After selling Millions of copies on PlayStation and bagging several awards (with a Game of the Year here and there), Santa Monica Studio’s God of War Ragnarok finally lands on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. For a cross-gen title that launched in 2022, the story of Kratos and Atreus, as they await the battle of Ragnarok, holds up to this day, both in terms of gameplay and visuals. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call it one of the best-looking titles on PS5 – a facet which carries over into the PC version.
Unlike several other PS5-to-PC ports, God of War Ragnarok isn’t handled by Nixxes Software of Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered and Miles Morales, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, and so on fame, but Jetpack Interactive. The studio did a good job bringing God of War (2018) to PC, but how does Ragnarok fare?
Graphical Options and Settings
Our test bench consisted of an AMD Radeon 5950x, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, 32 GB of RAM, and an NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD. There are four graphical presets to choose from – Low, Medium, High, and Ultra – with options to modify the quality of Models, Textures, Lighting, Anisotropic Filtering, Shadows, Reflections, Atmospherics, Tessellation and Ambient Occlusion.
Features like Latency Reduction, unlocked frame rates, and Frame Generation are also present but if you dreaded the previous title’s focus on Temporal Anti-Aliasing, it returns once more. You can adjust the modes with Native, Balanced and Quality available, and there are other scaling options available, like AMD FSR 3.1, Intel XeSS, and Nvidia DLSS with DLAA.
For our test, we went with Ultra settings, AMD FSR Frame Generation enabled and DLAA at 4K resolution. To say that it looks stunning would be an understatement. Just from the opening alone, the skin texture quality of Kratos and how it’s illuminated, both from light entering the cave and the campfire inside, is incredibly realistic.
PC Performance
Of course, for an action-adventure title with a big focus on combat, how it runs is equally important. The good news is that God of War Ragnarok on PC is initially no slouch. Shader compilation is a quick 15 seconds, and the opening sequence showcases great draw distance (which is probably aided by the fog) and destructible elements with no slowdown.
Traversing through the wintery Midgard, battling enemies as the snow realistically deforms under your feet, the frame rate is pretty solid throughout. Even when Kratos and Thor are battling out, the transitions between combat and cutscenes with all the atmospherics and lighting still look great.
The problem, such as it is, only really emerges when traveling to Svartalfheim. Upon exiting the Realm Between Realms, the environment will be visible in low-polygonal form – even the clouds are absent for a few frames. While both are briefly noticeable and quickly fixed, it takes a second or so longer for the foliage in the foreground to load. Some pop-ins are also visible further away but this is fixed in short order as well.
It’s far from a dealbreaker – odd to see this on PC but not on PS5. However, we also noticed the frame rate taking a few dips during combat in the same area, even if it wasn’t a particularly intense sequence. The frame rate was stable when venturing out onto the water via boat and when climbing the dilapidated structures. Perhaps those dips are due to the area’s size and sheer amount of graphical fidelity, from the environmental textures and water to distant details and backgrounds. While it’s due for some optimization, the PC version still looks utterly gorgeous and delivers some solid performance overall.
PS5 vs. PC
On the PS5, God of War Ragnarok offers two modes – Quality and Performance. The former delivers native 4K while the latter targets 60 frames per second, running fairly solid throughout. However, the Performance mode’s resolution is dynamic, averaging around 1872p. Aside from the frame rate, both modes are comparable in quality and details, differing only in better LOD and lighting in Quality Mode. Resolution and frame rate will vary even further if you opt for Quality Mode at 40 FPS or Ultra-High Performance Mode.
With the PC version and the right hardware, you get the best of both worlds – native 4K and 60 frames per second (or higher). This is arguably how the sequel should be experienced and having additional options for further refining the image quality or improving the fidelity beyond the PS5 version is noteworthy. Of course, that’s not even factoring in features like Ultra wide-screen support. Interestingly, we did experience one crash, which occurred when the GPU utilization suddenly shot up to 100 percent. It’s likely due to a bug since the rest of our experience saw no similar issues or hang-ups.
Loading Times
You’d be hard-pressed to find any “true” loading screens for God of War Ragnarok on either PS5 or PC. The game jumps right into a cinematic and into gameplay shortly after the main menu pops up, with no cuts in between, maintaining the cinematography and presentation of its predecessors. If anything, the “loading” is masked through instances where Kratos has to squeeze through crevices, or even when traversing the Realm Between Realms.
When initiating fast travel between the realms, there’s a two-second flash before entering the Realm Between Realms and another one-second transition before venturing into Svartalfheim on PS5. The “loading” times in these instances are roughly the same on PC, though you may spot a few milliseconds of difference. Either way, it’s impressive, even with some of the rougher edges seen in the PC version.
Conclusion
Much has been said about God of War Ragnarok and how it concludes the Norse saga. From rants about how it could have ended differently to alternate story directions. Regardless, very few have argued against the game’s technical capabilities or artistic merit. There have been no doubts about the beauty of its environments or how it’s leveraged the PS5 hardware to deliver a visually spectacular experience.
Playing it on PC evokes the same magic as first playing it on consoles, and the optimization, complete with specialized features and additional options, is very good. Yes, some areas could be improved, especially when venturing to Svartalfheim, including whatever happened when exiting a portal into a new realm. Nevertheless, considering the increased scale, and sheer size of the experience (especially when factoring in the expansive end-game compared to 2018’s reboot), Jet Pack Interactive has done an excellent job translating it all to PC.
If you want to experience its visuals in native 4K, the PC version is the winner by sheer virtue of fidelity and options. However, whether you play on PS5 or PC, God of War Ragnarok is an unforgettable experience and still one of the best action-adventure titles in gaming history.
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