Last week, Sony released Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on PC. Powered by Insomniac’s in-house engine, it’s time to benchmark it and examine its performance on the PC.
For this PC Performance Analysis, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX, as well as NVIDIA’s RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 4090, RTX 5080 and RTX 5090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 572.16, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 25.1.1 drivers. Moreover, we’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.
Nixxes has added a lot of graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Textures, AF, Shadows, Level of Detail, Traffic and more. The game also supports Ray Tracing for AO, Reflections and Shadows. Plus, there is support for all PC upscalers. As such, you can use DLSS 3, FSR 3.1 or Intel XeSS. For owners of the recently released RTX50 series GPUs, there is no support for DLSS 4 Multi-Frame Gen as of yet.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 does not have any built-in benchmark tool. So, for our tests, we used the first open-world area. This area has a lot of NPCs, so it should give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of the game runs.
Let’s start with some Ray Tracing benchmarks. At 4K, you’ll need to use upscaling to get playable framerates, even on the RTX 5090. In fact, the only GPU that can maintain framerates above 60FPS is the RTX 5090. This is only with DLSS Super Resolution Quality, and not with Frame Gen. Thus, by using DLSS 3 Frame Gen, you will be able to enjoy it on both the NVIDIA RTX 4090 and the RTX 5080.
Overall, the Ultimate Ray Tracing settings bring a massive 47-54% performance hit. To gain some performance back, you can dial down the RT settings. Here are all of the RT settings on the RTX 5090 at 4K with DLSS Quality Mode.
Without Ray Tracing, you’ll need a GPU equivalent to the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT for gaming over 60FPS at all times, even at 1080p. As you can see, the NVIDIA RTX 2080Ti and the RTX 3080 were able to push average framerates over 60FPS. However, their minimum framerates were awful. I don’t really know what’s going on here. However, I was able to replicate this multiple times. All I had to do was move quickly the camera in all directions.
Due to these performance issues, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was more enjoyable on the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT than on the NVIDIA RTX 3080. Also, for those wondering, the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX was not able to match the performance of the NVIDIA 5080. The NVIDIA RTX 5080 was 33% faster at 1080p, and 15% faster at 4K. Interestingly enough, though, they had similar minimum framerates.
At 1440p/Max Settings/No RT, our top four GPUs had no trouble at all running the game. The NVIDIA RTX 3080 was once again unable to offer a consistent performance. Although it had an average framerate of 65FPS, its minimum framerate was 12FPS. Finally, at Native 4K/Max Settings/No RT, the only GPUs that could run the game with over 60FPS at all times were the NVIDIA RTX 4090 and the RTX 5090. The RTX 5080 was also able to offer a smooth gaming experience, provided you use a G-Sync monitor.
Graphics-wise, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 looks great. The main heroes and villains look amazing, and the city looks stunning. The game only suffers from minimal pop-ins, something that a lot of gamers will appreciate (especially while web-swinging). Yes, you might spot some low-res textures here and there, but the game looks mostly beautiful. To be honest, I don’t have any complaints about it (in terms of visuals).
All in all, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 requires powerful GPUs for gaming even at 1080p. Owners of older NVIDIA GPUs will also encounter performance issues. To be honest, I’m not sure whether the green team will be able to address them via a new driver. But hey, you never know. As of right now, the game performs horribly on the RTX20 and RTX30 series GPUs on non-RT Max Settings.
Things get better once we go to the RTX40 and RTX50 series GPUs. These GPUs perform fine, though their minimal framerates are still quite low. The minimum framerates are also not that good on AMD’s side. At first, I thought that these mediocre minimal framerates were due to the DirectStorage implementation. For those unaware, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 takes advantage of GPU decompression via DirectStorage. This means that there is a GPU performance penalty, even on high-end models. However, my minimal framerates on both AMD’s and NVIDIA’s GPUs remained the same when I forced DirectStorage with CPU decompression. So, I don’t know what’s going on here.
The PC version of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 feels a bit rushed. At launch, the game had major stability issues (that Nixxes fixed via two hotfixes). Then we have these really awkward minimum framerates (especially on older NVIDIA GPUs). At least there are no shader or traversal stutters. Still, the game needs more work. So, here is hoping that Nixxes will be able to bring some performance optimizations to it!
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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Another game that looks not better than days gone and performs 10 times worse
Days gone had brilliant optimization despite it being on UE4. Bend studio did amazing job
Bend Studio made its debut PC port with Days Gone, and they handled it in-house without outsourcing to a third-party studio. Impressively, the game ran smoothly on PC.
