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Four years after its initial PS4 release, Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima arrives for PC, ported by Nixxes Software. Initial impressions of the port were favorable, but after spending a week or so with the game, we’re able to give you a much more nuanced assessment of the conversion, suggest some tweaks, and offer those all-important PS5 comparisons.

It may be a new engine for Nixxes to tackle, but the overall framework of the game has a lot in common with previous ports – which is generally a very positive thing. This means you get a settings menu that allows you to set it up however you like, with your changes taking effect in the background in real time – no reboot required! And as usual for Nixxes, there’s support for dynamic resolution scaling and all the major scaling technologies, along with FSR 3 and DLSS 3 frame generation (although the new FSR 3.1 spatial scaling upgrades aren’t included). Nixxes also exempted FSR 3 frame-gen from the FSR 2 spatial scaling requirement, which is a welcome change.

In terms of the quality of the upscalers, we see the usual hierarchy, although DLSS has some problems in this title with depth-of-field effects, with some off-putting judder. This occurs with XeSS, but to a lesser extent, while with FSR it is not a problem at all. It would be nice to have this corrected in a timely manner.

In terms of smoothness and smoothness, I have good news and bad news. On the plus side, there’s no stuttering when compiling shaders, but the smoothness of the presentation is nevertheless compromised with a curious camera issue that sees motion update out of sync with the frame rate. I find using v-sync to be distracting and the game doesn’t look smooth to my eye. This doesn’t happen on the PS5 version as far as I can tell, and gives Ghost of Tsushima PC a less solid look. I hope this can be considered for future fixes.

Also problematic is how Ghost of Tsushima can saturate the bandwidth of PCI Express, the crucial interface between the system and the GPU. Basically, the higher your bandwidth, the more stable your footage. PCI Express 3.0 at 8x has very poor frame time performance compared to 16x. So if you have a modern GPU that only works with eight lanes, and you’re using an old board with only PCIe 3.0 support, you might have problems. However, even PCI 3.0 at 16x – tested on an RTX 3070 – has issues. This is a pattern noted by other users and seems to apply to the Nixxes PlayStation ports and I really think it needs addressing.

Another improvement that Nixxes should address is performance with a memory-constrained graphics card. If you have an 8GB GPU with too high a display and texture resolution, you’ll get sporadically worse performance that would be difficult for the user to troubleshoot. At the very least, I’d recommend that Nixxes implement a VRAM meter within the settings to inform the user what’s going on, or just handle VRAM more intelligently. For example, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora doesn’t even have a texture setting. The game itself handles mip streaming quality by using DX12 tiled resources in an automated way, based on available GPU memory. This minimally degrades textures if necessary and never allows the user to degrade their performance or frame times.

In terms of PC vs PS5 comparisons, the most obvious differences are in image quality and frame rate. PS5 cutscenes are locked at 30fps and can run at any framerate on PC, dramatically increasing their smoothness at 60fps and beyond. However, not all game elements are optimized to run at random frame rates, as a number of particle effects awkwardly animate at low frame rates, such as dust on the ground or other distant particle effects, and this can sometimes give the game uncomfortable look.

The image quality is also much better, as the PS5 version has a TAA-style ghosting effect that the PC doesn’t have. However, the IQ’s biggest win comes from the PC’s access to more advanced scaling solutions compared to the PS5’s checkerboard rendering. Nvidia DLSS and even DLSS performance mode offer a significant improvement – just that, given that the latter uses half the original pixel count of the checkerboard solution.

Unlike Horizon Forbidden West, Ghost of Tsushima builds on other aspects of the presentation in meaningful ways. One of the biggest is in the foliage LOD, where on the PS5 the foliage gets pretty close to the camera so you can see barren hills in the distance. The PC pushes this much further, even just on a high setting, preventing pop. Based on the comparison with the PC settings, the PS5 version has a distance draw that is lower than the PC average, but a density similar to the high setting for nearby tufts of grass. On PC, this setting for drawing foliage is annoyingly controlled by a general LOD setting, which also affects the LOD of the opaque geometry. These elements show that the PS5 looks a lot like the PC high. I would like to see Nixxes separate the greenery from the existing LOD setting.

Another more obvious upgrade over the PS5 version is in the quality of the shadows. Shadows on console get pretty soft near the camera with an obvious shadow map cascade, but you can push it higher on PC. I’d say the PS5 is on par with PC’s high shadow setting, with very high and ultra above that. For mid-spec GPUs, I recommend the high setting in general to keep VRAM under control and preserve performance whenever possible. Screen space reflections are also improved on PC, with the PS5 equivalent of the high setting looking good. I just wish ray-traced reflections were available to eliminate the standard SSR issues.

After these more obvious upgrades, the PC’s visual improvements become harder to spot. For example, screen space shadows at a very high setting have a fuller penumbra effect, where a high setting (equivalent to PS5) resolves them in a more diffuse manner. It’s not a huge difference, although it does cost a bit to use the very high PC setting for this more minimal return, so I recommend high instead. It’s the same with the surround quality, where the PS5 looks like the high setting. You can scale beyond that, but the visual return isn’t as impressive.

One area that didn’t see much of an upgrade over the PS5 is texture quality – here the PS5 allows the same texture quality as high or very high, which look identical in the views I found. This is a shame as the texture quality is probably the weakest aspect of the game compared to indirect lighting where many of the game’s textures are blurry, especially those used for terrain. Another problem is that on PC, the anisotropic filtering setting doesn’t seem to significantly affect the texture quality of the terrain at a distance – even when it’s up to 16x at 4K. Either it’s not working or there’s something else.

Another questionable upgrade comes with environmental occlusion – like other Nixxes ports, other AO options are available, but the game art doesn’t seem designed around them, as they apply AO more conservatively to the environment. For this reason, I can’t recommend using XeGTAO or HBAO+, as they cost more than the SSAO quality option that the PS5 uses, and provide no quality gain other than less aliasing. Again, RT could have helped tremendously here.

With all these optimizations working, we can see some big performance gains in certain scenarios – anything up to 33 percent in our tests over the out-of-the-box ultra settings. This can be further improved by using DRS or DLSS, which I definitely recommend for older and slower GPUs.

In summary, I think we’re looking at a generally competent port of this game on PC. I especially like how there are significant graphical upgrades in key areas of the graphics, like the LOD of the leaves, which was definitely missing on the PS5. Eliminating checkerboard rendering in favor of more modern reconstruction techniques is huge. Otherwise, many of the hallmarks of Nixxes are there, making for a quality experience overall. However, this is the studio’s fifth PC port since the acquisition, and perhaps it’s time for some more general improvements – a VRAM counter or even better an automated system, along with a solution to the PCI Express bandwidth issues I’ve highlighted. I feel like it’s a GPU heavy game at ultra settings considering the visual payoff, although I imagine most will be happy with a high preset or a very similar alternative to optimized settings.