the lower end gpus out there trying to hit 60 fps now beyond that negative note i want to positively say though that spider-man overall on pc is good it scales really high in meaningful ways above the console version it offers a great user experience in terms of features and menus and for my money i think it has the best rt graphical options we've seen in a aaa game you have a lot of settings to customize rt and i think almost every game should do that but that is enough from me for now if you did enjoy this video hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you're already a subscriber hit that little bell in the corner to be informed as soon as digital foundry posts video if you want to help us out support df on patreon to get years worth of our content in high quality for download other than that follow on twitter and as always this is alex bringing you farewell and auf wiedersehen in one month you wish you had me back [Music] you

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 418,981

Keywords:

Id: xI2VUQsPqJo

Length: 26min 14sec (1574 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2022