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God of War Ragnarok – PC goes to war with PS5 – Clash of the Titans

Technical Review

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Clash of the Titans

Around 2 years after the console exclusive launched, we have an updated and enhanced PC release. Ported by JetPack Interactive, who also ported the 2018 original, as expected they have moved the engine over from DX11 to DX12, again with support from the Sony Santa Monica studio. Powered by Sony Santa Monica’s own, enhanced engine that offered up exceptional quality on PS4, PS4 Pro and far more on PS5.

User Experience and Scalability

 When it comes to PC gaming, the market, player base and demands are very different from the console roots this God of War, was born on.  With such a wide range of hardware and configurations, the customisation and user experience are a vital piece of the PC puzzle. Jetpack Interactive have excelled here with an instant and clearly labelled Shader Cache timer at the bottom screen upon first boot or driver update. The Developers themselves have confirmed this is a full offline shader build done by the developers and shipped with the game. PC players benefit from a console standard here. This takes approximately 10 minutes and no shader or traversal stutter was encountered, praise the gods.

 The menu system and options are also a pleasure, all changes can be made in real-time in this DX12 supporting engine. Transparent menus allow each graphical option change to be viewed and understood in real time. The choice is, again, extensive as per the standard for Sony 1st party PC ports.  Frame-rates over 120fps / 32:9 aspect ratioDLSS, FSR3, XeSS / frame interpolation are all here along with the engines own custom TAA which aligns to the PS5 version of the game. In the options you get a preset of Low, Medium, High and Ultra, these stay consistent across the games selection of graphics choices.

Settings

  • Textures and Vram specifics

This is an important one for image quality and performance, if you are V-Ram limited. The previous game was a last generation game, ported to PC, and only boosted on PS5, Ragnarok was created with PS5 and PS4 versions. Hence V-Ram demands are higher, 50% higher, as a baseline, bringing over the PS5 4K assets which where enhanced further using Machine Learning upsampling. Minimum requirements are 6GB cards rather than 4GB. Repeating myself again, Vram – and memory as a whole – DOES impact performance, no matter what anyone states. Other PC/console focused technology sites have only recently started acknowledging this, which is true again here, even 8GB cards can be limited. As covered in my GoW PC review (see below) when that launched, I discussed and demonstrated the split pools of Ram, PCIe, and more issues can impact PC but not the PS5, check that out for a more detailed overview.

 Even with an 8GB card, the game will likely access around 7GB to use, in my tests i ensured Operating System(OS) and Apps only used 300MB, a best case scenario. In the game though it will leave a portion open for OS emergencies. If we bleed over that circa 7GB of V-Ram we then page swap with system ram, which kills performance. The video highlights how this impacts my RTX2070, even at 1440p DLSS quality, (Approx 960p base) at the high texture settings we can bleed over the V-Ram limit requiring lower resolutions and/or dropping textures to Low or medium. A few other settings such as shadows and atmospherics also impact V-Ram requirements so if you are on a 6 or 8GB card (a huge portion of the market) you will have to lower these and/or target resolutions accordingly. Recall that the render targets, buffers and material requirements in this game mean it is not just the textures themselves that take all the ram, but they are one of the biggest.

Comparing them, Low to medium and then high is where you notice the higher level mips. High to ultra is common boost of mips, within the frustum so higher quality across all objects, rather than just those closes to your eyeballs. For the best balance of performance vs quality 8Gb or lower choose medium or low, 10gb and above choose high and ultra is really for the 12GB+ cards, you know who you are.

  • Models

 This impacts geometry and polygons of object along with general clutter and LoD. The hit to performance can be between 5-6% going from Medium to High and the same again from High to Ultra  depending on the area. A minor cost to V-Ram but is far more GPU impactful, PS5 Performance mode runs this at the medium settings.

  • Anisotropic Filter

With the high abundant and high quality textures, AF really only pays back at Low, offering a meagre 2% on my RX6800 and RTX2070. As such leave at High or Ultra which is what PS5 runs at in both modes as not difference can be found by eye between high and ultra

  • Lighting

This is a clear low is a no go as it effectively turns of AO and self shadowing on characters. The hit here can be 15% in some scenes and then each step is a more refined boost of 2-3% each step adding in more spot, fill and light maps for GI and other effects. Here Performance mode looks closest to High but after medium the changes are minimal both in visual and performance payback, Set to Medium as a minimum, or High if you notice any issues.

