Spider-Man 2 had a bit of a rough landing on PC last week, the game getting a resoundingly ‘mixed’ reception in the community-led Steam reviews, but is it really as bad as that made it sound?
With two hotfix updates on either side of the weekend, the most significant game crashing bugs should have been stamped out already, and awareness over the need to install the latest GPU drivers (even the sneaky optional ones) has also spread. That should leave performance as the main bugbear to address,
We’ve tested the game across two configurations. For one it’s a Ryzen 5900X paired with a Radeon RX 6800, and in the other a Ryzen 5800X with a GeForce RTX 3070, both combinations that’s are step ahead of the base PS5 and one dose of PSSR behind the PS5 Pro for the RX 6800. From the system requirements table, it’s good for 1440p at high graphics settings, without ray tracing, but from a couple hours of experimentation, it’s far more capable and flexible than that.
The first hurdle before getting into the game, though, was needing to update the graphics drivers. The most recent standard drivers from AMD are from December 2024, but Spider-Man 2 support comes in the “optional” 25.1.1 update that isn’t offered up by default in the Radeon software. Without that you get a mean looking warning screen when trying to launch the game!
But once in the game and with the default 1440p and high preset, the game runs at a nice and pretty much locked 60fps, thanks in no small part to the excellent dynamic resolution scaling used to hit a frame rate target, using any of FSR, DLSS, XeSS or Insomniac’s own IGTI to upscale. Disable dynamic resolutions and upscaling and the RX 6800 still does a solid job of staying above 60, only really dipping to the mid-high 50s during the most stressful moments.
Adding ray tracing into the mix – there’s settings for ray-traced reflections, interiors, shadows and ambient occlusion, as well as object range, and Nvidia’s ray reconstruction – and that naturally pushes things harder. Without upscaling, performance on the RX 6800 with ‘High’ ray tracing at 1440p dropped the lower parts of the curve to the 40s, while ‘Very High’ is better thought of as a 30fps mode here – it often clings to the upper 20s.
It is worth it, if you have a beefy enough GPU. The ‘High’ preset is amusingly named as the minimum bar for ray tracing effects, adding RT reflections and RT interiors for the game’s cunning building interior trick. The problem is that it’s a rather fuzzy looking effect that shimmers a lot on window edges and affects even the shiny chrome on cars, regardless of resolution or upscaling technique. Once you switch to ‘Very High’ the reflection quality is improved dramatically, but you also get RT shadows and RT ambient occlusion, which much better place objects in the world. Still, bumping up just RT reflections to Very High is the most impactful improvement.
If performance is on the cusp, you can step the resolution down to 1080p and get a bit of a frame rate bump, or just let the dynamic resolution take over with a target of 60fps, maintaining the 1440p highs for whenever the engine can handle it, and making up the difference with upscaling.
It’s a similar story with the RTX 3070, where 60fps is readily achievable on the ‘High’ preset without ray tracing, though the introduction of ‘High’ ray tracing seems to come at a greater cost than that seen with the RX 6800, dropping into the 30s when the on-screen action is at its most hectic – we’d suspect that the 8GB of VRAM on this card is having an impact here, in tandem with DirectStorage using the GPU to decompress textures from the SSD.
Either way there’s still greater headroom and more incremental control in Spider-Man 2 on PC to outperform the base PS5 version, and the PS5 Pro update, if your rig is capable of it. That’s similar to that found in the PC port of the original Spider-Man, but it’s fair to say that the baseline has been raised.
One of the great things about Spider-Man 2 is being able to quickly toggle between all manner of graphical settings with a rendered scene shown in the background of the menu. It is near instantaneous when toggling on PS5 Pro, but on PC and with so many hardware variables, it triggers a shader recompilation step with any significant changes – if you don’t let these process, there can also be shader compilation hitches during gameplay, and it will take a while for RT effects to actually start rendering.
-
- RT Off
-
- RT High
-
- RT Very High
-
- RT Ultimate
While it comes with a performance cost, I would definitely recommend at least turning on ray traced reflections. There’s fewer fallback cube map reflections in Spider-Man 2, since playing without RT is not an option on PS5. Cars do have a minimal skybox reflection, but there’s basically no reflections on building windows and sky scrapers, making them look very flat and lifeless when the mirror-like buildings are so much a part of New York’s identity.
In general, we haven’t found anywhere near the kinds of issues that have seen the game receive a wash of negative reviews on Steam. Some of those were due to game crashes that a hotfix was released to address by the weekend, while others complained about performance. Of course, we’ve been talking and playing with 60fps in mind throughout here, purely from the age and specs of our GPUs, but anyone with an RTX 4080, RTX 4090, or Radeon 7900 XT is going to be expecting frame rates pushing toward triple figures, and that colours the perspective.
In our experience, you’re not relying too heavily on dynamic resolutions and upscaling to high the graphics presets provided by Sony, but there’s plenty of scope to tweak settings and apply some upscaling to get core ray tracing features and a solid 60fps performance that matches or betters the game on PS5. All in all, Spider-Man 2 on PC has proven to be a reliable performer in both of our use cases.
