Marvel's Spider Man Remastered PC - DF Tech Review - Graphics Breakdown, Optimised Settings + More! 

The graphics menu ALONE is such a great "feature" this game has. More games need to adopt this style.

It's funny and somehow heartwarming to see that old pre-launch menu. It reminds me very much of old 2000s eidos pc games and of course later SE, former Eidos PC ports. I love that nixxes hold on to that function. Kind of like when you see the inventory screen in modern Hitman titles and realize it's the exact same inventory as in the very first Tomb Raider game on PS1. Those relational threads are very interesting and it could be very cool to see a DF-Retro that maps them out. Kind of like those game-engine family trees that you can find online, but for developer houses or features that are almost definitely transplanted between titles across studio lines.

Man, people at Nixxies are amazing They know the important stuff

I love that PlayStation is going hard with these PC ports and it's not just the console version with unlocked frame rates.

I really like how far loading times have come. We've went from complaining 35 second loading times on the psp to comparing that the ps5 is half the loading time of the pc when booting. I love the times we're in.

No one does it like DF. That was a masterclass in analysis. Bravo. Love to see 100% cpu usage on all cores. Put that baby to work. My pc is ready. Gonna try to max it out at 4K and let vrr+ drs handle the dips. Can’t wait!

Thanks, as always for great content. Your graphical break downs are by far the best I have come across. The team at DF truly deserves the thanks of the gaming community as a whole.

Cool to see such a good PC port, even more cool to see such good graphic options!

Just started the game a few minutes ago after launch. If you're the type like me that does more with your PC than just game, and are a little slow to update your drivers... trust me, you need to for this one - otherwise the game will look wrong and you'll barely see anything but black models with bad lighting. Immediately noticeable from the very first cutscene.

Even though I already own this on PS5 I did pick it up again to run on the Steam Deck. Being able to run games like this natively on a handheld is still absolutely amazing to me. With Uncharted and Last of Us next on the port list it’s the closest thing we’ll have to a modern Vita, along with everything else it can do.

Finally! Nixxes might low key be Sony's most important acquisition long term outside of Insomniac.

Great overview as always Alex! One thing to mention: it may be good to start testing Windows 11 for things like loading times. Although we don't yet have the GPU decompression part of DirectStorage or the direct SSD->GPU async transfer, we *do* have some of the CPU overhead reduction. BypassIO is a new Windows storage driver API and is what DirectStorage leverages under-the-hood on Windows 11; on Windows 10 even DirectStorage still goes through the legacy Win32 API. It'd be interesting to track the progression of games starting to use that API (either directly, or indirectly via DirectStorage) and any loading time implications!

Absolutely spectacular analysis, and big shout out to the port team, amazing QOL stuff, absolutely mindblowing quality here.

This would have been a perfect chance to finally release a game on PC that makes use of Direct Storage and find out if that would have made a difference, especially seeing that CPU and SSD usage. Other than that seems like another great PC port from legendary Nixxes, especially given the complexity of the original game. Thanks for the video.

I really hope DF makes a new section of analysis for "performance longevity", because a TON of these new games have "memory leak" issues that only show up after at least more than 15 minutes of gameplay, at least, when using ray tracing. This game, for example, has a massive performance degradation with RT turned on while web swinging, which only shows up with at least 15 minutes of swinging around quickly through the city. Frametimes go all over the place and the game has very noticeable stutters when web swinging close to the ground, along with generally much lower average fps. It may or may not be a memory leak, but it is an issue of some kind. I've tried turning down every setting to the lowest, but the only thing that fixes this (other than restarting the game) is to turn off RT entirely. It would be great if these analysis videos brought this issue to light. I'd recommend using multiple different GPUs with different VRAM amounts for this type of testing, because a lot of the texture quality recommendations made in these optimized settings don't hold up when playing for longer periods of time, since some of these games have bad memory management that show up over time and bring fps down to unplayable levels. Spider-Man doesn't seem to have a VRAM related issue (since turning textures to the lowest setting doesn't fix it), but other ray traced games absolutely do, at least on 8GB or lower GPU with RT capability.

I was literally thinking where's DF's analysis? Then BOOM! WISH FULFILLMENT!

