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After nearly four years, Ghost of Tsushima it’s finally available on PC. The new version includes the base game, Legends mode and Ikki Island expansion, as well as a suite of the latest technologies from Nvidia, AMD and Intel. In terms of efficiency, Ghost of Tsushima it runs well and looks beautiful, but there is one big problem.

Sony’s recent foray into PC has locked players in over 170 countries out of the experience Ghost of Tsushima, though it initially offered the game in those locations for pre-order. This shouldn’t detract from the excellent PC port Ghost of Tsushima is however.

Best settings for Ghost of Tsushima on PC

Ghost of Tsushima hait has a relatively abbreviated graphical menu, but each of the settings is powerful enough to affect your performance and/or image quality. After some testing, here are the best settings for Ghost of Tsushima:

• Motion blur power: 0
• Insight: 5
• Texture Quality: Average
• Texture filtering: 4x Anisotropic
• Shadow quality: Average
• Level of detail: High
• Field Details: low
• Bulk fog: Average
• Depth of field: High
• Screen Space Reflections: low
• Screen shadows: High
• Environmental occlusion: SSAO Implementation
• Bloom: On
• Vignette: On
• Aqueous caustics: On

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These settings resulted in about a 25% to 30% increase in my average framerate in the open world, and without a significant hit to image quality. You can see in the video below how close the recommended settings are to the Very High preset. It’s close, with only slight differences in shadows and reflections to draw attention.

I’d encourage you to mess around with the settings yourself, though. Ghost of Tsushima renders the game behind the graphical menu, allowing you to see how your changes affect the image quality in real time. Additionally, there are helpful tooltips for each of the options that note how the setting emphasizes different components in your system. Other developers can learn from Sucker Punch here how to design a graphical menu for PC.

There are a few settings you should pay attention to. The one that affects image quality the most is the level of detail. Ghost of Tsushima offers a huge world with many open views, and the level of detail setting significantly reduces the drawing distance of objects. That’s why I settled on the High setting here, as the quality drops significantly below that point.

On the other hand, there are some settings that aren’t worth pushing higher. Texture quality, for example, shows a big difference between low and medium. Above Medium, however, there are only minimal differences and it’s not worth raising the setting unless you have plenty of headroom for performance. Shadow Quality is in a similar situation. Shadows are sharper above Medium, but not by much.

Regardless of your settings, Ghost of Tsushimaperformance is stable. In the linear sections, the open world, and even the Legends co-op mode, I saw only minor deviations in frame rate. This port is at the level of Helldivers 2 in its consistency. It might tax older systems at higher settings and resolutions, but it won’t turn into a stuttering mess like Dragon’s Dogma 2.

Ghost of Tsushima PC system requirements

Originally a PS4 title, it should come as no surprise that Ghost of Tsushima system requirements are not too demanding. You can see the breakdown in the chart above. For minimal setups, you can go with a GTX 960 or RX 5500 XT, as well as a low-end processor that’s almost a decade old.

For most people though, you’re looking at at least Nvidia’s RTX 20 series or AMD’s RX 5000 series to play the game at 1080p. That’s really the threshold for most PC gamers in 2024, so it’s good to see that the majority of players will be able to run the game at 1080p with high frame rates and few issues.

However, this game may stress your hardware. On the high end, you’re looking at an RTX 4080 or RX 7900 XT to play the game at 4K. Testing with an RTX 4090 and Ryzen 7 7800X3D, I saw around 70 frames per second (fps) at native 4K in open world. It’s still an excellent representation of how beautiful the game looks.

Need PSN for Ghost of Tsushima on PC?

This one is tough. You do not need a PlayStation Network (PSN) account to play Ghost of Tsushima on a PC, but you’ll probably want one. You can play the single-player story without a PSN account, but you’ll need to sign in to PSN if you want to play the Legends co-op mode or access the new PlayStation overlay.

Given what we saw with Helldivers 2 recently there is a high possibility that Sony will require a PSN account for their PC ports. Logging in or creating a PSN account is tedious, but the bigger issue is availability.

