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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