Screenshot: Stray/Kotaku
My colleagues have been playing Stray on PS5 and by all accounts it’s an absolute joy. However, I played on PC where things are not so rosy.
This is not a disaster; even on my average pc i can run it perfectly at 4K and 60FPS which is always appreciated and of course it looks great most of the time but i get hit with cases of annoying little stutters during gameplay which aren’t bad enough for to torpedo the experience, but are bad enough to remain a thorn in my side.
As is always the case with computer performance issues, I was wondering if it was just me or if the problem was more widespread. Turns out it’s very common. It seems to affect almost everyone.
The culprit, as Digital Foundry explains below, is familiar to PC gamers: it’s Unreal Engine 4’s shader compilation, a problem that seems to increasingly plague every game developed on the engine these days. On consoles that are pre-built and standard across the board, developers can pre-compile the game’s shaders, meaning that anyone playing the game on PS5 won’t suffer.
But since every PC is different, developers never get that luxury on the platform (with some rare exceptions, like the recent Horizon port), and so most games are forced to compile shaders on the fly.
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The result is a constant stream of micro-stutters that over the course of hours of play can start to get quite annoying! The video below (which provides some examples) goes into a lot of detail about this, and I’ve set it to autoplay in the PC performance section, but if you want to see how the PS4 and PS5 editions fare, you can also check them out at -early.
Stray PS5 vs PS4/PC: Superb 4K 60FPS streaming on PS5 – but what about PC?
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