While all those PC launches were successful and more or less satisfactory from a performance and features standpoint, Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered PC can easily be described as Sony’s best port to date. That’s no coincidence, as it is also the first project handled by renowned Utrecht-based support studio Nixxes Software, purchased by Sony off Square Enix a little over a year ago. At Square Enix, Nixxes had been doing PC ports for over twenty years, from Soul Reaver 2 to Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Marvel’s Avengers, garnering a reputation for its usually excellent work. Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered PC is yet another example of their technical expertise. To begin with, it’s the first Sony game on PC to support both AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (2.0) and NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling image reconstruction techniques at launch. Granted, it is also the first to include ray tracing support for reflections, whereas the previous titles ported from the console had none. Given the performance impact of ray tracing, it wouldn’t have been possible to include the feature without using DLSS and/or FSR. We’ve tested Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered PC with the newly released Game Ready driver (516.94 WHQL), using DLSS Quality Mode. The game does not feature a built-in benchmark tool, so we used NVIDIA’s FrameView software to analyze the frame rate in a custom open world gameplay segment. Do note that we were also capturing the below footage while running the benchmark, which slightly impacted frame rates. This benchmark was run with maximum settings, where the game looks excellent thanks to PC-exclusive improvements like NVIDIA HBAO+ for ambient occlusion, higher-resolution shadow maps, higher levels of detail, and higher fidelity texture filtering. Nixxes has provided an extensive breadth of tweakable graphics options, ranging from textures, lighting and shadows, geometry, and more. Even camera effects like vignette, chromatic aberration, motion blur, and film grain can be customized, with the latter two sporting an actual 1-10 slider for finer control. The last Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered PC patch that dropped right ahead of the embargo introduced three new settings dedicated specifically to ray tracing. Whereas the game previously only allowed users to enable or disable RT-powered reflections, you can now also choose the resolution (high/very high), the geometry detail (high/very high), and the object range (slider). According to the information we received but couldn’t test yet due to timing, maxing out these new settings should provide higher quality ray traced reflections at some cost while lowering the settings yields improved frame rates. Sony also promised further tweaks for Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered PC are on the way, such as:
Performance and image quality improvements for AMD FSR 2.0 and NVIDIA DLSS Investigating additional optimization for haptic feedback with the DualSense controller
Indeed, this game does not feature the best implementation of the DualSense controller’s trademark haptic feedback, but that was true even on PlayStation 5. As for the game itself, if you aren’t among the over 20 million gamers that already played it, then Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered PC is the proper way to rectify this mistake. As mentioned in the original PS4 review, this is undoubtedly one of the best superhero games ever made, which now looks better and performs smoothly provided you have the hardware. Whereas PS5 users have to decide between the Fidelity (4K+RT with dynamic resolution, 30FPS), Performance (1440p, 60 FPS), and RT Performance modes (1080/1440p+RT, 60 FPS), you can now get all the bells and whistles at once on your beefy PC. Visually, the ray traced reflections make a big difference while swinging around Manhattan, especially at nighttime. Some building and pedestrian models aren’t cutting edge, but we must remember that the game originally came out for PS4 nearly four years ago; Miles Morales should fare better when it launches on PC soon. Last but not least, the higher frame rate (completely unlocked) of Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered PC makes both traversal and combat as everyone’s favorite friendly neighborhood superhero feel better than ever. With this latest port, Sony has shown how serious it is with the PC gaming business. For example, the company has now released three games that support NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR, while a PC company like Microsoft still only has Ninja Theory’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, with Asobo’s Microsoft Flight Simulator due to receive both with an upcoming update.
