Managed to get half hour in, not feeling particularly great and I have been up on and off through out the night, finally waking up at 4. Otherwise, I would have continued.
Early thoughts, this remake is amazing, there is one thing currently bugging me though and it is the switch between 30fps and 60fps for cutscenes. Other than that, the stutters are not that frequent or annoying (in my experience).
Looking forward to getting stuck into this properly.
Wait until you get to Wood Side Apartments, the reception area especially for some reason has a whacked out frametime graph which results in lower framerates than anywhere else:
Also when you're well into the streets after doing the jukebox it seems to stutter a bit more during the windy bit.
I can tolerate these though as they are no the massive ones like we see on Jedi Survivor.
I've been playing 2.2 hours so far and playing with mouse and KB feels responsive and intuitive in the game, though I do find the way the inventory is navigated and the map annoying as the movement is with the WASD keys. Enjoying it though, the atmosphere with modern fog and sound is awesome, especially through headphones.
Technical observation
- There is no frame generation
- DLSS dll version is 3.5.10, so be sure to manually swap the dll to the latest 3.7.20 and enable Preset E with DLSSTweaks for the best upscale quality
- DLSS Performance for 4K output is perfectly nice quality, clean and crisp
- There is no DLAA or NativeAA option, only UE's internal TAA if you opt to not use DLSS/FSR/XeSS.
- Ray tracing seems to make the most difference on water reflections my removing the screen space reflections that go out of whack when the puddles go out of screen space. Otherwise anywhere else so far RT seems to only make a minimal difference it seems. RT has on average a 24fps hit on a 4090. IMGsli here. And for an indoor scene with light spill where RT on vs off shows a bigger difference, see here.
- Average framerate for me seems to hover between 85fps and 105fps depending on area, it can fluctuate slightly above or slightly below this range. VRR sorts out the frametime inconsistency. Seems the frametime graph line is never truly flat like in other games, it's always a bit "alive" if that makes sense, see my video below:
- There is no FOV slider
- Because there is no Frame Gen, there is no Reflex
- There is a texture AA mode which has FXAA/TXAA etc, even when you enable DLSS, cannot determine is this is actually being used when an upscaler is enabled
- FSR1 and FSR3 feature, why the hell does it have FSR1 lol....
- The FPS cap in game is only 30fps or 60fps and of course uncapped, you'll need to use GPU driver or RTSS to set a custom FPS cap if you want that above 60fps.
- And 75fps+ the motion smoothness and mouse camera latency is perfectly fine which was nice to see, this is with a 1000Hz mouse
- The level of texture detail and general lighting etc is excellent. There is some Lumen GI at play but not in all areas, like if you open the doorway in the loo at the start, light floods in and illuminates areas of the walls of the loo that would hit the light
- In SDR (default gamma) pitch black areas are slightly faded black, not as faded as Wukong, but still faded. in HDR mode with the max luminance set to whatever mode the OLED is set to for HDR, and the "HDR Brightness" lowered slightly but not set to the lowest, pitch black areas are much darker than the faded black in SDR mode, though still not perfectly black which is still fine. In this mode the game looks good as many areas are very dark and this works well, although after further testing in SDR mode, I found I can replicate the HDR black level mentioned by setting the SDR gamma calibration to 1.6. Anyone on an OLED monitor should use either HDR and tweak the HDR brightness slider, or in SDR set the SDR gamma to 1.6 and then both will retain good black levels
- The weird frametime issues seem to be gone when you get to Bluecreek Apartments and as such it's basically 100fps most of the time there now. This is definitely an optimisation issue as I can see at least 1 CPU core in Wood Side sitting at 1% so is obviously parked. Reminds me of Last of Us when that launched and had CPU optimisation issues until they patched it up. For me the 4090 is brute forcing its way through the lack of CPU multithreaded optimisation I'd say.
- When I close the game and go back to desktop, UE crash reporter says the game crashed even though it exited fine (weird)
- No problems with hair, everything maxed out and hair seems to look superb
Edit*
6.5 hours played according to Steam
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