Agreed! They’re the most underrated studio inside playstation. Sony should treat them better
ray reconstruction is just so good and its the first game i guess that uses it with ray tracing (not path tracing) .it makes the visuals much better and more natural .i wish all games use it .i even used that ray reconstruction mod for silent hill 2 and it was also incredible .all games must use it
Just hoping this stuff is largely correct and fixed by the time the game gets under $30 on PC.
Hey john, you should've touched on the CPU performance since this game is so CPU-intensive
Yeah John, we are during a period that games are super CPU demanding (see Stalker 2 for example).
It would be very helpful to also have CPU benchmarks on game reviews.
According to the creators, the recommended GPU for 1440p is…RTX 3070! They clearly skipped the tests since cards with 10-11GB have huge problems here. People, this is a PS5 game!
Pfft!! 4K ready RTX 3000 GPUs remember!! Now 5 years later…13fps.,
Ahhaahahahah. It's not hardware alone dammit! the software should be 4K ready too. State of PC gaming now. Ray trace this mf right in the crotch.
This game eats up huge amounts of VRAM without offering anything in return. I think it's clearly a problem with poor texture optimization. We saw it in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Horizon Forbidden West, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. In these games, you simply need 12 GB of VRAM for 1440p. My RTX 3080 10 GB sometimes choked on V-High cardboards
I bet that the upcoming The Last of Us Part II Remastered will also require at least 12 GB of VRAM for Ultra Cards at 1440p
Yeah 12 gb vram requirement for a ps4 era linear game without any ray tracing support and outdated low effort graphics upgrades,just another typical playstation verified low effort messy port right here.
Boycott doing 5090 reviews until the card actually exists.
same with the b580 wtf is going on in this industry?
Everyone is in a wait and see mode before moving forward. These are all American corporations that get their chips manufactured in Taiwan and boards made in China and they are waiting to see how badly Trump screws up things with his tariff taxes.
For instance if Trump bumps up the Chinese tariffs from 10% to 25% then the computer market is going to go into a recession (likely along with the rest of the US economy) and they don't want to get stuck with a bunch of stock they just can't sell. The US is still by far the number one computer market and gaming market in dollars spent.
Trump = uncertainty, uncertainty = risk and the two things markets hate are uncertainty and risk
imagine still being with joe after trump proved you are all a bunch of clowns. The tarrifs are there to get china to corporate not as a policy, he asks for 100% so he gets 50% but 50% is more than zero, so you effectively won, he outlines these things in his book art of the deal, you morons call him stupid, but he dances around in circles around you.
Interesting result at 1440p. Not only does DLSS Quality give you a framerate boost it gives you better framerate consistency as shown by the 1% lows being so close to the average FPS
again they used their feets instead of hands to code the game
How do you force DirectStorage with CPU decompression?
I'll be honest. A lot of people praised Spider-Man Remastered for being a "competent port" but that one also had and still has issues. Hyperthreading would cause FPS to be lower, it would seem to leak memory, and over time it would start to stutter and have worse performance. It's only because it was still playable and manageable that I even managed to beat it twice.
SP2 being even worse doesn't fill me with confidence. It's kinda funny since Nixxes was the same team that did the Hitman Absolution port and that port was flawless. So maybe they had a brain drain or their team has become more lazy or incompetent. Either that, or Sony's crunch time kills any hope for optimization.
The pattern is finally complete. NIXXES is not the saint of PC porting force many people consider them to be. Their efforts have started going down since Ratchet & Clank port. Flawed DirectStorage implement + improper CPU usage, thereby improper on & off texture streaming. This is one of several reasons NIXXES ports have started demonstrating missing stuffs from PC ports and remains unfixed indefinitely. Ragnarok port was subpar. Then those underwhelming Horizon ports. and now this. Clearly not a stat to fall for!
Edit: I forgot about Ghost of Tsushima port. Even at lowest preset 1080p settings, inside a hut, your 4060 will be loaded up to 60% for no reason at all! like wtf!!!
Ragnarok was not done by Nixxes, it was Jetpack interactive. Sherlock Holmes my a*s. Digital Foundry consider Nixxes as the best PC port house and they know what they are talking about. Spider-Man 2 feels unfinished, certainly not bad, but give it 2 or 3 weeks and it will be in supreme condition.
Digital Foundry is no longer that Digital Foundry we know. So you need something better than that. But I obviously missed Ragnarök. That was a Jetpack port. Good catch! But Spider Man 2 will not be in great scalable condition. If you are holding that belief, then you have already seen Spider Man 1 having no CPU bottleneck. But it ain’t the case.