Sony has just released Death Stranding 2: On the Beach on PC. The game is using the Decima Engine, and it’s the first Decima-powered game that uses Ray Tracing. As I’ve said, Sony has not provided us with a review code. So, today, I can only share my initial tech impressions.
For these early Ray Tracing and DLSS 4.5 benchmarks, I used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090. I also used Windows 10 64-bit, and the GeForce 595.76 driver.
Nixxes has used Ray Tracing to enhance the game’s reflections and ambient occlusion. RTAO can noticeably improve the overall image, especially in shadowy places. RT Reflections can also resolve the awful SSR artifacts we’ve witnessed in the first Death Stranding game. So, both of them are a welcome addition in DS2.
Death Stranding 2 does not have a built-in benchmark tool. So, for these early benchmarks, I used the starting area. For our PC Performance Analysis, I’ll use the same (or another one that could be more demanding than it).
At Native 4K on Max Settings with Ray Tracing, the NVIDIA RTX 5090 can push over 60FPS at all times. Without Ray Tracing, the NVIDIA RTX 5090 offers framerates between 90FPS and 100FPS.
These results are pretty great already. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a game that can run at Native 4K with Ray Tracing and with 60FPS on an NVIDIA RTX 5090. So, this tells me that Death Stranding 2 will be able to scale on a lot of PC systems. We’ll know for sure when we test all of our GPUs. Still, things look quite positive right now.
With DLSS 4.5 Multi-Frame Gen, NVIDIA RTX 50 series owners can further improve performance and smoothness. With DLSS 4.5 Quality and MFG X2, we got to 160FPS. Then, with MFG X3, we got over 200FPS. And finally, with MFG X4, we got to 280FPS.
I also did not experience any major stuttering issues. Not only that, but Death Stranding 2 looks great. So, this could easily be one of the most optimized PC games of 2026. Again, we’ll have to test all of our rest GPUs in order to get a proper idea. However, these early tests and benchmarks are very positive.
Our PC Performance Analysis for Death Stranding 2 will go live later this week. Below, you can find a video in which I’ve decided to test both Ray Tracing and DLSS 4.5. So, be sure to check it out!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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