But perhaps its time for Nixxes to take its ports to the next level.

Four years after its initial PS4 release, Sucker Punch’sGhost of Tsushimaarrives on PC, ported by Nixxes Software.

Nixxes has also liberated FSR 3 frame-gen from requiring FSR 2 spatial upscaling, which is a welcome change.

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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.

I find it distracting using v-sync and the game does not look smooth to my eye.

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I hope that can be looked at for future patches.

Basically, the higher your bandwidth is, the more stable your frame-times are.

PCI Express 3.0 at 8x has very poor frame-time performance compared to 16x.

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However, even PCI 3.0 at 16x - tested on an RTX 3070 - has issues.

Another improvement Nixxes needs to look at is performance with a memory-constrained graphics card.

For example,Avatar: Frontiers of Pandoradoesn’t even have a texture setting.

This minimally degrades textures if it needs to and never allows the user to tank their performance or frame-times.

In terms of PC vs PS5 comparisons, the most obvious differences are in image quality and frame-rate.

UnlikeHorizon Forbidden West, Ghost of Tsushima upgrades other aspects of the presentation in meaningful ways.

PC pushes that out much much further, even at just the high setting, preventing pop-in.

Those elements see PS5 look much like PC’s high.

I’d love to see Nixxes split out foliage from the existing LOD setting.

Another more obvious upgrade over the PS5 verison is in shadow quality.

I just wish ray traced reflections were available to eliminate the standard SSR issues.

After these more obvious upgrades, the visual improvements on PC become harder to spot.

It’s the same story with volumetric quality, where PS5 looks like the high setting.

you’ve got the option to scale beyond that, but the visual return is not that impressive.

Either it’s not working, or something else is afoot.

Again, RT could have helped immensely here.

This can be improved further by using DRS or DLSS which I definitely recommend for older and slower GPUs.

In summary, I think we are looking at a generally competent port of this game on PC.

The elimination of checkerboard rendering in favour of more modern reconstruction techniques is huge.

Otherwise, it has a lot of the Nixxes hallmarks that generally deliver a quality experience.