To console players, PCs are confusing, frustrating, and not very user friendly. But to PC players, they’re actually so much worse than you can even imagine. The benefit of having a noisy metal box under your desk that requires frequent expensive upgrades and makes your office ten degrees hotter is the fact that every game on it has a bunch of graphics settings no one knows how 💎to use. I’ve been playing PC games since the ‘90s and I’m still not exactly sure what ambient occlusion means, or whether or not VSync should be on or off. You might think PC players are obsessed with tweaking every individual setting until they achieve graphical perfection, but more often than not, we just set everything to High and hope for the best.
PC games are gre♛at at offering options, but they’re usually not great at helping you understand what those options do or which ones are best for you. When you’re having performance issues, often the best thing to do is rely on trial and error, but ev꧂en that won’t fix every problem. I’ve played games that ran better on Ultra and High, and other games that looked better with a lower render scale. One time I played a game that would randomly crash if the anti-aliasing was set to MSAA instead of FSAA, and I still don’t even know what that means.
The point is, tailoring graphics settings is hard, and games are bad at directing you on how to do it. Returnal, the latest PlayStation St🐼udios title to make its way to PC, bucks that trend in a big way. Thanks to a built-in benchmarking tool, Returnal is able to run real-time simulations of gameplay while tracking your hardware performance in order to he🌠lp you determine what settings to change and the exact impact those changes will have. It may not be the first game with its own in-engine benchmarking tool, but it’s the most impressive implementation of the feature I’ve ever seen.
The benchmarking test is designed to push your PC to its limit by simulating all the different gameplay elements in Returnal. While it runs, you’ll be treated to a cinematic that moves from one zone to the next, demonstrating specific visual effects while you watch how your hardware performs in real time. Each zone is designed to isolate something particular to see how your PC handles it. That way, you can then go in and tweak the settings relevant to the performance issues you're having. Those zones are Lighting & Shadows; Destructibles & Volumetric Fog; Animation, Particles & NGP; Material VFX & Reflections; Projectiles & Beams; Enemies & Projectiles; and Mesh Complexity. When it ends, you're left with a detailed benchmark report that shows you the average frame rate, CPU and GPU load, and RAM usage for each individual zone.
The test is automatic and the data is easy to parse. In my benchmark, I discovered that the zone related to destructibles🔯 and volumetric fog was tanking my FPS by an average of ten frames, so I went into the settings and lowered the fog quality to compensate. Whenever you꧅ make changes, you can run the test again and it will compare the current performance to the previous test to show you what the overall impact is.
This is an invaluable tool for PC players, and it should be a standard feature for all games going forward. There are other benchmark programs out there, but there’s nothing like having an in-game version that can perfectly simulate the exact conditions you’re trying to tune for. It would be 𝕴nice if the breakdown had a section that explained which settings you can adjust if you’re seeing performance dips in a particular zone, but there’s enough information here as is to make Returnal run smoother and look betteꩲr - without needing to first get a degree in computer science. It’s nice to see Sony unexpectedly leading the way on PC, and it will be even nicer if the rest of the industry follows suit.