Ghost of Tsushima was delisted in over 170 countries shortly before launch, even in regions where players had pre-ordered the game. Steam issued refunds, but Sony removed the game due to lack of PSN availability in countries where it previously sold PC editions.

This is the biggest problem with Ghost of Tsushima on a computer. Although a PSN account is not required to play the main game, a large part of the world does not have access to the game, even if they have played previous versions on Sony PC.

Can you play Ghost of Tsushima on Steam Deck?

Ghost of Tsushima is not currently technically supported by Steam Deck, at least according to Valve’s Deck Verified program. However, the developer says it’s working to optimize the game for Valve’s handhelds, and after installing and playing the game for a while, I’m shocked it hasn’t earned a Verified badge.

With the Low preset and XeSS or FSR set to dynamically adjust the resolution, I was getting a consistent 45fps and with fairly stable image quality. There are certainly games that perform much worse on Steam Deck and have received a Verified badge, such as Lords of the Fallen and even The Last of Us Part I.

The only problem right now is that you can’t use frame generation. FSR 3 should in theory run on Steam Deck, which will help the game reach a consistent 60 frames per second (fps) on the pocket. For now, though, FSR 3 is locked in the settings, so you’ll have to settle for scaling.

DLSS 3, FSR 3 and XeSS in Ghost of Tsushima

Outside of the graphics settings, the other thing that stands out Ghost of Tsushima is its broad support for productivity-enhancing technologies. You have access to Nvidia’s DLSS 3, AMD’s FSR 3, and Intel’s XeSS. The scaling and frame generation components are separate and you are free to mix them. You can use FSR 3 frame generation while using DLSS or XeSS scaling, for example.

Of the three, it should come as no surprise that DLSS 3 reigns supreme for both scaling and frame generation. FSR 3 is definitely close to the frame generation front at least. It’s great to see FSR 3 stick around in a new PC release, which AMD has done a relatively poor job of up until this point.

For the scaling component, the differences are more nuanced, which you can see in the video above of all three tools running in their performance mode at 4K (1080p native resolution). Immediately, FSR immediately looks the worst. We have yet to see AMD’s long-awaited FSR 3.1 update, which promises much better quality and stability. The last point is what hurts the FSR Ghost of Tsushima. You can see a little flickering in the grass near the camera, which only gets more pronounced further away.

XeSS is in a different situation. It’s more stable up close, but struggles to recover fine details far away. You can see flicker and drip in detail on distant trees, which FSR and DLSS preserve well. There is also a loss of detail in distant grassy patches, with the tops washed out in a lighter green.

DLSS looks best and serves as the benchmark here. There is a slight loss of detail on distant trees compared to native resolution, but you really have to squint to notice significant differences.

Anti-aliasing in Ghost of Tsushima

In addition to scaling, Ghost of Tsushima includes DLSS, FSR and XeSS anti-aliasing. If you’re not familiar, these scaling tools are essentially complex anti-aliasing algorithms and c Ghost of Tsushima, you can run these algorithms at native resolution for improved image quality.

You can see how they stack up to the typical temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) the game uses in the video above. TAA shows a lot of shimmer on distant trees, while DLSS, FSR and XeSS clean up those details. FSR’s Native AA mode looks most immediately impressive due to its aggressive sharpening, but here the devil is in the details.

If you look at the white grass in the background, you can see that the FSR is struggling to separate the details as it blows in the wind. DLSS doesn’t look as sharp, but it maintains those fine details better. Finally, XeSS looks the worst, but is still better than TAA. It mainly works as a way to fix TAA issues rather than significantly improve image quality.

A stumbling block for a great port

Ghost of Tsushima is an excellent PC port with one major problem. You do not need a PSN account to play the main game, however, the game is not available in several countries where PSN is not available. We’ve seen more than a dozen PC ports from Sony in the past two years that don’t require PSN. There’s no reason games should require it now.

However, that shouldn’t overshadow how excellent this port is. It runs extremely well on a wide variety of hardware, features the latest and greatest in computing technology, and even holds its own on the Steam Deck. Pepper in a useful graphical menu and a photo mode in which you can easily get lost, and Ghost of Tsushima is all up.

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