Awesome work Alex, and Nixxes too. Glad to see the care they put into their work!

Playstation late-2020 : let us give PS5 Spider Man a 60 fps Playstation late-2021 : Let us give PS5 Spdier Man RT with 60-FPS Playstation late-2022: Let us give (PC) Spdier Man drops to 45 fps for any 2080ti & below Yeah right.. even as PS5 owner, I hate when Console gets better optimzations, while PC gets treated poorly

It was Processing the Native 4K60 Now we can see the details! Thank you! ❤❤

I love the fact that the complaint for the loading time is that it's 3 seconds instead of 1 second (It's a fair complaint, but it's still funny to me). I LOVE This generation.

Envious of those who are playing this for the first time. A fantastic game no doubt

Nixxes should be the benchmark for other companies to learn how to port properly to the PC.

Wow, THANK YOU Nixxes for making ACTUALLY PUTTING IN EFFORT into this port!!!

Great video as always, wishing it was rendered in 4k like most other DF videos are. Easier to see the differences with higher resolutions. (If watching in 4k of course). Excited to finally play this game with high FPS on my 3080ti!

8:09 You are talking about VRAM, but in the On Screen Display you are looking at the RAM usage

Tremendous work Alex I love your CPU limit analysis in particular. I think this is the first time we're seeing the sheer power of the PS5's cpu and decompression hardware vs raw PC CPU power.

Thanks for your tremendous work Alex! Was eagerly awaiting the upload, since their proprietary engine does an amazing job. Still: I bet I'm not the only one curious how much one can squeeze out of the Steam Deck though.. especially given how many different options are available to mess with. The next few days will be surely interesting...

With a 3090, 5900x and NVME 6000MB/s drive I get around 70-84 fps while webslinging through the city at 4k max settings with DLSS quality. Some things to note. : Some textures fail to load quickly enough so it will look like a blurry smudge for 5 seconds or so before loading in the high res texture (even on a 6000MB/s NVME gen4 drive) : HDR is not working correctly and looked badly washed out like RDR 2 did at release (hopefully they fix it) : SSAO looks better than HBAO+ (HBAO+ for some reason is not working correctly) : This game is very CPU intensive (Even at 4k max settings my 3090 is being bottlenecked at 93% GPU utilization with drops to 84%, even with a 5900x with full 24 threads being utilized) : DLSS is oversharpening at lower resolutions so if you play at 1080p it may look too sharp : The game currently has a memory leak that will crash even a 3080ti with 12GB of vRAM but you may not notice it as much with a 24GB 3090/3090ti

You guys really need to add chapters for these long videos.

All thanks to chip shortages, Sony didn't sell enough PS5 to make profits from their games, so they are porting them to the PC for extra revenue. The same can be said about that Dualsense controller: Not enough consoles to sell, then sell the controllers to PC and Mac users.

Now why can’t they just release a standalone physical native PS5 version of Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered? 🤷‍♂️

14:40 looks like a typo on the right pane. You've got low listed twice. Looks like a really good port! You've convinced me to buy!

Kinda surprised you guys didn't cover the Weather Particles setting (this game's volumetric fog), as it is one of the most demanding options in the game and has a big fps impact from Medium to High.

always amazing work. You can skip the intro video with a playstation 5 controller press O button. Also if you screw around with the race trace settings for too long switching them back-and-forth over and over again You may not get the performance that you would get if you restart the game It takes a long time of screwing around with settings for it to happen.

But why is this video not in 4K?

Insomniac are truly wizards at what they do. I still can't believe this is still technically a PS4 game, I've seen Ps4s go for as low as 100 bucks and it's just insane how bang for your buck and how much quality you get from optimized games and Sony exclusives for such a shitty and old hardware. The performance rt version on the PS5 already looks beautiful. I genuinely can't wait for spiderman 2, specially since I found out that the trailer for it was running in real time on a PS5 and most people even thought it was a cgi trailer because how good it looked lmao

Just like elden ring, im getting spiderman for ps5 instead of pc. When it comes to games that im a fan of or games devs i rather have it physical.

Damn you guys do a great job on finding the best optimizations for PC!

