Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered PC Review

Your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man has finally swung his way onto PC, and to say that this is exciting would be an understatement. Insomniac is one of the many developers under Sony’s wing who are technical wizards, showing the world that Sony’s first-party scene is arguably the strongest in the industry. As more developers adopt the PC platform, it also means that these teams can push these games further and further, to see what the current limitations are, which is always cool to see. It’s definitely not perfect, but damn am I impressed with what has been delivered.

As per usual, this is not a review of the game itself, but rather how the PC port was handled. If you are interested in the game itself, we have a great review written by Kieron Verbrugge that you can read.

First things first, this PC port was predominantly handled by an outside developer, Nixxes Software. This is not to say that Insomniac had nothing to do with this project, but rather that this is slightly different to previous ports like Horizon Zero Dawn or God of War, which were handled internally. However, this is apparent when it comes to seeing the different game technologies introduced and prioritised.

While a lot of what I’m about to say may not be seen too much in its full release, it’s pretty clear that the development team made a concerted effort to cater to NVIDIA, while forgetting that the game itself was originally made with AMD hardware in mind, to the extent that a bunch of AMD restrictions were in place prior to the release. For starters, ray tracing was completely disabled for AMD GPUs until recently. Admittedly, this was communicated to us ahead of time, so we wouldn’t potentially encounter it when playing the review build and report it as a bug.

The development team has been hard at work, however, providing multiple pre-release updates which have improved a few of the underlying performance issues, and enabled ray tracing on AMD GPUs. These updates won’t just stop here, and further optimisations will occur post-release. It was actually good that these updates happened when they did because I wasn’t super impressed by the performance beforehand. It’s not that it was bad, in fact, there were many areas where it was great, but it also dipped far below its highs, making for an incredibly jarring experience. After these updates, performance became much tighter. I mostly played on a laptop with a Ryzen 9 5900HX and an RTX 3080 Mobile GPU, utilising both 1440p resolution and 1080p Ultrawide. The game ran quite well in its current state while having a great level of detail.

Clearly, the game is difficult to run even on that pretty solid hardware, but it uses its high-rise building landscape to help mitigate some of the performance woes that open-world rendering can cause. As it stands, I was always sitting around the 70fps marks while swinging through the city, even higher when it was daytime in the game. The one thing I did make sure to keep off was ray tracing. Like always, it is incredibly expensive and I still don’t feel like it’s remotely worth it. The lighting as is hits an incredible level of sharpness and quality, with equally fantastic shadows to boot. In addition to this, the reflections are immaculate. Scaling the glossy windows of New York City feels absolutely fantastic with such responsive, accurate reflections. It really helps the world feel that much more immersive, and that you really are Peter Parker in the best way (perhaps good enough to distract you from its generic open-world design, but that’s a discussion better saved for another time).

Like many graphics in the modern day, the settings are victim to the law of diminishing returns. Improvements as you scale up get smaller and smaller, and their performance costs get larger and larger. I found the best results for great detail and performance were a mix of medium and high settings, and the usual offenders were the ones that were brought down – volumetric fog, lighting, hair rendering – the usual suspects. What is nice is the sheer flexibility in the visuals. There are many options to modify, and the game does a great job of granting control to the player to twiddle and tweak as they see fit. The graphics and display options are as follows:

What I was not expecting was a launcher. Most games (that aren’t an MMO of any kind) don’t really have a launcher these days, but Spider-Man wants to buck that trend, and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If there is a certain setting that conflicts with your PC and causes crashing, it can make fixing the issue quite frustrating and launchers like this are a great way to get around it. Being able to modify your game settings before the game actually launches is great, if a little unorthodox by today’s standards. The launcher isn’t anything fancy (which I appreciate) but it gets the job done and that is all it needs to do.

On to the proper performance numbers, I scripted a benchmark of swinging through the city on a very specific path during the introductory section of the game. I passed the benchmark through various resolutions multiple times and here are the results. These benchmarks were run using the latest version of the game and the latest NVIDIA Drivers which are optimised for Spider-Man.

Marvel’s Spider-Man Benchmark
(Very High Preset: No Upscaling)

Given that these benchmarks were run on a laptop, there is still some performance left on the table, as desktop components run much better than laptop components in general (I really need to upgrade my PC), but the performance numbers are still indicative of how the game scales across multiple resolutions. I did mention previously that the highest settings have big performance costs while not offering that much in terms of graphical improvement, but even then these are still solid numbers. An average framerate of 66.42 FPS while running at 1440p with the Very High preset is pretty good. What I wasn’t expecting was the performance hits running ultrawide resolutions, 1080p ultrawide more specifically. It’s not a huge performance difference, but this behaviour is definitely outside of the norm for most games that support ultrawide resolutions.

