For those who may not own a PlayStation 5, the draw of playing any number of Sony’s console ports on PC has left much to be desired, particularly regarding day one performance.
Thankfully, Nixxies is here to save the day with another excellent port, this time, bringing Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut to PC, more specifically, the PlayStation 5 version of the 2020 Sucker Punch smash hit, which initially targeted the PlayStation 4.
There isn’t much left to be said about a game that has already received praise from its PS4 and PS5 releases. Instead, I’m here to talk about Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut’s performance on PC. Unlike my awful time with The Last of Us Part I on PC, which exhibited a laundry list of performance issues and bugs on day one, Ghost of Tsushima on PC is a fantastic port and an absolute joy to play, far eclipsing its PlayStation 5 equivalent.
Running on my AMD 7900xtx, I was able to play the game comfortably at 75-90FPS, which, thanks to VRR (variable refresh rate) in motion, looked silky smooth and buttery smooth without a single performance hiccup or shader compilation stutter. Speaking of shader compilation, one minor annoyance I had with Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut on PC was updating my driver to the recommended day-one release, which eliminated shader compilation slowdowns but also introduced a nasty HDR glitch that caused frequent explosions of overexposed light, rendering the game unplayable.
“…Ghost of Tsushima on PC is a fantastic port and an absolute joy to play, far eclipsing its PlayStation 5 equivalent.”
Thankfully, rolling back my drivers fixed the issue and left me with a mostly pristine presentation, outside of some strange artifacting on the very edge of the black borders that crop up during cutscenes, but nothing that rendered the game unplayable or overly distracting.
Rolling back, the driver did force me to recompile the shader cache for the game, but fortunately, this process only took about a minute and resulted in a game free of slowdowns and stutters during gameplay. Graphically, Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut on PC benefits from capable hardware by providing a pixel-perfect presentation that looks particularly stunning in terms of foliage, minute details in the foreground, and figures in the distance that could sometimes look aliased and out of focus on consoles. Ultra-wide monitor support also dramatically enhances the already gorgeous look of the game, expanding and showcasing the game’s lush and often photorealistic natural beauty.
“…Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut’s highlights Sony’s continued push to bring their first-party games to a wider audience…”
Additionally, outside of native Dualsense controller support, Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut is the first Sony-published title to introduce a mandatory PlayStation Network login at the start of the game (unless you want to forgo playing online), which for me, personally, isn’t a big deal, in fact, as someone who occasionally likes collecting trophies, I like the fact that the game is now associated with my PlayStation account.
However, I can see this being an issue for many, particularly those who reside where the PlayStation Network isn’t supported. But for a day-one release featuring a new form of integration, Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut’s highlights Sony’s continued push to bring their first-party games to a wider audience via a familiar-looking friends pane, trophy list and PlayStation-centric menu that can be opened from the pause menu or a keyboard shortcut, while ultimately remaining unintrusive enough as to not get in the way (such as having to use a separate launcher).
At the end of the day, Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut on PC is easily Sony’s best day-one effort, thanks to Nixxies’ excellent porting job.
