Spider-Man 2 PC port gets a rough reception over performance and graphical issues

thesixthaxis.com:

The PC port of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 launched on Thursday, but the game has had a “Mixed” reception in the Steam user reviews as many players complain about performance, graphical issues and crashes.

Sony leant on their in-house porting team at Nixxes to handle the port of Spider-Man 2, but while they traditionally have a good reputation for their PC ports, this one has fallen flat, joining a number of other PlayStation PC ports that have had a rocky landing.

We’re working on our own impressions of the PC port, but just to grab one of the many negative Steam reviews, “I have an RTX 4070ti, on high graphics and no raytracing I get crashes […] Even when it’s not crashing, shadows flicker for no good reason and it feels like it struggles to render hair at times.”

Part of this is down to performance. While Spider-Man Remastered and Miles Morales were well received for their performance, those games fundamentally had the PS4 platform as the base target for Insomniac’s original creation, and were designed with ray tracing as an additive feature. Spider-Man 2 only launched for PS5 and so could always feature ray tracing, could always rely on the fast NVMe SSD loading times, and the fundamental uplift that the console provided.

Spider-Man 2’s PC port actually scaled back down to GPUs without ray-tracing features, with a broad set of hardware and performance targets to go from 720p30 up to full 4K with “Ultimate” ray tracing.

The problems that players are encountering seem to run the full gamut, and affect both Nvidia and AMD GPUs alike with performance dips, frame rate stutters and running out of VRAM even with a 16GB card. The majority of PC gamers have gone with Nvidia, and with many newly implemented graphical options seem to come plenty of problems.

Odd driver issues can lead to full-blown crashes citing GPU temperatures. Elsewhere Nvidia’s bespoke ray reconstruction for improving ray traced reflections and certain other DLSS features are claimed to actually reduce frame