Is this video only uploaded in 1080 or is it just RU-vid's servers that are really slow right now to encode the 4K version? (it has been almost a day, and I have been waiting to the the review in at least more meaningful quality than the horrible RU-vid 1080p encode)

Nixxies thank you for amazing ultrawide support!

I will definitely be getting this, to play on my Steam Deck, though I will wait for it to be on sale, as I already played it on my PS4, when it was first released. Miles Morales will be a day 1 purchase though, as I have not played that yet.

7:00 notice how that sure PS5 loads in faster, but the PC version has assets pop-in after the loading screen is done.

Looks like a pretty solid PC port and it looks like they are still working on it, fixing bugs and optimizing it. It's a shame that Direct Storage isn't use and I do wonder why it's taking so long for games to take advantage of it, especially considering that AMD and Nvidia have their own implementation of decompression on the gpu that works through Direct Storage. Another thing that I'm impressed by is how quickly they are patching the game, it's a nice touch that is very likely going to help game sales as it shows they are putting the effort into the game. As for the loading times, it's not that big of a deal considering you're only talking one or two seconds difference which in it's self is quite impressive considering it's not using Direct Storage. Also, credit to Sony, it looks like they are not messing PC gamers about and seem to be going all in with treating PC gamers well, again, that's a sure way to generate more game sales in that critical early window when the game price is high, which I always find it perplexing why so many publishers make a mess of games on release as that is only going to hurt sales in the early high profit window that they don't really want to lose those sales, I know of many gamers that buy games months or years later if the game is released in a bad state and that is surely costing these publishers a lot of money and good will and in this case, it looks like this game runs in a pretty decent state from the start. Also, it would be interesting to get some in-depth analysis of the game on the Steam Deck, others are reporting the game runs well on the Deck, but it would be great if DF takes a closer look at that.

Should I wait and watch this video tomorrow because RU-vid is slow in processing 4K videos, or did DF really upload this video in 1080p?

Was looking forward to this. Thanks as always Alex and DF crew!

This looks like an excellent port!

In depth and very well presented showcase Alex! Glad we share same fondness for external launchers.

4:20 Shader compilation has SIGNIFICANTLY impacted the enjoyment of PC gaming for me. The ridiculous amount of stuttering in some games absolutely destroys any feeling of immersion. It's completely inexcusable. This is really great news. Day one purchase for me.

If it's CPU limited with RT on, why did you not test it with RT off?

Fantastic video as usual. Thx Alex.

I can only imagine how amazing Spider-Man 2 will look on PS5 when it comes out, being built from the ground up instead of an enhanced port.

That menu that launches before the full game launches is very much a Nixxes thing these days. I remember Rottr having that.

Even with a 8GB card, I found the very high textures can cause stutters. I'm using a 2070 super and 9900k, at the suggested settings, but with 1440p & DLSS quality mode and no raytracing. I'm testing this by walking back and forth on a long street. The VRAM spikes to over 7GB used, and that causes a visible stutter that can be measured by a frametime graph (msi afterburner). I used reload checkpoint and I found the stutters repeatable. Putting it down to high textures stopped those stutters and kept VRAM usage around 6.5GB, though it's hard to say if the VRAM reading from this software is correct.

17:28 Never thought I would get excited at ray traced soda bottles! So excited for the next game

Can't wait for Spider Man 2 next Year😍

I just don't understand why so many console titles use anisotropic filtering at 4x or 2x. 16x literraly costs 1FPS (at most) but the overall quality increase is "worth 20 fps" compared to other settings.

HBAO+ for sure seems broken/bugged. That's not its usual behavior at all.

Really looking forward to your in-depth video on DLAA vs. DLSS vs. FSR vs. IGTI. Any hint on when that will come out? I recently discovered your channel through word-of-mouth, and I think you guys are really something else. One of the best reviewers I've ever seen. You really do your homework, and are very talented in the technical aspect of things. Really looking forward to more of your content! Salud!

