Why this month’s PC port of Death Stranding is the definitive version [Updated]

For some video game publishers, eight months between a title's console launch and its PC port would be galling. In the case of Death Stranding, on the other hand, that timeframe is astonishingly fast.

The peculiar, critically acclaimed game, and first from industry vanguard Hideo Kojima after his departure from Konami, emerged in 2016 as an apparent PlayStation 4 exclusive. That was the operating assumption for some time, considering Sony rarely ports its console exclusives to PC, but we'd seen hints to the contrary, and the publisher was bold enough to announce the PC version a mere week before the game's PS4 launch. The whole thing felt like a dare to PC gamers: will your Kojima fandom make you cave and buy a PS4 early, or can you wait until Summer 2020 to strap a naked baby to your post-apocalyptic chest?

In my case, an eight-month wait for the PC version was easy to stomach. I had plenty of other games to catch up on, and the prospect of a higher-performance romp through Kojima's United Cities of America tided me over.

I'm five days into testing the game's preview version ahead of its July 14 launch on Steam. Now that its preview embargo has lifted, I'm here to report incredibly good news. This port is the definitive way to play Death Stranding, and it scales incredibly well in terms of getting PC gamers to that crucial 60-frames-per-second performance threshold while offering PC-grade customization options.

Our testing conditions

Our early access comes with one serious concession, however. We are not allowed to show you our own gameplay capture until the PC version officially launches on July 14. This article includes images of the PC version supplied by publisher 505 Games and Nvidia, along with a single capture from the game's original version running on a PlayStation 4 Pro. All of those images are clearly marked, and they're used to drive points home about what I noticed in my hours of testing the PC version.

My PC testing suite consists of the following: a desktop sporting an Intel i7-8700K CPU, 32GB of DDR4-3000 RAM, and an NVMe SSD; and this late-2016 Alienware laptop, which is powered by an Intel i7-7700HQ CPU, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, and a PCIe SSD. I tested the desktop with an Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti and an Nvidia RTX 2060 Super, while the laptop includes an Nvidia GTX 1060 with 6GB of VRAM.

The desktop system is obviously on the bleeding edge in terms of budget; even its RTX 2060 Super version isn't a bargain, with that GPU costing no less than $400. Meanwhile, the laptop's performance level is equivalent to an affordable modern-day gaming PC, since its notebook-specific parts run at slower clocks across the board.

Thus, we'll start with the laptop as a good baseline spec to ask: Can we get Death Stranding, a gorgeous, console-stressing showcase for the Decima Engine, running at a smooth 60 frames per second on a middle-tier gaming PC? The answer is an almost resounding yes. I'll break this down by talking about some in-game toggles.

When Death Stranding isn't asking players to sit back and squint quizzically at cut scenes, it puts players in control of Sam "Porter" Bridges, a post-apocalyptic deliveryman who must run and drive through a massive wasteland. Hillsides, valleys, and mountains stretch widely across the game's field of view, and the game is keen to wallop you over the head with its enormous scale every step of the way.

60fps on midgrade hardware: Yes, it’s possible

Since I cannot post the PC version's screens, I have to present its graphics customization options as a list:

• Aspect ratio (16:9, 21:9)
• Maximum frame rate (as low as 30fps, as high as 240fps)
• Model detail (low, medium, "default," very high)
• Memory for streaming (low, "default," high)
• Shadow resolution (low, medium, high)
• Ambient occlusion (on, off)
• Screen space reflections (on, off)
• Nvidia DLSS (off, "performance," "quality")*
• AMD FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening and Upsampling (CAS) (on, off)
• Anti-aliasing (off, FXAA, TAA)
• Depth of field (on, off)
• Motion blur (on, off)

A few things about this list. First, "default" appears to be matched one for one with the PlayStation 4's equivalent in each category. Second, that ultra-wide ratio option is great, but it's a reminder that arbitrary resolution options won't fly. If you're not using a pure 16:9 or 21:9 display, you'll get black bars. (Still, native 21:9 support is a reasonable concession to the ultra-wide crowd.) And the frame rate is indeed as unlocked as suggested here, with the exception of cut scenes, which are always capped to 60fps. We appreciate those not being capped to 30fps, but the jump back and forth from 60fps to an unlocked rate is noticeable enough.

