Flappy Pannus
Veteran
Thanks to the EA Play $1 promo, finished Dead Space Remake on the PS5, and about halfway through it on the PC too. Was surprised how much they changed, nearly all for the better. Far better writing, great switch ups of previously tedious sections from the original, the mechanic of rerouting power to decide how you want to tackle areas, the way you find weapons, sidequests, the new weapon effects, etc - just so many really smart decisions to modernize a classic title and not lose anything in the process. Very impressed.
But good gravy, what an absolute technical mess of a game. One of my favourite games so I was really bummed to hear how the PC version turned out, and after playing it, while the game was even better than I expected, if anything the technical critique was milder than the reality. High-end PC is still very likely the best experience, but there probably is no platform though where it really excels - at least until we're in Zen6 territory. On the PS5 in performance mode, it looks quite blurry as expected, but that really wouldn't be an issue if it could maintain 60fps - but it definitely can't. You have the traversal stutters yes, but there seems to be a lot of GPU-related bottlenecks too, especially later in the game. When you're firing off flamethrower effects and gravity wells it can really crawl, there are plenty of rooms with nothing happening when you're clearly in the 50's, but intense moments can drop that down further - and those are often.
The PC, at least on my 12400f, manifests a little differently, but probably for the worst. You can obviously just adjust your resolution/DLSS settings to not be GPU limited nearly as much, so combat encounters can play out far more smoothly on my 3060 with DLSS quality/balanced with 1440p output res. But holy shit, those traversal stutters. Stutters when you approach a door. Stutters for a moment after. Random stutters for missed shader compiles. Stutters where there are not actual framedrops, but just the animation halts (the PS5 get these too). Also these clusters of stutters (and that's really the problem - we're not talking about periodic 1 fps drops, we're talking about 4-6 stutters in a short span which are each 5-10fps drops) can occasionally make the engine go haywire, where my GPU will top out at 80% in a room and be stuck in the 50's, and will only get 'unstuck' by going into another room, triggering another stutter that somehow fixes it and returns GPU utilization to normal. You're constantly revisiting sections and walking through doors in this game, so Alex's comment of "A stutter every few meters" really wasn't an exaggeration. There are even some DLSS oddities (even with LOD bias fixed), and some indications that some post process effects are being reconstructed where they shouldn't be, albeit relatively minor in the scope of things.
At the very least from what I hear, high-end CPU's can minimize this to an extent. But not even a PS5 Pro or a Zen5 will probably get rid of these in their entirety. Can honestly say I've never played a game, and I'm including the worst shader stuttering games in existence, that compared to the constant judders in this game. Such a shame because it's so beautifully architected in terms of game design.
But good gravy, what an absolute technical mess of a game. One of my favourite games so I was really bummed to hear how the PC version turned out, and after playing it, while the game was even better than I expected, if anything the technical critique was milder than the reality. High-end PC is still very likely the best experience, but there probably is no platform though where it really excels - at least until we're in Zen6 territory. On the PS5 in performance mode, it looks quite blurry as expected, but that really wouldn't be an issue if it could maintain 60fps - but it definitely can't. You have the traversal stutters yes, but there seems to be a lot of GPU-related bottlenecks too, especially later in the game. When you're firing off flamethrower effects and gravity wells it can really crawl, there are plenty of rooms with nothing happening when you're clearly in the 50's, but intense moments can drop that down further - and those are often.
The PC, at least on my 12400f, manifests a little differently, but probably for the worst. You can obviously just adjust your resolution/DLSS settings to not be GPU limited nearly as much, so combat encounters can play out far more smoothly on my 3060 with DLSS quality/balanced with 1440p output res. But holy shit, those traversal stutters. Stutters when you approach a door. Stutters for a moment after. Random stutters for missed shader compiles. Stutters where there are not actual framedrops, but just the animation halts (the PS5 get these too). Also these clusters of stutters (and that's really the problem - we're not talking about periodic 1 fps drops, we're talking about 4-6 stutters in a short span which are each 5-10fps drops) can occasionally make the engine go haywire, where my GPU will top out at 80% in a room and be stuck in the 50's, and will only get 'unstuck' by going into another room, triggering another stutter that somehow fixes it and returns GPU utilization to normal. You're constantly revisiting sections and walking through doors in this game, so Alex's comment of "A stutter every few meters" really wasn't an exaggeration. There are even some DLSS oddities (even with LOD bias fixed), and some indications that some post process effects are being reconstructed where they shouldn't be, albeit relatively minor in the scope of things.
At the very least from what I hear, high-end CPU's can minimize this to an extent. But not even a PS5 Pro or a Zen5 will probably get rid of these in their entirety. Can honestly say I've never played a game, and I'm including the worst shader stuttering games in existence, that compared to the constant judders in this game. Such a shame because it's so beautifully architected in terms of game design.
