Conclusion

Dead Space is a remake of the cult horror classic from 2008. You work your way through an infested star ship in the 3rd person perspective. While stealth is a concept that other games rely on, it isn't an option in Dead Space. You'll be fighting mutated enemies constantly, but it's not DOOM that pits you against hordes of feeble opponents, you'll usually fight one to three monsters at a time. The story is not necessarily the core focus of the game, it's just enough to give you an idea what's going on, so you can be dropped into a scary, dark, flickering environment, with no support and limited gear. Check out the reviews, Dead Space is the best critiqued release this year so far.

While we've seen big promises of "next-gen" with Forspoken, Dead Space relies on the older EA Frostbite engine that has powered the Battlefield series for many years. Of course there have been improvements to the engine, and it seems that Dead Space uses the most modern version, newer than even Battlefield 2042. The developers have added support for shader precompiling, to fix the stutters that are plaguing so many games right now. Unfortunately it's a half-baked implementation. At the game's first launch you get a screen "compiling shaders," which takes around 30 seconds—pretty fast, I was impressed. But as you proceed through the world, the game will suddenly start stuttering like crazy, for a minute or so. At this point it's obviously compiling another round of shaders. I suspect, that Motive, the developer, wanted to reduce the initial shader compilation duration, so they split it into several stages that happen at certain story points. Your best option is to just stand still for another 30 seconds, so you don't get eaten during stutter. Later in the game this becomes a non-issue, as the first couple of compile runs took care of all the shaders. While it's certainly an unorthodox approach, I prefer it greatly over dynamically compiling shaders as they are encountered, which results in constant stuttering that's much more distracting.

Another improvement to the engine is that variable rate shading is now supported. VRS promises to increase FPS, by rendering dark, low-contrast parts of the scene at lower resolution, typically 2x2 pixels, which frees up some shading power on the GPU. Unfortunately VRS is always enabled, and there is no option to turn it off. It's not super distracting, but sometimes you wonder whether something you're looking at appears to be lower resolution than expected unless you aim at it—then it becomes super crisp. The community has produced a workaround already, and the developer will add a toggle for VRS in a future patch.

Visually, Dead Space looks amazing, the environments are extremely richly detailed and textures are sharp even when you walk up right to them. The lighting designers did a fantastic job creating a claustrophobic environment that's full of dynamic light sources and moving shadows. Check out our screenshots, there's so much detail here, the only thing that I don't like is that the floors are pretty flat everywhere, but the walls and ceilings make up for that. