Category: Video Games

What constitutes a remake or a remaster or even a reboot? Regardless of what you call it, today we’re looking at Dead Space, the new recreation of the classic survival horror game. The original is beloved by many – will history repeat itself here?

What’s on the menu?

Motive studios have some space experience, but this war is of a much bloodier kind, and remaking such a cherished sci-fi tale is surely a daunting task. The weapon of choice is DICE’s long serving Frostbite engine which has been used for everything from Battlefield to FIFA. Here they have to turn down the lights for a gory, tension-soaked rebirth of Isaac aboard the doomed Ishimura. The upgrades and rebuilt assets and models transform the entire game, and Isaac himself is now front and center with many of Dead Space 2’s improvements merged into the first game.

Let’s start with the changes from the 2008 original, which was an impressive game for the time and still holds up well due to its focused technology and strong art direction. As dark and grimy as the original was, the new game manages to make the original look bright in comparison. Far more light sources emphasize the dark and highlight focal points, which is used to build tension in the new game. Improved occlusion comes from screen space ambient occlusion and even ray traced ambient occlusion on PC, PS5, and Series X. Shadows are not only far more abundant, mixing shadow maps with screen spaced shadows, but also more accurate from multiple torches and electric strips. Although the original was very forward-looking with its reliance on light and shadows, the team ensured that flickering lights cause dancing shadows and looming shapes in many old and new areas.

These updates and changes are often subtle, diverting your expectations even for long time fans. Significantly improved models, facial animation, eye movement and materials all leap out over the original’s flat, single-shaded surfaces. Gore is a core pillar of the game, and improved dismemberment allows for skin to be chopped away revealing bone and sinew before the limb is finally cleaved off. The visual upgrades continue with screen space reflections, significantly increased geometry and detail, and improved and fully re-made textures with impressive physically-based materials. It is safe to say the results on a technical and artistic front are a rousing success and, dare I say it, even improve in some areas over the original. This is a tall order in anyone’s book, but when the source material is this strong the expectations are equally high.

The use of Frostbite means that 60fps, or even greater on PC, is an upgrade from the old 30fps of the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions. The visual fidelity mode (which I will call the Ray Tracing mode for ease in this review) and Performance mode on Series X and PS5 rely on DRS and FSR2 for their intended outputs. However, both target 60fps.

The Performance mode runs the lowest resolution level, 2560×1440, to maintain 60fps, along with lower effects, no ray tracing, and reduced fog volumes, screen space reflection (SSR) quality, and even texture detail. Some of this though is that the FSR2 implementation does not appear to be well implemented. A combination of mip-map bias, variable rate shading (VRS), as well as the sharpening pass in Performance mode not being updated to compensate for the lower resolution. The PC can also utilise both FSR2 or DLSS2 (Nvidia RTX only) to reduce the cuts in that pixel-to-performance recipe, but again there’s no option in the menu to adjust sharpening, which may be a nice addition from the team later.

Image Quality

The game is often dark enough that the resolution gap is quite small when comparing between Performance and Ray Tracing modes. Aiding performance further appears to be a VRS implementation, which can be noticed on all three consoles and PC. The solution is often ok to middling, and can improve performance at texture and pixel-shading precision. But pixel blocking can be visible in close-view surfaces, such as Isaac himself in lifts, causing almost a macro-blocking look. These appear worse on PC than consoles and can be more pronounced with motion vectors in FSR and DLSS on PC. The Xbox Series S is affected the most due to its very low texture filtering, causing floors and surfaces to fade into a muddy soup at times at close range, alongside some blocky textures – which again may be related to the FSR2/DLSS2 engine implementation pipeline alongside VRS. In addition, the resolution levels here are very low, which leads to a noisy and soft image at times, effectively VRS works best with higher resolutions.

The Series S only has one mode, which sits between the Ray Tracing and Performance mode on Series X and PS5, but does not appear to run the ray traced AO setting and instead uses the screen space solution that the Performance mode runs, albeit slightly reduced compared to the Series X, PS5 and PC settings, though this may be resolution related. The cost is relatively low though, with approximately 5-10% impact dependant on scene, using my RX 6800 at 4K TAA going from SSAO to RTAO, which is one of the cheaper effects in the game. A ceiling of 1920×1080 is hit but is often around or at 1280×720 with FSR2 helping as best it can. The main issue is at these low resolutions the reconstruction has less data to work with, so it affects the image quality versus the other consoles.

