Review Death Stranding 2 PC: The Last Big Sony Single-Player PS5 Port?

Death Stranding 2 may be the final big single-player Sony game to come to PC, so we were curious to see how well it runs on a mid-range system and scales to more powerful machines. The inclusion of ray tracing, which wasn't present in the PS5 and PS5 Pro versions of the game, also makes the PC release unique. The Nixxes-developed port was released around a month ago, so we're a bit late to the party here, but it's only recently that patches have brought the title into what we'd call a good working window. The initial release included PCIe bandwidth issues, performance problems and other bugs, and felt more like a beta release than a finished game.

We started our testing on a mainstream system built around the venerable Ryzen 5 3600, a mid-range CPU from 2019, and the RTX 4060, the entry-level Nvidia option from 2023. The game runs well using optimised settings, easily maintaining 60fps at a 1440p output resolution using DLSS balanced mode. Hitting higher frame-rates requires more CPU grunt, but it's good to see that the game isn't terrifically CPU-limited. Likewise, GPU performance feels reasonable here for the fidelity on offer, though the 8GB of VRAM on this card (and many other mainstream Nvidia options) means that turning down texture quality settings is a matter of course. There are no disruptive stutters to report either, beyond the momentary blips on cutscene transitions that we've seen before, and using dynamic resolution scaling (DRS) ensures a solid 50-60fps throughout the first three chapters.

Death Stranding 2 on PC also marks the first release of Guerrilla Games' proprietary Pico ("progressive image compositor") upscaling, which is found in the PS5 and PS5 Pro versions. That gives us the novel opportunity to compare Pico to DLSS in the same game, and what we found on our RTX 4070 at 4K resolution surprised us. As the upscaler benefits from being tightly integrated into the Decima engine, it actually outperforms DLSS 4.0 in some areas like foliage, while being slightly more performant than DLSS 4.5 using a matched 1440p internal resolution. It's also platform-agnostic, so Nvidia, AMD and Intel users can all benefit from it, and we recommend giving it a try.

The upscaler of your choice can be used alongside DRS to lock to a given performance target, though you may notice short frame-rate dips, possibly as it adjusts between scaling factors. The effect becomes more pronounced when v-sync is enabled, but less so with VRR enabled as we generally recommend. Still, with the horsepower to increase performance above 60fps on the RTX 4060 PC when using Pico or DLSS, having DRS enabled allows you to benefit from better image quality than you'd get from a fixed scaling factor designed to maintain the same 60fps lock throughout.

Let's move onto the optimised settings proper now. While performance is laudable overall, VRAM remains a key constraint and should be the first thing you consider changing on anything but the highest-end GPUs. The very high mode matches that on PS5, but even high approaches the limit on 8GB systems. Therefore, we recommend the medium setting for 8GB cards, even though it means that the RTX 4060 is unable to match the PS5 in terms of visuals, despite possessing enough compute power to do so. (The same issue also affects the RTX 3070 and 3070 Ti, despite being faster than the 4060 by a good margin - another victim of low VRAM allocations for this generation of cards.)

Reflection quality is another setting with a profound performance impact, especially when you jump from screen-space reflections (SSR) alone to ray-traced and SSR together. The standard high option offers the best balance and stability, equivalent to the PS5 presentation, with high RT introducing some noise and inconsistent performance, while very high RT looks great but saps frame-rates substantially. RT high is therefore recommended if you have GPU headroom, and we recommend pairing it with DRS to maintain more persistent performance.

Likewise, ray-traced ambient occlusion (RTAO) looks good but drops performance by seven percent in our test area, so we have opted for the PS5-matching high option for our optimised settings. If you have GPU headroom, then it's fine to use it.

The level of detail (LOD) setting controls how far away full-resolution models are rendered, and here the very high preset has a substantial performance impact, so high is recommended. It offers around a 10 percent performance win versus very high with a minimal reduction in distant detail, aligning with PS5's performance mode. Cloud quality also impacts the view of distant vistas, and again it's the PS5-matching high option that we recommend versus the more expensive very high. Translucency quality, which affects the rendering resolution of transparent effects like particles, is best set to default, as it again has a heavy performance cost in some scenes but looks very similar to the higher setting.

With the biggest performance wins out of the way, let's quickly run through less impactful options. Terrain quality should be set to high to maintain complex geometry and surface detail, as going lower noticeably flattens distant areas. The high setting aligns with the PS5 performance mode and offers a six percent gain over very high. (A persistent bug intermittently reduces distant terrain detail and requires a restart to correct - something that has persisted across patches and needs Nixxes attention as it doesn't happen on PS5.) Shadow quality shows negligible performance changes across settings, so very high is generally recommended - unless you're on an 8GB card, where the 250MB VRAM saving is worth taking. Other settings show no significant performance savings, so we'll skip them. Finally, anisotropic filtering, which is limited to 2x on PS5, can be increased to 16x on PC without any performance penalty.

In total then, our final optimised settings look rather similar to the PS5 across the board, save for the VRAM concessions needed to hit mainstream Nvidia graphics cards. To test our optimised settings, we used a demanding dark scene with dynamic lighting and heavy foliage, back on the RTX 4060 at 1440p - with Pico balanced mode enabled and medium texture settings, so we're not limited by VRAM. Here, average frame-rates increased from 47fps on the very high preset to 60fps with optimised settings. Using DLSS balanced mode instead provides similar results, with a 57fps average. It's worth noting that the very high preset doesn't invoke RT, so the performance gulf will be even wider if you compare optimised settings to the game running at max settings with RT enabled.

It will be interesting to see if we do see any more big Sony releases ported to PC, as the strategy looks to have changed as of late and Nixxes no longer mentions PC ports on their website. Kojima Productions is nominally independent, but what about games from Insomniac, Sucker Punch or Naughty Dog? It would be a real shame for PC players to lose out on their future work.