Spider-Man supports various upscaling methods that cover a variety of options, which is great. These upscaling methods can potentially allow lacklustre performance up to much better numbers for lower-end hardware. The three supported upscaling methods are IGTI (Insomniac Games Temporal Injection), NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), and AMD FSR 2.0 (Fidelity Super Resolution). Most people would already be pretty familiar with DLSS and FSR 2.0, but IGTI is unique to Spider-Man. IGTI was previously exclusive to Dynamic Resolution Scaling with Temporal Anti-Aliasing enabled but was decoupled from these options in the last pre-release update. I ran an additional benchmark with each of these methods active, with the resolution set to 1080p ultrawide and the Balanced option selected on all three methods.

Marvel’s Spider-Man Benchmark
(Very High Preset: 2560×1080 Upscaling Test)

Clearly, these upscaling methods put in some work. I barely noticed a difference in terms of visuals with each of these activated, but the stability was much improved. The biggest improvement came from NVIDIA’s DLSS, which saw a performance uplift of about 14%, which doesn’t sound like a lot at first, as the average framerate rises to 70.18 FPS from the previous average of 61.47 FPS, but as you bring the settings down, the differences between no upscaling and DLSS will become larger.  The performance differences between IGTI and FSR 2.0 are pretty negligible but the numbers from these other two options are still great.

Speaking from experience, the only thing I really noticed while running these different methods had to do with the anti-aliasing, especially on the buildings. AMD’s FSR 2.0 was by far the worst, with lots of jagged edges in comparison to DLSS which provided the best anti-aliasing while performing the best – people who are sided with team green are in for a treat. This clear lead in the upscaling department also adds to the narrative that Nixxes Software may have prioritised NVIDIA hardware when developing this port.

What is also pretty decent is Spider-Man’s 99th-Percentiles across the board. While they may not look that great, dipping into the low 40s on average, they are at an average of around 32% lower than the average FPS. Scale these numbers up and you can have solid enough stability, but it very much needs some improvement. 32% isn’t exactly bad, but it’s high enough that you might notice those dips at higher averages.

I spent most of the game using a DualShock 4, due in part to my DualSense going a bit cactus, but I did also spend some time with mouse and keyboard controls too. I was quite impressed with how this game translated to mouse and keyboard, even if it was not my preferred method of control in the game. I would still recommend playing with a controller, but you aren’t in for an abysmal experience if you lack one unlike other ports such as Monster Hunter: World or Elden Ring.

Back to the DualSense, my controller was functioning enough to get a feel for the haptics that are available in this port, a first for the PC platform. There is the silly restriction of needing the controller to be plugged in via USB, meaning that the haptics are not available when being used wirelessly. This restriction is a bit of a bummer, but also not surprising given how restrictive Sony can be (I will stand by my opinion of the platform holder being the Apple of the gaming industry). The haptics are absolutely a welcome addition. I am someone that has been wanting Sony to bring the best part of their new controller to PC, though it never felt like they were as integral to the experience of Spider-Man as something like Returnal. Hopefully, this means that more games will be able to utilise the DualSense’s features on PC on a more regular basis.

It bears mentioning that even with all these nice features, Spider-Man is an insanely expensive game for PC. It was previously listed as A$109.95 and has since been reduced to the price of A$94.95, with the justification for the high pricing being because it is a port of the PS5 remaster. I don’t normally like to bring price into the discussion or review for a game, as usually it’s regarding the length of a game against how much its asking price is – a discussion which I find kind of reductive. But this is a different scenario. At its core, Spider-Man is a four-year-old game that is finally making its way to PC. Sony has previously ported older blockbusters to PC while maintaining a reasonable asking price of around A$74.95, so at this point, it just feels like they are cashing in on their prestige points to ask for more.

Final Thoughts

Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered is an impressive, if slightly imperfect port of a PS4 classic. Insomniac and Nixxes Software have been hard at work ensuring that this port didn’t feel like a half-arsed venture. It does still need some work in terms of optimisation, but its flexibility and availability of options make this one of the better PC ports around if you’re willing to drop the substantial amount of coin it demands.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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