This is my first play through and playing on medium. Amazed at how good it looks and some moments look like they’re straight out of a movie

A game launching with fsr 2.0 support my 1650 super is thanking me

they're offering features which most triple a games, let alone playstation exclusive games, implement. The way you can see the changes in real time and not having to restart is the best thing i've seen

I have spent about 2.5 hours with the game so far on PC and with my set up I am getting a nice, consistent 80-90fps all high settings, 1440p, DRS on, RTX on Very High! Ryzen 9 3900x, RTX 2070S, 32GB Ram, installed to 1TB Samsung 970 NVME. This is another QUALITY PS port!

Playing this rt now on Steam Deck and it's a dream. So glad this port was well optimized.

Some of us on the Steam forums figured out what's going on with HBAO+. The ambient occlusion menu options are labeled wrong! If you select Off you get SSAO. If you select SSAO you get HBAO+. If you select HBAO+ you get Off. I have screenshots to prove it. Really strange bug.

It's just hugely impressive to me that despite all the details, you still get rather pleasant RT shenanigans on both the PS5 which is oh-so supposedly lackluster in that regard as well as on rather modest PC gpus. And at great performance metrics to boot. Insomniac are just wizards.

Great analysis! Features are great but performance with rt on is currently far from ideal on my system (i7 11700k + 3070 ti). Frame-rate is dropping below 60 constantly even at 1080p optimized settings. Both GPU and CPU utilizations are not maxed out.

Why is it not 4k?

*We appreciate the delay to make sure you had all the Day 1 updates* and your proactive interactions with the Insomniac/Nixxes teams. Good job, Alex. 👍

Great video as aways. I believe that Traffic Density is how far the traffic movement goes. If you pay close attention, the very high shows cars moving from far away. On very low noting is happening.

I wish there would been screencap for both the launcher setting options as there's stuff that the game doesn't include, like cloud particle detail, and also stuff like would they recommend dlss etc. or just post screencap of the in game settings fully too. I can sure just try them out but bit too much guess work at times. Good stuff though, and game is a blast!

Horizon: Zero Dawn PC port used to pre-compile shaders before the main menu (one-time event until you do something to invalidate them like change video driver version or a game patch). Resulting in a experience devoid of Shader Stutter... but then they patched that out and decided to do it real-time as you play because they listened to the idiots complaining about the infrequently encountered slow startup and ruined the actual gameplay for everyone :/ They could've made the handling of it configurable to appease them without ruining it for everyone.

Thank you for making the video! At 14:40 you labelled "low" settings twice.

Couple errors in the video. You can skip the intro videos with the controller. It's the B button on my Xbox pad. Skips them every time. And ultrawide isn't perfect out of the box because it screws up UI elements, like when someone calls you. The wave length graphic is misaligned and partially covers the image of the caller whereas it's confined to the left side in a box when playing at 16:9.

Sometimes I feel like both Insomniac and Nixxes are too good at what they do. Something unnatural going on there. It’s also really cool to me that Sony has not oversold the claims on their drives and that they’re still holding up nearly two years later. After so much overpromising in console history, including by Sony, that is refreshing to see.

Installing it rn as we speak. Time for a fourth playthrough of this amazing game Can't wait for the suit mods personally

Nixxes is great. Really excellent move by Sony to bring them in-house.

You're the man Alex, such a badass review. Looking forward to the DLSS vs FSR video.

Not having to restart the game for any of the settings to take effect is greatly appreciated. Ubisoft should take a hint...

Awesome. I was waiting for this. Already pre-ordered the game (loved it on the PS4), but I was hoping to get a breakdown of settings equivalent to PS5 Fidelity Mode and PS5 Performance RT. @21:00 . Thank you very much, guys and gals. Sounds like the developers did a great job optimizing the game but still have some patches to go. Hopefully my i9-9900K, RTX 3080 Ti, NVME 2.0 SSD, and 64 Gigs of DDR4 3600 mhz ram can brute-force a 60 fps with balanced DLSS and settings close to PS5 fidelity mode (with ray-traced reflections object range turned down to 8). We'll see. Luckily, they gave us a big enough range of settings that I can potentially fine-tune the drops away.

Alderlake CPUs with DDR5 seem to have a big advantage in this game. A sign of future games needing nextgen CPUs sooner than you might think. I wish you test games with 5800X3D since the price of that is going down really fast and it could be an attractive upgrade for AM4 users.

