Death Stranding 2: On The Beach is a PlayStation 5 games that truly looks and feels like a PlayStation 5 game. This has been a generation with games that have often felt trapped between souping up the last generation of graphics, and coming to terms with console hardware that really struggles to handle all the ray-tracing, lighting and upscaling demands that will be key to the next. Death Stranding 2, though, had my jaw dropping in it’s opening moments at how gorgeous, photo-realistic, and breath-taking it looked – and in all my hours of playing the game, that feeling somehow never went away. Getting to experience that again with this PC port is a delight, although the second time around and on now somewhat older hardware, the cracks do begin to show.
For reference, I’m running a PC with a GeForce RTX 3080, a Ryzen 5 5600X, and 32GB of RAM, which all comes just a hair shy of the full recommended PC specs for the game provided by Kojima Productions and PlayStation. At first glance, the game runs like a dream. It’s a perfect blend of the “Performance” and “Quality” modes from the original PS5 release, providing a 1440P experience at a smooth 60FPS with plenty of room to hit higher frames if left uncapped. Running at full 4K is a bit trickier on this hardware, requiring me to really fiddle with the more granular graphics settings to land on a consistent framerate. The PC port provides a host of new frame-generation options that help add fluidity to my 4K experience, despite my lack of supercomputer-tier hardware.
I chose to keep the game at 1440P and 60FPS, though, opting for an experience that didn’t rely on frame-gen. What I noticed, though, was that even on this seemingly stable setup, I was regularly encountering some minor stutters and frame-drops throughout the game. It never fully went away no matter how long I played, and these stutters were never present on the original PS5 version of the game, which is a frustrating knock against this PC port.
As a diehard fan of the Steam Deck, I simply had to try this game out on my OLED Deck to see how it performed. I knew it was impossible to expect a 1:1 experience on the aged hardware of Valve’s hybrid handheld, but I’ve also been surprised in the past by how competently some of these Sony PC ports can run on the Steam Deck if you really crank down the settings – The Last Of Us 2 was a good example of this. Unfortunately, despite even going so far as to offer a dedicated “Portable” graphics preset in-game, Death Stranding 2 is a mess on the handheld console.
Framerate inconsistently bounces around the 15-25FPS range at all times, and only really reaches 30FPS if you’re indoors and are feeling lucky. Again, I’m not surprised that a game of this scale can’t run at all on the Steam Deck, but it’s always a fun experiment to turn settings down to their minimum and see how these kinds of games fare.
Further Reading: Death Stranding 2 Review
Overall, Death Stranding 2 on PC is a mostly stellar experience, but the constant threat of minor frame drops and stutters at seemingly random times prevent this from feeling as seamless or polished as it did on the original hardware. It’s absolutely a solid enough port for PC-only Kojima fans to finally dive into his latest epic, but hopefully in time the rough patches get ironed out so this can become the perfect way to play this game.
