Not the first time it happens. Dead Space Remake, Silent Hill 2, and Black Myth Wukong have all been singled out on PC for their poor performance or stutters, yet they all sit at 92-95% on Steam. Hell, Dead Space Remake even made their 2023 list for worst PC ports, yet it got glowing reviews on Steam.
It’s not like it’s imaginary either as there are frequent forum posts talking about the stutters, but it seems the majority of people don’t see them or they’re not bad enough to undermine the experience.
In a way, DF (especially Alex) does make PC gaming seem a lot worse than it is or at least a lot worse than the average consumer perceives it to be. I still think they should continue pointing out technical issues. Until recently, shader comp stutters were largely ignored. Thanks to them in large part, it’s become s focal point.
So I was musing on that some time ago and arrived to a conclusion that DF's overfocusing on "locked 60" is what doesn't jive well with me as this is 100% a console derived performance quality metric in my opinion which has very little value or meaning for PC players.
Most PC gamers don't target a "locked fps", they either play with Gsync/VRR or allow the fps to fluctuate in a fairly wide margin with the help of adaptive sync or without vsync at all.
Which in turn means that some fairly significant quantity of "stuttering" is always present in your typical PC gameplay and is thus considered "normal".
Then you'd have to consider that for many PC gamers 60 fps hasn't actually been the target for years now, 100+ is what people generally want to see on their 120Hz+ monitors.
Even more so it is in fact a lot harder to notice minor frametime judder when using the mouse to control the camera as it hides such issues very well because it doesn't have a constant speed/acceleration panning you get on a gamepad's sticks. The difference can be rather striking in some scenarios where what you perceive as stutters on a gamepad become completely invisible on a mouse.
Thus DF's insistence on "locked framerate" kinda goes against how most PC gamers tend to play their games which makes their judgement on how some game "can't lock to 60" basically irrelevant as most people won't be pursuing such lock anyway.
I myself always prefer an unlocked 80-160 fps presentation to a locked 60 or even 80. For me the value of having a game running at a constant low framerate just isn't there, I'll happily trade that for the ability to see some healthy half of gameplay at 120 fps instead.
So the focus on fighting stuttering has become a bit of a wrong one for DF/Alex I'd say.
Shader compilation must be implemented properly and that's a good fight.
Everything aside from that is highly title and environment specific though.
Take the DS Remake example you've given - does it stutter on game world sector loading? Yeah. Does it matter anywhere else but in a "locked 60" scenario? Eh, not really. The game will stutter inside the variable framerate and these stutters will effectively be hidden by that and by the fact that you don't really see them that apparently when controlling the game with the mouse.
I was able to fix excessive sharpening in Uncharted 4 by replacing the in-game DLSS DLL's (with DLL Swapper) and overriding the DLSS settings (Transformer J preset) in nvinspector. Without replacing DLL files there was strong sharpening filter during movement even when I forced transforer J preset.
UC had both engine's built-in sharpening - which you can't disable AFAIR - and DLSS sharpening on top of that (which when combined produced some really really awful IQ).
DLSS sharpening was removed in v2.51 so any DLSS DLL post that won't have it - but the engine's built-in sharpening which they are using with their TAA is still present there and you can't turn it off. At least as far as I remember. This is 100% the case with TLOUP1 and now 2.
This is by all means a competent port
Eh, depends on what you consider "competent".
Worth remembering that it is a PS4 game launched in 2020.
The way it runs on PC and the issues the port has now in 2025 are certainly disappointing to see.
