As Sony slowly but surely follows through with the plan to port all of its PlayStation exclusive games to the PC platform, it is time to test Returnal PC, available starting today on Steam (10% off via Green Man Gaming) and the Epic Games Store.
Originally launched for PlayStation 5 in April 2021, Returnal is now the quickest of Sony’s first-party console-to-PC releases with ‘only’ around twenty-two months of delay, beating Marvel’s Spider-Man Miles Morales (which launched after twenty-five), which held the previous record. So far, the ports’ quality has ranged from solid to excellent, setting a high standard for Returnal PC. Most of the games have received their definitive edition on the platform thanks to enhanced visuals, optimized performance, and support for cutting-edge upscaling technologies like NVIDIA Deep Learning SuperSampling 2/3 and AMD Fidelity FX Super Resolution 2.
On paper, Returnal PC checks nearly all of the boxes. The game supports NVIDIA DLSS 2 and AMD FSR 2, ray traced reflections and shadows, Ultrawide and Super Ultrawide displays (with dedicated options to tweak the appearance during cutscenes, for example), Dolby Atmos support (unavailable on PS5), full DualSense features support (haptic feedback, adaptive triggers, and speakers), in-game FPS cap, Field of View (FoV) slider, and the following adjustable graphics options:
- Lighting
- Shadows
- Ambient Occlusion
- Objects
- Textures
- Volumetric Fog
- Particles
- Anti-aliasing (locked when an upscaling technology is engaged)
- Depth of Field
- Film Grain
- Bloom
- Emissive Intensity
- Brightness
Each graphics setting is accompanied by a preview of how much it is estimated to stress your CPU and/or GPU, measured on a scale of one to three.
Returnal PC also includes in-game metrics such as FPS counter, CPU/GPU utilization, latency meter, and more. Last but not least, it features a built-in benchmark that goes through seven scenes, each dedicated to stressing a different aspect, like lighting and shadowing, particles, or volumetric fog. At the end of the benchmark, you can review each scene’s performance and the overall result, of course. Below you’ll find a capture of the benchmark from yesterday’s latest patch.
The benchmark results would seem promising. On the test rig (Intel i7 12700KF, GeForce RTX 4090, 16GB DDR4), Returnal PC averaged 121 frames per second, while the max FPS was 213 and the minimum FPS was 73, at 4K resolution with DLSS set to Quality and all settings (ray tracing included) set to the highest available.
As hinted in the headline, though, the actual experience is different and not in a good way. While the game compiles shaders the first time you launch it, stuttering is everpresent, despite not being picked up by the in-game metrics or benchmark. It’s there not only in the thickest of combat, where it is most annoying but slightly more understandable due to all the particles flying around, but also when you’re just moving throughout the environment on your own, with nothing else going on.
You can check out the stuttering in action in the co-op gameplay capture below. The in-game metrics are enabled on the left, showing a constantly high frame rate. On the right, however, NVIDIA FrameView shows a different story, with the 1% Low dropping to 50FPS or lower on a fairly regular basis. This provides a very inconsistent experience that is quite damaging when actually playing, given the challenging, fast-paced bullet-hell shooter type of gameplay. You certainly don’t want stutters to catch you at the wrong time in a game like Returnal, where you often need to dodge multiple projectiles with near-perfect timing lest the whole cycle run go to waste.
It’s a shame because everything else about Returnal is fantastic, as thoroughly explained by Kai in his PS5 review. Housemarque brilliantly translated the signature arcade gameplay from hits like Resogun into a third-person bullet-hell shooter with triple-A quality, while the eerie sci-fi horror setting melds amazingly well with the roguelike elements. I’m not really a fan of roguelike titles, but I can’t wait to dive into Returnal PC – once the stuttering is improved. You can tone it down a notch by disabling ray tracing, but a PC powered by the most powerful graphics card on the market shouldn’t need to do that to play smoothly.
The DualSense features are excellently implemented here, and the native Dolby Atmos support (which is far from common on PC, sadly enough) shines incredibly well when you have a dedicated Atmos system as I do (Samsung HW-Q990B, in case you’re curious), further enhancing immersion in the dreadful world of Atropos.
I can only speculate as to why Returnal PC currently suffers from these issues. First and foremost, the game runs on Unreal Engine, which has become infamous lately due to the stuttering experienced in most recent PC games powered by Epic’s popular game development toolset. Unreal Engine 4 is known to favor singlethreaded CPU performance, which may explain why CPU utilization is low according to FrameView (discard the in-game metrics showing 0%; that’s obviously a bug).
Returnal PC also recommends 32GB of RAM, one of the first games to do so. I’ll upgrade soon and check out the game again to see if that was the main cause of the stutters, though it is doubtful.
Lastly, there is the matter of the studio that handled this version of the game: Climax. The last console-to-PC port they made was Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, a decade ago. Since then, the British studio, once known for games like Sudeki, Silent Hill: Origins, and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, has largely focused on developing much smaller titles. In short, their expertise cannot be compared to the likes of Nixxes, which Sony acquired specifically due to their excellent PC port track record.
Nevertheless, hopefully a patch will be able to resolve or at least lessen the stuttering soon. Given that it’s an Unreal Engine title, it’s also possible that modders will look into tweaking certain parameters to find improvements of their own, as they have been doing for Hogwarts Legacy. However, NVIDIA users cannot attempt to improve performance in Returnal PC by enabling ReBAR like in that game or Dead Space remake, as the feature is already whitelisted on NVIDIA Profile Inspector despite the lack of an official Game Ready driver.
I, for one, can’t wait to dive headfirst into Returnal; right now, though, I have to once again recommend that PC gamers be patient for a while longer while the worst of the technical issues are sorted.
