Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales PC is another stellar Sony port

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales looks a lot like the old expansion pack: the same characters, a new story, a visual overhaul, and a small dose of new technology. For the PC version of the PS5 launch game, developer Nixxes is building on all the great work it’s done with its port of Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, with the new version benefiting from the various optimizations and revisions made over the years. time – while the addition of ray-traced shadows adds to the PC version’s already impressive upgrades over the PS5 version.

As it’s built on the same fundamental technology, the game runs much like Remastered – and has the exact same recommended system specs. However, there is an argument that the performance of the city can be slightly improved (I measured an increase of about five percent), but this is probably due to the revamped winter city, with the small changes of art that this entails – like the lack of leaves on the trees, for example.

Gathering together optimized settings and the PlayStation 5 comparisons you’ll see in the video embedded below, Nixxes’ changes give me a better understanding of what certain settings actually do – and now all of them actually seem to be fully functional. It wasn’t clear what the crowd and traffic density settings actually did when Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered launched, but now they seem to be working – just like the HBAO+ ambient occlusion alternative to the ported SSAO solution. from the PlayStation code.

Another key optimization comes in the form of better VRAM utilization of a video card, rolled out some time ago in Remastered and implemented “out of the box” in Miles Morales. Right now, if you’re using an 8GB or larger GPU and playing at 1440p using optimized settings, my advice would be to set the texture quality to very high – but bring it down to high if you use 4K output. Failure to do so can lead to big performance hits if ray tracing is enabled.

You can see how the optimized settings perform against the closest PlayStation 5 equivalents in the table below – and I’d recommend these settings to anyone using one of today’s mainstream RT-capable graphics cards. Due to CPU limitations more than anything, I would recommend a 60fps target for a mainstream PC with a Ryzen 5 3600 class processor. The optimized settings should keep you in the region of 60fps for the big game. majority of the game, while your scaler of choice (DLSS, FSR2, XeSS, Insomniac IGTI) can be linked with dynamic resolution scaling to ensure smooth and consistent performance.

For those with RTX 4000 class GPUs, DLSS 3 frame generation is also supported – and the good news is that Nvidia’s latest driver opens the door to full G-Sync support. Previously, forcing v-sync in the control panel caused major latency issues, while leaving it enabled per Nvidia’s recommendation would result in tearing outside of G-Sync’s supported frame rate window. In my testing, the difference in latency between a capped 116 fps on a 4K 120Hz display (48ms) and a fully unlocked, fully ripped 151 fps (43ms) is just 5ms. On maximum settings worthy of the RTX 4090, DLSS 3 frame generation is the only way to play consistently north of 100fps, due to the surprising CPU demands of gaming with all the bells and whistles engaged. Nvidia’s new driver-level G-Sync/V-Sync fix solves my biggest issue with the technology and I’m really looking forward to seeing how DLSS 3 plays out on lower-end RTX 4000 cards where the effect of d amplification will be more pronounced.

* Very High for 8GB GPUs at up to 1440p resolution, High for 8GB GPUs at 4K

** Item detail 6 for processors with Ryzen 5 3600 class performance, 8 for higher performance processors

Moving on to Miles Morales’ new tech, Nixxes beefs up the RT feature set even further with ray-traced sun/moon shadows – an upgrade I hope to see modernized in Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered in due course. It’s not an essential upgrade and as you’ll see in the video enabling it requires a good degree of CPU and GPU overhead, but I’d say nine out of ten times it offers a nice improvement in the quality compared to the game’s standard shadow solution.

A host of additional objects gain shadows that simply don’t otherwise exist, while the range of objects casting shadows increases dramatically – everything from pedestrians and cars in the distance to grass and bushes directly in front of you, gain shadows that were not there before. The quality of these shadows also accurately reflects how they work in real life: sharp when close to the object casting the shadow, more diffuse the farther away from the player they are. The sudden change in quality of remote shadows – the waterfall – also disappears with RT shadows enabled.

It’s not the complete solution though and there are edge cases with RT shadows not quite working. Shadow maps are “baked” and reflect the highest quality world detail, while RT shadows are derived from lower quality geometry, so they can – very occasionally – look worse than the standard alternatives. I also noticed that in standard view tree shadows can animate, but RT shadows don’t.

Another issue I’ve seen occasionally is that the alpha maps that make up the tree branches are sampled in RT shadows as opaque, so very occasionally some tree shadows can have ugly, noticeable triangles – there has a picture of it in the gallery above. It’s not a major problem, but I think Nixxes could introduce a very high-level geometry structure option that would solve most of these problems.

Ultimately, I don’t recommend including RT shadows in my optimized settings as they are expensive on the GPU, costing 15% performance on an RTX 2070 Super running at 1440p only on the medium setting. More important is CPU cost, where the Ryzen 5 3600 sees a performance of nine percentage points, jeopardizing your locked 60 fps. Consider this a luxury option for those with high-end kit.

At this point Nixxes have mostly nailed their Spider-Man ports (no #StutterStruggle here) but there’s one final bug that needs fixing: an obvious texture pop-in, something that happens regardless of abilities of your material. Beyond that, once again, Nixxes deserves kudos for the quality of their ports and their dedication to delivering an exceptional experience to a huge range of different PC hardware, from Steam Decks to the latest high-end equipped with RTX 4090. platforms. It’s great to see a developer unconstrained by consoles, offering some serious upgrades to an already impressive PlayStation 5 release. As such, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales on PC comes highly recommended.

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