I know that consoles struggle with AF, but I wouldn't have expected it to be so bad that it carries over to the current gen. Can a PS5 really not handle 8xAF? It can really hurt the otherwise great image quality.

So glad it's come out well, and your in-depth work here has given me a great place to start dialling it in. Just finished Dad of Boy so I think I may day-one this.

Lovin it at 4k on a 3080 TI. Spiderman port is the kind of game PC users need!

I’m lucky enough to have a decent rig and if you have the head room, i found that using DLSS while improving performance did negatively impact the visuals, instead I used DLAA instead of up scaling and conservatively tweaked the settings similar to Alex s optimised and it holds well above 60 and looks stunning …DLAA working a treat

Will be playing this with a ps5 controller on my pc

Looking forward to seeing this run on my RTX3080. Looks like they did a great job with the porting to PC and as a former console gamer who moved completely to PC, I couldn’t be happier!

I played this on PS4 but I've been waiting for a PC release ever since. I am so excited!

Absolutely phenomenal and detailed breakdown as usual! Excellent stuff! Love that graphics menu! Every port should have that attention to detail and lots of options and quality of life options these days! 😁👌🏻

I have an RTX 3070 + Ryzen 5 5600x, yet even if I'm using optimized settings, my game still stutters, A LOT. I've seen other people on the steam forums having similar performance issues. I've also been experiencing a lot of visual bugs. A lot of pop in, even at max settings. DLSS doesn't even increase performance either. If anything it makes the image quality a lot worse. I've noticed this on every game that supports it. Also worth noting that I'm playing at 1080p.

I think you also missed the PS5 update rate for RT looking like a complete slide show. Watching pedestrians walk around in reflections could see them stuttering around as they were only updated what looked like 1/2 frame rate (or less) where as in the PC they're smooth. This is another trick consoles use to save performance, they often do it with dynamic shadow update rates as well.

Did a quick run on the intro mission for the game and I can say I'm pleasantly surprised by how well it ran. Running 5120x1440@120Hz ultra settings and it seemed smooth like butter (i9-9900k@4.9Ghz, RTX 3090). I played the game on PS4 so had to relearn a few things but otherwise, seems like a very solid port. Even HDR and widescreen looked great. They definitely did their homework with this one.

Lmao the Spider-Man on the left at 02:55

This is one of the ONLY ray tracing titles in which the ray tracing makes a major difference in visuals AND is optimized for most cards. I assume this is because the CPU does a lot of the heavy lifting compared to most RT games dumping it all on the GPU, but I could be wrong about that. In any case they should just make more games like this. Where ray tracing is accessible for most players, at least at 1080p 60fps with some optimization. But this game runs great on my RX6800 and 5800X3D, maxed out at 1440p, getting at least 60fps in the low end. My issue is I bought the game to test the graphics, and in general, just don't care for super hero games. But that's just a personal preference. Far Cry 6 also runs great at 4k maxed out with RT reflections over 60 fps. I don't use the RT shadows in that because, well... they can look like garbage in a lot of areas lol. And I was convinced the RX6800 just wouldn't do RT at all when I bought it so it's all a bonus to me anyways. That card is amazing in non RT titles and even goes toe-to-toe with the 4070 on some games.

I was wondering why some areas looked so flat and now It seems that HBAO is the culprit. I figured it was an ambient occlusion or shadow problem but I didn't think turning AO down to SSAO would actually be beneficial.

I rely on Digital Foundry to understand my graphics settings and how to optimize them. Thanks so much for this, I can't wait to try this out tonight!

so the video is still 1080p which means there was no 4k to begin with. that's a rare mistake from DF to not realize that your video is just 1080p upload.

It is pretty cool to have the cutscenes play in a wider aspect ratio despite being made for 16:9

12:26 "very shadow quality" lol But seriously thank you so much for waiting to make this video instead of rushing it to publish. Doesn't seem like anyone else out there cares about up to date information, you know - something that would actually reflect what real world PC user would experience and therefore helpful, as opposed to just getting the video out as quickly as possible.

The excellent quality of Sony's ports so far shows that there's absolutely no reason for any console games to run poorly on PC if you have competent hardware. Some ports just tend to be especially lazy

this game should support direct storage since it’s available to use on pc. more games should.