Platform comparisons

The comparison to PS5 and Series X is unsurprisingly short: for all intents and purposes they are identical in both modes, with DRS and fps being the only potential difference. There are some subtle changes in lighting and gamma, but both look to match each other in the Performance and Ray Tracing mode. From multiple counts the Ray Tracing mode can hit a full 3840×2160, but the FSR2 pass is always reconstructing this, so that may not always be a native range. In quieter sections it is certainly at that level on both, but in action it can drop to an approximate low of 2240×1260, though this can and will change depending on the on-screen action. The range appears to be between Quality and Balanced within the FSR2 settings. Again the target is 60fps, but is most of the time below that on both.

Performance mode drops this to a 1440p high and an approximate 1536×864 low, and again in heavy action it can shift between Quality and Balanced to that 1440p high. This leaves a softer image than the other mode but I would say that even in side-by-side this does not really stand out, other than the texture clarity and filtering I mentioned. In addition, this mode turns off RTAO and enables the game’s SSAO. Screen Space Reflections are reduced as are the fog volumes and even lighting in the game, but some of these are tied to resolution so that may be the reason. Matching to PC settings is not fully possible, as even across a selection of tests the RTAO and lighting on PC does not exactly match the consoles. As a rough guide, the consoles appear to be between Medium and High on some settings. Certainly shadow maps appear to be closest to medium with most others being High and maybe Ultra on SSR. In Performance mode they appear to drift closer to medium, and using the PC as a rough proxy, going from Ultra to High nets you approximately 21% improvement, and from High to Medium provides a further 35% gain. This is likely what the Series S is running at with lights possibly even being closer to Low.

Console Performance

The Xbox Series S is often below 60fps in heavy combat and real-time cinematics – the opening one being the most stressful section I found across all platforms. Here we can get down to 30fps. Some of these are simply context, memory stutters, and general code issues that can cause some minor 60-80 ms stutters. Aside from this all other dips stay within 16 and 33ms frame-times. The net result is that in this section we are often around and even below the VRR range to solve the issues on all formats. That said, in many of the corridor sections, which the game is largely comprised of, it can be a steady 60fps, with only single dips being almost invisible.

The original testing for this article was conducted using pre-launch review code, however a day-one patch added a 30fps lock to the Xbox Series S as well as the Ray Tracing mode on Series X and PS5. The testing you’ll see in the following section shows the headroom available for all consoles above that cap, just know that the Ray Tracing mode (and Series S) are all now at a locked 30fps instead of the 45-50fps range from the review code.

Moving to the PS5 and Series X in Performance mode, they are close to perfect, and I applaud the team for ensuring that players can choose how to play. What we see is a locked 60fps on PS5 and Series X in like for like heavy sections against the Ray Tracing mode. And with the same cinematic section here we can see some small dips into the mid 50s briefly, before returning to a smooth 60fps output. If smooth and consistent performance is your focus, this mode has you covered, and the visual sacrifices are minor enough to not make it much of a decision.

With that said, the Ray Tracing mode does give us a better test of the two consoles. The Series X takes a small lead on performance in the like for like section, but these are single digit levels at best, and would be identical without the fps graph. The bigger view though is this mode is never at a locked 60fps and is often around 45-50 fps even in normal corridor exploration and battles. I believe this is due to the game using very high quality assets, alpha, and particles, and as such it can become pixel-limited on console and PC. This mode is certainly not bad but you will notice these dips throughout your play, and compared to the smooth performance mode it can be a much bigger gap than the loss in resolution and effects from the other mode. Either way, the choice is yours, which is the way we like it to be.

