PlayStation owners who have played Death Stranding experienced the game running at 30 fps, but Kojima Productions says the original intent was for Death Stranding to run at 60 fps, and that’s been one of the big benefits of releasing a PC port.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Kojima Productions technical director Akio Sakamoto says the PC version of Death Stranding is capable of 60 fps and “much more,” depending on individual hardware setups. “As we had originally designed the game in 60 fps, this is a feature that I must say out loud,” he says. “Of course, it is not locked to 60 fps, and according to your hardware, it can go much higher.”
Interestingly, Eurogamer points out that while Death Stranding was developed for Sony systems, it’s now running on PC with Microsoft’s DirectX 12 graphics API. Sakamoto explains that during Death Stranding’s development, there wasn’t a lot of information available on either DirectX 12 or Vulkan, but based on hardware surveys and discussions with AMD and Nvidia, DirectX 12 made most sense for Kojima Productions to work with for the port.
By all accounts, it’s a terrific port and delivers not only on much higher framerates, but on PC-specific features like ultra widescreen support and graphics options. Eurogamer’s tech team managed to get it up to more than 120 fps on a PC using an Intel Core i5 8400, a chip introduced in 2017.
The article also points out that while there’s no cross-play between PC and PlayStation 4 versions of the game, you will be able to play with other PC players regardless of whether they buy Death Stranding from the Epic Games Store or Steam.
In our Death Stranding review, Ben Maxwell says it’s often an intentionally boring experience, making you focus on each step of each journey as you travel “from snow-capped mountains to hills shrouded in mist”, and that “Death Stranding looks fantastic.” It launches on PC July 14, and you can check out the Death Stranding system requirements to see if your PC can handle it.