Death Stranding 2: PC, SteamDeck, PS5, PS5 Pro Technical Review
Share the Story:
Death Stranding 2 was my graphical winner of 2025, yet only 8 months later we get a PC version, and Nixxes even had time to include Ray Tracing extras. But comparing the new PC release to the PS5 and PS5 Pro presents some bigger gaps and issues than expected. Once again, Powered by Guerrilla Game’s Decima Engine, the PC version is built on that same PS5 exclusive from last year. And interestingly includes their own, PS5 exclusive till now, updated Reconstruction TAA called Pico ( Progressive Image Compositor), Which is another name for Reconstruction, Checkerboard, up sampling, or spectral super resolution. As I covered on IGN last year in my performance review, both modes on both consoles use it, along with DRS. And here on PC Nixxes have added it for the first time alongside FSR3.1, XeSS and of course the champion in Reconstruction, DLSS 4. And unlike Death Stranding 1 on PC, the comparison here to DLSS highlights some big gains for the Nvidia Solution, more on that later.
Visually, artistically, Visual FX design, lighting, and materials are exquisite, the same photorealistic environments, dense geometry, and digital actors via motion and performance capture remain industry leading once again. Photogrammetry forms a large portion of the games ID, with striking photorealistic rugged scenery, intimate towns, fireworks, cockpits and raging forest fires. Lighting is both real-time and dynamic with outdoors being lit by sun or moon complete with light radiosity or global illumination. Although not Ray Traced, even now on PC, it samples probes at run time via irradiance volumes, with some caching to aid speed and quality. Complementing this is CSM, Screen Space shadows and Analytical Ambient Occlusion. Man made lights are also used often, such as spot lights using area lights and soft feathered shadow casters. All this is as much true on PC as PS5, well almost.
PC can offer features above PS5 and even PS5 Pro, some are expected for PS5 to PC ports, such as 32:9 ultras widescreen (although PS5 has now added a widescreen option as per the Directors cut), the aforementioned upscaler and resolution choices of your design. Alongside unlocked frame-rates above 60fps, although only in gameplay as the real-time cinematics are capped at 60fps due to the performance capture and animation process. Not ideal but as these are non-interactive they are not a showstopper, albeit a possible issue for those that do not own a screen that can easily jump from 60 to 120, they still run and look smooth.
Options and optimal settings using RTX5060 8GB card, 32GB DDR4 3600 Ram, 5800x3D 8c/16t cpu
Memory, textures and rt are big costs in
Big hits are RT reflections, textures if ram limited
Then level of detail
Then terrain
clouds can be minor to big cost, depending how much real estate they take up in the frame. Low is best but quality is poor, very low res causing heavy artefacts, breakup, ghosting and dithering due to the 3D voxel construction, but 91fps is your reward. Medium is significantly better, more stable, coherent and convincing and only costs around 6% more performance to 86fps. High is the best balance with cleaner construction, excellent light attenuation, more stable with only mild edge trails that can look like interlaced lines on edges. Costing a little more, just shy of 8% down to 80fps now. V high is the most stable but the cost vs reward is way out of whack, a whopping 42.8% over high makes it hard to spot visually but impossible to miss in play, dropping us sub 60fps here. And the denser the cloud the more expensive it becomes on all modes. For my optimal settings medium is best for this card but PS5 uses high in both modes, performance looks a little softer due to lower base res but is still better than medium. For higher end cards high is recommended.
Really high is the sweet spot on quality and performance but on 8Gb cards st 4K perf high textures are too much ( PS5 runs very high textures in both modes). As such set textures to med on 8Gb card, high on 10-12gb and vhigh above that. The game uses textures a great deal for its detail, art and impact so even high can be impacted at times significantly over PS5 and very high textures. That said it is still a great looking title at medium and with DLSS or pico you can enjoy a clean, crisp, and smooth game on the RTX 5060 that remains within the g-sync VRR Range always at worse and often a smooth 60 with better IQ than PS5 Pro even, shocking I know but pssr2,0 would fix that even in perf mode, discussed shortly.
Scaling performance is mostly limited to memory options as just covered then resolution and RT, using my RTX5060 we see a small 14% gain with low settings over medium, but high is slightly more, costing 10-15%, very high is a big hit costing 38% of frame time over high, but this is due to memory and what I have often talked about since the PS4 days, memory structures see god of war video. Max everything is vram bound, thus we see massoove 63% cost, which includes RT reflections high RTAO.
4K native
4K Checkerboard vs 1800p Checkerboard DRS down to 1440p/ 1260p
Ps5 and PS5 Pro have 2 modes, a Native 4K 30fps Quality mode for both consoles, using Decima’s own TAA solution (Pico), present the games characters, assets, and varied terrain in the best possible light. Both look identical and line up almost identically to the very high settings on PC. The performance mode targets 60 and makes some changes, rendering resolution, base PS5 takes a 30% haircut to 1800p down from that 2160P in Quality. In addition, it also makes reductions on Level of Detail in geometry and grass mostly, but Shadow resolution and filtering are also reduced along with Ambient occlusion. Performance on PS5 is closely aligned to the high settings, with shadows, level of detail and terrain being the most obvious.
PS5 Pro makes no cutbacks, LoD, shadows and AO remain identical, as does the 3840×2160 target output. But never judge a book by its cover. Both consoles utilising Decima’s upscaling TAA solution to reach those final output targets. As per previous games game on PS4Pro, we get similar signs of image break up and jittering pixel noise. In addition, both use Dynamic Resolution Scaling in this mode (Quality likely does also, but I never counted any points). PS5 drops the lowest, rarely hitting that 1800p potential high, more often around 1260 – 1440. With longer views, dense geometry, or firefights staying much closer to those lower bounds.
The PS5 Pro also scales but remains within the upper bounds of the PS5 levels, approximately 1440p as a low. The final image is slightly softer on the Pro over its quality mode, both still suffer from high frequency subpixel shimmer on thin edges, distance geometry and grass and hair. Anything within a high contrast and tiny triangle or pixel level on screen can become unstable due to motion and/or the TAA upscaling being jittered across each frame. And here the lack of PSSR2 compared to Nvidias DLSS is stark at times, highlighting my point in pixel counts since 2018. Even at a lower base resolution of 1080p upscaled to 4K via DLSS performance we get better detail and texture resolve, more stable high and low frequency details and superior image quality over the PS5 PRO 4K quality mode at points, making the use of the other options almost mute.
Performance
Loading
Evolution on the prior engine, but texture detail, polygon count, physics, materials and character rendering, skinning, rigging, animation and lighting is top tier. It can cross uncanny valley due to face bone rigs on occasion being too static and robotic. They look authentic but do not have the character, sole. Eyes can also be weak at times with a lack of depth and Occlusion. Almost like west world with Yule Brinner, it can ruin the illusion of humanity beyond the cyborg.
The mix of atmospheric scattering, impressive scale, Dynamic weather, particles, Rain, fire Fluid simulation, in streams and the oil like rivers that build from void outs or BT battles. Cloth, skin, muscle and fat deformation is top tier with some of the best models, bone rigs, materials, skin and contact animation in real time rendering. Post effects remain a key tool in the visual quality, such as clean motion blur of a per pixel variety improves the action and cinematic aims. Physics another key pillar here in, momentum and animation system, in gameplay and real-time cinematics, just as before, but improved.
More of the same in story, visual style, gameplay, travel and battles. Expect more variety, weapons, skills, vehicles, enemies and terrain to explore. But it certainly does not significantly change the formula, but surprises, shifts and turns do come. But this is still delivering the story within at a slow pace, one front in front of the other.