PC comparison

As mentioned, the consoles do not appear to use the engine’s own TAA – which is the option for older cards or Intel GPUs – but this is more demanding that both FSR and DLSS solutions with no reconstruction can lose over 45-50% performance in like for like settings moving from TAA to FSR2, so use it if you can for performance. DLSS2 is better implemented here as sharpening and details are preserved closer to 4K when enabled, with FSR being softer overall. All three can be aligned with DRS but neither are as good as 4K TAA high and overall Image quality is impacted further due to the VRS solution, which cannot be disabled on PC and it looks like the Checkerboard option within the engine has been laid to rest, not the only thing in this game.

Starting with the Steam Deck, we need to run at 1280x720p with FSR2 performance. The Steam Deck can become CPU-bound due to the excellent multi-threading within the engine. 60fps is never really an option even at Low settings. As such my recommended choice is to set the game at medium or high settings, and cap to 30fps using the Steam OS, as the game does not offer a 30fps cap in the menu. By lowering the effects you can boost the FSR2 settings to quality, but lights, SSAO and shadows should be at medium if possible for the best balance of image quality and fidelity.

Due to the split pools of RAM, CPU demand, and overall PC architecture and API changes, the PC version does suffer from stutters and pauses during play not present on consoles. Some may still be a few shader compilation on occasion – the game does pre-build these up front before you can start the game, and by and large they cover almost the entire game, but you will get some stutters from time to time. The bigger stutters come from streaming data from the drive and these can be worse at times, with the Steam Deck being most affected due to its relatively weak CPU and slower bandwidth. The game is designed around an SSD, so load times are quick continuing from boot on console and PC alike, but depending on your drive you may also see some bigger stutters with loading and data streaming. Aside from these admittedly quite impactful performance woes, the Steam Deck does a super job of offering this modern remake quality in your hand at a largely locked 30fps. As stated the majority of these stutters are not DX12 shader-related, but in your first play be prepared for the annoyance of stutters when entering new areas, spawning shader effects, and even during cutscenes. And then you can get smaller stutters when walking through hub areas or entering an area, even if you have been through it before.

This carries over to the PC where using my RTX 2070 close to the console Ray Tracing settings with DLSS2 Balanced engaged at an 1800p output, we can see the first run versus the second can double our performance with the main issue here appearing to be memory related, with data moving from the SSD into System RAM and then over to VRAM, which causes the GPU and CPU to stall and thus frame-times to hang low until this issues clears up and then performance and utilization returns to maximum. Using the second run, it is very close to the Series X and PS5 in these sections.

This data stuttering again happens as you continue through the game as new areas and sections load, which can be annoying and means that above 60fps – which is fully possible on PC with my RX 6800 – the dips can feel more prominent as the frame time gaps are bigger with 100+ ms stutters. This happens across all my PC machines from Nvidia to AMD. (Note that both PCs are running the game on an SSD with 1.5GB/s bandwidth as a minimum.) The faster your PC’s CPU and memory, the less these problems will be visible as the data being shifted between SSD, system RAM, and VRAM through PCIe can be frequent. These can improve the second or more times you play the section as the data is likely already present in System RAM or VRAM, thus reducing the delay on keeping the hardware busy. I hope the team can patch this at or close to launch to clean up the issues I encountered in this review code, as while it doesn’t ruin the game, it can leave the PC suffering more in performance than all three consoles.

Summary

Dead Space remains a classic and the team have reimagined the game from a visual and story perspective. Although the engine and game scales right down to handheld mode on the Steam Deck, the PC version still feels and performs a little rougher around the edges compared to the console version, and the weaker your machine the worse those problems will be. As such, the game is best experienced in its current form on a new gen console or a very high end PC which can push 120fps and maybe even native 4K. The day-one patch added a 30fps cap to the Series S and Ray Tracing mode on Series X and PS5, which adds stability but I would have preferred to see it as a toggle, leaving the choice to the player. Either way, the pre-launch testing shows there’s plenty of headroom above that cap, so 30fps should be quite stable in that mode. Meanwhile, the Performance mode is close enough to the 60fps range, and with VRR it is the smoothest and most consistent version at launch. Hopefully patches drop soon on PC to resolve the issues noted, as this is one of the best remakes I have played and manages to achieve that rare balance of sympathetically improving and altering the original, delivering the best version of Dead Space you can play.