Another huge PlayStation exclusive has found its way over to PC – and the results are spectacular. Sony Santa Monica has collaborated with partner studio Jetpack to produce a superb port for God of War that genuinely elevates the original experience across the board, improving graphical quality, boosting image quality and leaning into worthwhile PC-exclusive technologies such as Nvidia DLSS. Performance is generally excellent too and there’s support for both ultrawide monitors and high refresh rate displays.
There’s much to discuss here, so where to begin? My first contact with a PC game usually starts with the user interface and God of War holds up well here. The menus are simple, easily navigable, not overly nested, and work well with both mouse/keyboard and a controller. Various aspect ratios such as 16:10 and 21:9 are supported out of the box and the visual options are numerous and genuinely meaningful. Perhaps surprisingly, the game is running under DX11 and as far as I can tell, it does not have an extended shader compilation step and in-game stutter is kept to a minimum. The only notable omission is a field of view slider – which would have been tricky to implement due to the ever-moving camera in the game. However, that constant camera movement itself has an option to reduce its severity, which is welcome.
PC also offers up a range of upgrades in the menus, even over the PlayStation 5 patched rendition of the original PS4 Pro game. Nvidia Reflex is implemented, where I saw an 11ms reduction in input lag when I tested using a DualSense controller (which the game natively worked with). There’s generally faster loading too, depending on your hardware. The biggest differences come from visual upgrades, starting with image quality and the removal of PS4 Pro/PS5’s checkerboard rendering. Artefacts including checkerboarding patterns on particles and general fuzziness on texture surfaces are gone on PC as a result. With the PC version, nearly all of these aspects can be improved upon with native resolution rendering using the game’s standard TAA or via DLSS. And yes, DLSS holds up beautifully, with some aspects of the presentation actually improved over native rendering. That’s quite impressive bearing in mind that DLSS performance mode runs with 50 percent of the pixel count of PS4 Pro’s checkerboarding solution: smart upscaling solutions have moved on dramatically and it’s great to see Sony Santa Monica bring those latest advances to its PC ports.