Like the PS5 and Xbox versions, Dead Space on PC is a brilliant game with some serious issues that unfortunately overshadow what is otherwise a high-quality remake of the 2008 classic. Here’s what you need to know about these issues – plus a comparison of PC versus PS5 and optimised settings that boost performance without sacrificing visuals on a range of PC hardware.
Starting with a look at the game’s menus, Dead Space is a well-appointed PC port with clearly described options and a background that shows graphical settings changes live – something every PC port should try to emulate. Weirdly though, the menus animate at 30fps, and sometimes performance is lower than expected after making changes – so a full game restart after changing a setting is recommended.
We’ll cover which options are worth changing a little later, but for now let’s talk shader compilation. This is handled by a precompilation step the first time you start a game, taking a bit more than a minute on a Core i9 12900K and just under three minutes on the more mainstream-orientated Ryzen 5 3600. This is normally good news, as it should help prevent instances of shader compilation stutter, but the implementation here seems flawed – reinstalling a driver and wiping the shader cache doesn’t trigger this precompilation step again if you’re on the same driver version, so you can run into massive shader compilation stutters this way.