The biggie for performance comes in the form of two upsampling options: Nvidia's DLSS, should you own an Nvidia RTX GPU, and AMD's FidelityFX CAS, should you not. We've written a decent amount about the former—particularly in our coverage of the recent Minecraft RTX patch—while the latter is a platform-agnostic model that we've rarely seen built into games. In either case, the idea is that the game will render at a lower resolution, then smartly upscale to the resolution you chose.

My GTX 1060 system is not compatible with DLSS, but this is the one that must compromise the most to run the game at a consistent 60fps refresh. Hence, I began flipping FidelityFX CAS on and off while playing this version, and what I found was surprising: I got better, and arguably clearer, performance by setting my laptop's native resolution to 1440p and then toggling FidelityFX CAS than I did at the same settings at pure 1080p. (This laptop is underpowered enough for me to opt for 1080p resolution on a regular basis.) CAS at 1440p coughed up an average of 5fps compared to equivalent settings with a pure 1080p signal. To reach a mostly locked 60fps threshold at CAS 1440p, I set everything above to "default" or "medium," with anti-aliasing disabled.

I also had to reduce the settings for ambient occlusion and/or screen space reflections to get to 60fps or turn shadow resolution down to "low." I hate to lose any of those tweaks, but I prefer to dump water reflections to preserve the subtle, all-over-the-screen boost you get from good shadows and ambient occlusion. (If you're wondering: I have to reduce all three of these settings to reach a comfortable 60fps average in native 1080p resolution.)

A surprising case for CAS

Those are small sacrifices that otherwise put the Alienware laptop right up there with PlayStation 4's 1080p performance, and with double the frames, to boot. I can't help but ask a question as a result. Does the PS4 version render close to that 60fps threshold, only to apply a 30fps cap to avoid uneven frame pacing? Or is the Decima Engine (developed by Guerrilla Games, makers of Horizon Zero Dawn) that much more efficient when rendered by a medium-grade gaming PC?

Either way, there's still the matter of jacking this port all the way to 4K or pushing higher resolutions on 144Hz and 240Hz monitors.

I'll get an easy one out of the way: if you're a proud owner of an Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti, you can rest assured that your GPU can push this game at a native 4K resolution, with all graphical settings up to max, and cruise at a nearly locked 60fps. On the other hand, you'll need to play with lower resolutions, reduced settings, or one of the upscaling options to get anywhere near 144fps at 1440p resolution. I'd argue that the game's pure pixels at roughly 110fps are better than adding mild up-sampling fuzz to teeter closer to 144fps.

With the Nvidia RTX 2060 Super, meanwhile, you might expect Nvidia's proprietary DLSS standard to be your preferred option to get up to 4K resolution at 60fps. Yet astoundingly, AMD's FidelityFX CAS, which is platform agnostic, wins out against the DLSS "quality" setting.

Both of these systems generally require serious squinting to make out their rendering lapses, and both apply a welcome twist on standard temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) to the image, meaning they're not only adding more pixels to a lower base resolution but also smoothing them out in mostly organic ways. But FidelityFX CAS preserves a slight bit more detail in the game's particle and rain systems, which ranges from a shoulder-shrug of, "yeah, AMD is a little better" most of the time to a head-nod of, "okay, AMD wins this round" in rare moments. AMD's lead is most evident during cut scenes, when dramatic zooms on pained characters like Sam "Porter" Bridges are combined with dripping, watery effects. Mysterious, invisible hands leave prints on the sand with small puddles of black water in their wake, while mysterious entities appear with zany swarms of particles all over their frames.

The above image is taken from PS4, and you'll notice a sparkling effect of particles on the open bodybag, generated in part by rain falling all around. It's the kind of detail Kojima Productions likely agonized over to get right, since the studio is obsessed with visual storytelling (and this moment is a reveal of a major supernatural force). Nvidia's DLSS, unfortunately, gets confused by this field of sparkling pixels and messes it up, turning the exposed body into a simple, black mass. Other moments and entities in the game, particularly the swirling-particle creatures known as BTs, suffer from similar issues when put through the DLSS wringer, though in many cases, these occur during live gameplay and are thus less noticeable.