God of War Ragnarök PC: a quality port with small issues

More than two years after the PlayStation original, God of War Ragnarök aims to be a better PC game than its predecessor and largely hits the mark, offering PC players a genuinely great way to play one of Sony’s best recent releases.

One big improvement is visible right away: as part of the move from DirectX 11 to DirectX 12, there’s now a shader precompilation step when you launch the game that actually works, preventing shader compilation stuter from rearing its ugly head. According to developers Jetpack Interactive, this is done wholesale rather than relying on QA playthroughs to find them, resulting in a much more bulletproof experience – and certainly the smoothest PC port I’ve seen from Sony in recent memory. There are still occasional frame-time blips in the first few hours of play – eg a 50ms spike when Atreus opens a door early on – but they’re extremely uncommon and don’t detract from the experience, which is a huge win.

Another improvement comes in the form of the user experience and settings menu. If you have an ultra-wide or super-wide monitor, you’re well catered for, with support for aspect ratios up to 32:9 or double the traditional 16:9. This requires a lot of extra development work, particularly in cutscenes to ensure that the wider field of view doesn’t reveal any animation shortcuts.

The menu is also laudable for allowing options to be changed in real-time, with the background turning transparent to see what effect your settings choices are making. There are a good range of options here, and all of the most popular upscalers are supported with frame generation where available: DLSS, FSR, XeSS and Santa Monica Studios’ own TAAU implementation.

Unfortunately, the useful “original” preset, which corresponded to PS4 settings in the last game, doesn’t return in this title, and in general there’s less ability for the PC version to scale beyond the PS5 version of Ragnarök. The biggest upgrade is simply image quality, with DLSS or DLAA in particular doing a better job with fine detail than TAAU on PS5. Other PS5 quality mode settings tend to be labelled as “ultra” on PC, whereas PS5’s performance mode tends to correspond to somewhere between low and medium depending on the setting.

However, there are some areas where the PS5 version of the game looks better than the PC release, which is concerning. The PC release is missing the unique cubemap tracing system used in the PS5’s quality mode, for example, leading to fewer visual errors in the PS5 release when it comes to matching cubemap and screen-space reflections.

Some effects work also seems to be missing, such as a dream sequence in a forest that features a moving mist on PS5 that doesn’t appear on PC, a trend that continues in the Realm Between Realms area too. Portal transitions are also smoother on console, with LOD transitions on PC being much more noticeable – and this is true even for the HDD-equipped PS4 version of the game, so it’s not a case of the PS5 SSD outperforming its PC equivalent. I also noticed audio differences switching between PC and PS5, with dialogue on PC sometimes sounding more muffled than on the console release.

Finally, performance on Ryzen 3000 (Zen 2) processors seems unusually low. The popular Ryzen 5 3600 often struggles to hit a 60fps frame-rate almost regardless of settings. Sub-60 performance isn’t by itself an indicator of a game issue, but we see a much bigger performance gulf between the Ryzen 5 3600 and 7800X3D, for example, than we see in other games. In Space Marine 2, the 7800X3D is 108 percent faster than the Ryzen 5 3600 when CPU-limited; in Dragon’s Dogma 2 the advantage is 95 percent; in Crysis 3 Remastered it is 130 percent. In Ragnarök, the 7800X3D is 247 percent faster than the Ryzen 5 3600, way beyond any other game we’ve tested.

And lest you think there’s some kind of v-cache shenanigans going on, there’s similar weirdness with the Ryzen 5 3600 compared to its successor, the Ryzen 5 5600X. In Crysis 3 Remastered, the 5600X is 39 percent faster, which is already quite a big gen-on-gen performance boost, but in God of War Ragnarök is 99 percent faster – so something a bit odd is going on here. Looking at core utilisation, there’s a lot more load per thread on the 5600X, but it’s not clear why the 3600 underperforms to such a degree in this game specifically.

Another oddity concerns the game’s tessellation setting. In the pre-release version of the game, a top-spec 7800X3D and RTX 4090 PC ran comfortably at 70fps to 100fps or higher in all areas at ultra settings, but the Realm Between Realms dipped frame-rates into the 40s. The shipping version of the game now runs in the 60s here, which seems to be a result of tessellation being hugely pulled back – which does manifest in the ground deforming close to the camera. It’s not clear why the tessellation effect is so expensive in this area in particular, as it’s essentially neglible elsewhere, but it’s another bit of weirdness for sure.

Engaging ultra-wide mode also seems to hurt frame-times for some reason, with visibly choppy performance as very short and long frames appear back to back. This doesn’t appear to be simply down to an increased GPU load due to the higher resolution, as frame-rates are still reasonable; it’s just the frame-times that suffer.

Beyond fixing these bugs, if possible, I’d like to see two more changes to the game post-launch. Firstly, it would be great for 16:9 users to opt for a wider field of view, given that this works fine on ultra-wide aspect ratios. Secondly, while upscaling works well, all upscalers apart from XeSS have real problems when handling water reflections, with DLSS in particular becoming a flickery mess. I imagine this should be fixable given that we don’t see similar issues in other games that use these upscalers.

Getting into optimised settings, the table above summarises my recommendations, but it’s worth going into a little more detail about some key options. For example, tessellation has little performance impact (apart from the aforementioned bug), so keeping it on ultra makes sense. The same goes for lighting, which doesn’t provide enough of a performance advantage to justify the worse-looking visuals, so keep it at ultra.

Volumetrics are temporally amortised, so you can go down as low as medium before seeing noticeable issues. The model setting adjusts the quality of models at a distance, and reclaims performance quite expertly, so for a mid-range GPU the medium setting makes sense. Shadows are a similar situation, remaining handsome enough while delivering a good performance lead. Lastly, for textures you can opt for high on an 8GB GPU, anything above this can go for ultra.

All told, optimised settings provide around an 18 percent performance improvement in an expensive indoor area, or around 31 percentage points to the better outdoors with minimal changes to visual quality. Not a bad showing, all things considered!

God of War Ragnarök is in an interesting place right now. In many ways it’s an extremely well done PC port with some nice features, but for a minority of users – those with Zen 2 CPUs or ultra-wide displays, for example – there are some serious problems that need addressing. If the areas I’ve mentioned can be fixed, the PC version will feel just as hyper-polished as the PS5 original.