One day ahead of the official launch of the Dead Space remake, we were able to check out both the PlayStation 5 and the PC versions of the game. The full review, conducted on PS5 by Nathan, is available here; for what it’s worth, while I’ve only played a portion of the game on PC, I largely agree with Nathan’s final assessment and score based on what I’ve seen so far.
This article is focused on the game’s PC version. Following the disastrous launch of The Callisto Protocol, fans are now apprehensive about Dead Space suffering a similar fate, especially regarding the now-infamous shader stutter.
Luckily, upon launching the game for the first time, you will be greeted by a message saying ‘loading shaders’. That alone immediately signaled that Motive Studios did not make the same mistake as Striking Distance Studios. However, shader stutter is not the only form of stuttering. I would really love to say that Dead Space was completely free of stutters, but that’s just not true.
On my configuration (Intel i7 12700KF, RTX 4090, 16GB DDR4), stutters happen on a fairly regular basis, even with DLSS 2/Super Resolution enabled. I’ve manually benchmarked (and captured with Shadowplay) a 14-minute-long gameplay session from the first Chapter with NVIDIA’s FrameView software; as you can see from the table below, the average frame rate was very high at just over 144 FPS, but the game’s minimum frame rate went as low as 15 frames per second.
| GPU | CPU | Avg FPS | 1% Low FPS | Min FPS | Max FPS | 0.1% Low FPS | 0.1% FPS | 1% FPS | 5% FPS | 10% FPS | GPU Util % | CPU Util % |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 | 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12700KF | 144.17 | 69.38 | 15.41 | 604.11 | 40.05 | 50.30 | 88.45 | 99.03 | 109.13 | 95.34 | 11.53 |
According to FrameView’s data, the issue may lie with the utilization of the CPU rather than the GPU, with the latter fully busy at 95.34% usage while the CPU sat nearly idle at a mere 11.53%.
I’m not sure if it’s a bug, but it could easily explain all the stuttering. We’ve frequently seen games failing to properly use all of the cores available in recent CPUs, after all.
Overall, the game runs better than The Callisto Protocol, but the experience isn’t as smooth as I would have liked. Partly because for the most part the visuals are nothing to write home about.
The Callisto Protocol and even older horror games like Resident Evil Village handily beat the Dead Space remake in this regard. Long gone are the days when the Frostbite Engine was far ahead of most other competitors from a technical standpoint, but I still expected more from Motive Studios. After all, most of the time you’re playing in very small spaces with half a handful of characters on screen, if that.
Even Isaac Clarke’s model is less than impressive, considering that he’s the main character. That’s not to say the Dead Space remake doesn’t look good in places, but it’s far from a visual powerhouse, even with all the settings (ray traced ambient occlusion included) pushed to the max.
Speaking of the options, here too the port can be considered in the middle range. There aren’t many settings, but we’ve seen far more barebones PC releases. Weirdly enough, the DLSS setting automatically resets itself to Balanced even if switched to Quality.
While playing The Callisto Protocol on PC at launch was nearly unfeasible until the developers issued a patch, no such problem exists here. That said, unless you’re really dying to relive the Xenomorph nightmare, it won’t hurt to wait a bit and see if Motive can’t fix the annoying stutters by improving CPU utilization.
