Four years after its initial PS4 release, Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima arrives on PC, ported by Nixxes Software. Initial impressions of the port were favourable, but having now spent around a week with the game we’re able to give you a much more nuanced appraisal of the conversion, suggest some optimised settings and offer up those all-important PS5 comparisons.
This may be a new engine for Nixxes to deal with, but the overall framework of the game has much in common with its prior ports – which is generally a very positive thing. It means you get a settings menu that lets you tweak as you like, your changes reflected in the background in real-time – no restarts required! And as usual for Nixxes, there’s support for dynamic resolution scaling and all major upscaling technologies, along with both FSR 3 and DLSS 3 frame generation (though the new FSR 3.1 spatial upscaling upgrades are not included). Nixxes has also liberated FSR 3 frame-gen from requiring FSR 2 spatial upscaling, which is a welcome change.
In terms of the quality of the upscalers, we see the usual hierarchy, though DLSS has some issues in this title with depth of field effects, with some off-putting jitter. This manifests itself with XeSS but to a lesser extent, while it’s not a problem at all with FSR. It would be nice to see this remedied in due course.
In terms of fluidity and smoothness, I’ve got good news and bad news. On the plus side, there’s no shader compilation stutter, but even so, the smoothness of the presentation is compromised with a curious camera issue that sees the movement update out of step with the frame-rate. I find it distracting using v-sync and the game does not look smooth to my eye. This does not happen on the PS5 version as far as I can tell and it gives Ghost of Tsushima PC a less stable appearance. I hope that can be looked at for future patches.