Days Gone is the next Playstation-exclusive game that has been released on the PC. Powered by Unreal Engine 4, it’s time to benchmark it and see how it performs on the PC platform.
For this PC Performance Analysis, we used an Intel i9 9900K with 16GB of DDR4 at 3600Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX580 and RX Vega 64, NVIDIA’s GTX690, GTX980Ti, RTX 2080Ti and RTX 3080. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce driver 466.47 and the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 21.5.2 drivers. Since the game does not have any SLI profile, our GTX690 behaved similarly to a single GTX680.
Bend Studio has implemented a nice amount of graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Lighting, Geometry, Textures, Foliage Draw Distance, Shadows and Cloud/Fog. There are also options for Chromatic Aberration, Motion Blur, HDR, Field of View and Render Scale.
Days Gone does not come with a built-in benchmark tool. As such, we’ve decided to benchmark to separate scenes. For our GPU benchmarks, we used the scene in which you ride first Boozer’s bike. For our CPU benchmarks, we used the scene in which Deacon uses Boozer as a decoy and first encounters a large number of enemies.
In order to find out how the game scales on multiple CPU threads, we simulated a dual-core, a quad-core and a hexa-core CPU. And, we are happy to report, that the game does not require a high-end CPU. With Hyper-Threading, our simulated dual-core system had no trouble running the game with more than 90fps at all times at 1080p/Max Settings. From the looks of it, the game mainly uses 4-6 CPU threads. Thus, and as we had expected, there aren’t any performance differences between our octa-core and our simulated hexa-core CPUs.
On the other hand, Days Gone requires a high-end GPU for gaming on Max Settings. At 1080p/Max Settings, our NVIDIA GTX980Ti was unable to offer a constant 60fps experience. As such, owners of weaker CPUs will have to lower some settings in order to improve performance. The two settings that you should focus on lowering are Lighting Quality and “Cloud and Fog” Quality.
At 2560×1440, the only GPUs that were able to run the game smoothly were the RTX2080Ti and the RTX3080. As for 4K/Max Settings, the only GPU that was able to run it with constant 60fps was the RTX3080.
Graphics-wise, Days Gone looks great. Its environments in particular are among the best we’ve seen. The game also comes with some amazing weather effects. Not only that, but Bend Studio has improved the quality of all textures, and used higher quality effects on PC (like SSGI). Unfortunately, though, the character models are not as impressive as the environments. While they look good, they are nowhere close to what Kojima Productions and Capcom achieved with Death Stranding and Resident Evil Village, respectively. Don’t get me wrong, they don’t look horrible. However, they are not as impressive as what we’ve seen lately on PC. This is to be expected of course as Days Gone originally came out on PS4.
Before closing, I should also mention some PC issues that we’ve encountered. The game suffers from some deadzone issues when using the mouse and keyboard. Thankfully, you can somehow improve things by raising the in-game mouse sensitivity. The game does not offer 1-to-1 raw mouse input. Still, it’s not as awful as what we’ve seen in other console ports. So yeah, while we don’t have raw mouse input, the mouse is at least pretty responsive.
Additionally, the game suffers from some “speed” issues when riding your bike. You can easily notice these issues when the framerate drops below 60fps. At high framerates, this “speed” issue is not that noticeable. Thus, we strongly suggest playing the game with more than 70fps (at least until Bend Studio fixes this issue).
Apart from the aforementioned issues, Days Gone appears to be in a very good state. It’s also way better than Horizon Zero Dawn’s launch version. For instance, we did not experience any graphical glitches/bugs or missing effects. The game also appears to be stable as we did not experience any crashes. Bend Studio will have to address the issues we mentioned above. Other than those, though, the PC version appears to be in a pretty solid state.
Enjoy!
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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