More than two years after the PlayStation original, God of War Ragnarök aims to be a better PC game than its predecessor and largely hits the mark, offering PC players a genuinely great way to play one of Sony’s best recent releases.
One big improvement is visible right away: as part of the move from DirectX 11 to DirectX 12, there’s now a shader precompilation step when you launch the game that actually works, preventing shader compilation stuter from rearing its ugly head. According to developers Jetpack Interactive, this is done wholesale rather than relying on QA playthroughs to find them, resulting in a much more bulletproof experience – and certainly the smoothest PC port I’ve seen from Sony in recent memory. There are still occasional frame-time blips in the first few hours of play – eg a 50ms spike when Atreus opens a door early on – but they’re extremely uncommon and don’t detract from the experience, which is a huge win.
Another improvement comes in the form of the user experience and settings menu. If you have an ultra-wide or super-wide monitor, you’re well catered for, with support for aspect ratios up to 32:9 or double the traditional 16:9. This requires a lot of extra development work, particularly in cutscenes to ensure that the wider field of view doesn’t reveal any animation shortcuts.
The menu is also laudable for allowing options to be changed in real-time, with the background turning transparent to see what effect your settings choices are making. There are a good range of options here, and all of the most popular upscalers are supported with frame generation where available: DLSS, FSR, XeSS and Santa Monica Studios’ own TAAU implementation.