As promised yesterday, EA Motive issued a Dead Space patch to remove Variable Rate shading from consoles (with PS5 leading the charge, as the Xbox update is scheduled for later this week) and to allow PC players to disable the option when using NVIDIA DLSS or AMD FSR. Previously, VRS was forcibly enabled if the user selected either upscaling technique, leading to a significant decrease in image quality over native rendering. It certainly played a part in the not-so-great visuals mentioned in the port report article.
Variable Rate Shading was first introduced at GDC 2019 when Microsoft released a dedicated API to help game developers with the technology’s implementation.
Variable Rate Shading allows developers to selectively reduce the shading rate in areas of the frame where it won’t affect visual quality, letting them gain extra performance in their games. This is really exciting, because extra perf means increased framerates and lower-spec’d hardware being able to run better games than ever before.
There are two flavors, or tiers, of hardware with VRS support. The hardware that can support per-draw VRS hardware are Tier 1. There’s also a Tier 2, the hardware that can support both per-draw and within-draw variable rate shading.
However, only a few games (Gears Tactics, Far Cry 6, and World of Warcraft: Shadowlands being the most prominent examples) have implemented VRS since DLSS and FSR have produced far superior results and seen far greater adoption. Before Dead Space, it had been a while since a major game implemented VRS.
The Dead Space remake received an 8 out of 10 score in Wccftech’s review.
The new Dead Space is a mostly-successful revival of a survival horror landmark, offering atmospheric new visuals and a series of precision updates to combat, level layouts, and the game’s scary bits that ought to surprise and excite veteran engineers. That said, there was room for Motive Studio to push ever further, as some game elements still feel a bit dated. Dead Space should satisfy long-suffering fans of the franchise, but compared to the latest, greatest AAA horror competition, it’s no longer a cut above.