  • Shadows

The single biggest hit on performance, just like the first game. The quality of shadow cascades is great and even medium looks good and sharp but not feathered with a penumbra filter that High adds in and the Ultra refines that even more with an improved filter pass and more shadows. Spotlights are also improved but here PS5 quality mode is actually higher than PC’s best with spotlights being very high resolution above ultra. Sun shadows are a match with PS5 quality and Ultra. Performance mode runs shadows closest to medium both on spot lights and sun shadows as seen here. Which can offer a welcome 12%. But going from Low to ultra is a whopping 24% boost. Medium is the sweet spot and ultra if you have the GPU and Ram to run them, as this is the next biggest V-Ram affect over textures.

  • Reflections

Another setting that runs way above Ultra on PS5 quality mode as it uses the engines integrated hardware accelerated Ray Traced parallax cube maps and fallback Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) proxy geometry to increase reflection quality and accuracy. This means we get correctly aligned reflections that fall outside of the ray traced SSR pass, in the video/pictures, on PS5 the reflections are higher, including the ceiling and netting which is missing on PC ultra which only has SSR and cube maps. This is a hybrid Ray Traced reflection pass that effectively falls back to SSR when that data is available, combining all these rays to improve the accuracy/quality. We know from the teams GDC talk on this that the entire step here on PS5 quality mode costs approx. 4ms, big for a 33ms target and gigantic for a 16ms one, hence why this is disabled in performance mode where PS5 now aligns with the High setting. It will be interesting to see how much this affects rendering cost on PC when the team getting their DXR process working. But in the 40fps mode disabling this would provide circa 16% on performance.

  • Atmospherics

This is a minor one, looking to really be focused on fog volumes and other alpha and potentially particle effects. In the most stressful sections I could find, we can see that Low and Medium can look very low resolution and highlight the voxel construction of the effect. We see a 4% gain per step up to high, and then high and ultra look almost the same. Quality mode on PS5 is Ultra and performance mode aligns closest to Ultra or High.

  • Ambient Occlusion

I am not sure this is not a broken menu, as I only saw High show any change in performance less that 1% and is likely a bug and appears to be very minimal in a change or currently not working on PC, as such PS5 in both modes look the same and really Lighting and shadows impact the look of this more,  leave at ultra for the placebo pleasure.

  • Tessellation

This is another area that can be very costly currently on PC, both AMD and Nvidia. Within the Inter realm portal, we can see the biggest hit to performance of any setting, Some 37% going from Ultra to Low on my RX6800 GPU. But Nvidia cards are impacted far more on my RTX2070 moving from medium to high costs a staggering 69%. As of Patch 3 I believe the team pulled this back on PC which leaves Ultra another setting on PC that is way below PS5 in Quality and Performance mode. Of which both modes are above Ultra currently, outside of this area though tessellation on PC is a minor cost at ultra but objects do tessellate closer to the camera on PC than PS5.(UPDATE:- Patch 4 or 5 has now resolved this specific Nvidia bug, but I had to update my driver also, which offered a huge 62% improvement. Be sure to update driver and/or delete shader cache to fix the bug within the API render.)

  Below you can see the PS5 settings matched in Quality and performance modes, resolutions are direct from developers directly, meaning we have a perfect example here to do a full like for like console to PC test across CPU, MEM and GPU with 2 Nvidia cards and the close match to PS5, the RX6800 GPU.

Performance testing PS5, PC and Steam Deck

 Pitting the PS5 against my RTX2070 machine, specifications in video, we see a huge delta in performance for a few reasons. V-Ram as noted with 8GB being far too low for 4K gaming here, even using DLSS or such leaves the card swapping data out from system ram to V-Ram which hurts performance significantly. All tests are carried out against Patch 5 with latest drivers applied on all machines. Matching PS5 quality mode,  which is 1800p to 2160p at/above ultra settings against 4K DLSS quality (1440p base) at those closest ultra settings. PS5 really pulls ahead, at times we can be 100% faster, but over this run of matched play we are around 50% faster on PS5 at higher settings and resolutions. Those V-Ram limits reinforce my point perfectly as to the cost of going over that threshold during play.

 Dropping to the performance mode settings we also need to drop textures to medium along with 1440p DLSS quality (960p base) which keeps us within those V-Ram limits. Now we hover closer to that 60fps target now. We still dip into the 40s though and it can be bandwidth, fill rate and/or triangle bound across this run in addition to CPU here. This game, as per GoW 2018 also has a high sync cost, pointing to possible CPU sync or memory cost on my 2700, with V-sync off you can gain around 5-8% performance back in some places. That said using the unlocked native 1440p Performance mode on PS5 we see a similar 40-63% boost in performance at higher resolutions, and who says consoles don’t punch above their weight, hey Kratos.

 Moving to the RX6800 (a closer match to the impending PS5 Pro, maybe) we can run close to the PS5 quality mode when at 40fps, just with a potential 30% boost in resolution. In this comparison PS5 is running DRS up scaled back to 4K from a lowest bound of 1800p, where as the RX6800 is native 4K. Performance is still better on PS5, with some bigger dips on PC cropping up. Over the run PC is within 10% of the PS5 at roughly 30% higher resolution, which is far closer than the specs would suggest. 

Performance mode is roughly the same story, with the RX6800 now running identical settings and Resolution, 1440p native for both. But here, shockingly, PS5 is faster overall with the PC able to max out the 120fps V-sync limit here, and PS5 just shy in its run of 116fps. But over the run PS5 averages
higher and for a GPU like the RX6800, this is one of the best results yet for the PS5 and does highlight more work on the GPU/CPU utilisation and potential memory and V-sync areas could close that gap up.

 The RTX4090 paired with a 5800X3D can stretch its legs far more, withe CPU being a big part of that in some of these tested sections. At 4K DLAA Ultra settings, we can run above 120fps often with the fastest and smoothest performance level yet. Far exceeding the PS5 in all of its modes, obviously, but dropping to 4K DLSS quality can boost this even further with a similar or better image quality than the PS5’s 4K quality mode. This is certainly the best way to play the game on PC, but you can get decent results even on weaker hardware.

Steam Deck

 Completing my full suite of testing, the little Valve Steam deck brings the joy of the PS4 experience in your hand, yes you need to make some drastic cuts which equates to Low on everything, including Textures and a reliance on TAA reconstruction, so from a 1080p target using FSR3 or TAA from an approx. 640×400 base we can achieve a decent 30fps rate and even above 60fps in the quitter sections, but I recommend the cap as it feels more consistent that an unlocked variable rate. IN your hand it looks great and really highlights the exceptional art driven design the game has when even at the lowest settings and resolutions it still looks great and achieves the lions share of the quality and is close enough to the PS4 version to succeed as that quality in your hands. It can become bandwidth, memory and CPU bound on the small device and certainly power throttled, but the scalability and quality on offer is a testament to how good the port is across a wide spread of hardware. It is just in that middle ground that the team need to claw back a few % of performance to try and mitigate the architectural differences between the PC and console design.

 

Game Engine & areas for improvement

The engine is very memory dependant it seems and has a tight spin lock, sync point with its render loop. On PC this can present some fixed timing cycles on the refresh, we even notice this on PS5 performance mode when running at 120fps, we can have runs locked to 80fps. On PC these can be CPU and memory bound, making them more impactful. The engine threads across 4-6 or so cores/threads well, with a main worker thread, but does not scale much beyond this. Even disabling HT and boosting clocks makes little difference, as it can be tied to a single core in specific areas. The game is more often GPU or memory bound, but it does appear more CPU bound on PC than PS5 which is likely due to the extra work it has to do for data streaming and decompression (handled by dedicated hardware on PS5) and the DX12 API not being as efficient has the PlayStation API. This is true of all three of my CPUs but my 5800X3D offers significant boosts, reinforcing memory timings and cache misses being a potential cause here, not a surprise as the game will be built around the tightly coupled hUMA memory sub-system and architecture.

Game play and quality of port Summary

  A little over 2 years after the consoles, this Ragnarok sequel does not boost the PC version as much as the prior release. Simply because the PS5 version took many of those enhancements away from this PC port back then. It can win on three main areas though over that PS5 version:-

  • Frame rates can be far higher;
  • Image quality can be superior;
  • And your choice of ways to play and aspect ration are broader;

The biggest challenge is you need very powerful PC hardware to match or exceed that PS5 baseline. It can be done and overall this is another quality PC ports with a very console like experience from the shader compilation, real-time settings changes and fast loading. The enforced PSN login is still annoying and, I feel, impacting Sony’s sales negatively as so many parts of the world cannot create a free PSN login, but they can and do have a Steam account to buy the game.  I would prefer this to be a choice outside of online focused 1st party releases.

 The shift to DX12 has been a worthwhile effort from JetPack and does help increase performance across AMD and Nvidia hardware, which was an issue I discussed at length back in my review as to the reasons they choose DX11 then, which the team have now confirmed in interviews over on IGN. But this engine could still use CPU’s and certainly some of the mid range CPU’s slightly better than they currently do. Data streaming and memory buffers along with that tessellation issue, specifically for Nvidia, were also areas from launch code but have now been resolved. But, this is still a solid, well built and impressive PC port that can be played from the Steam Deck to the RX4090 and anywhere in-between. And the quality of that experience across all those devices is close enough to never ruin the game underneath.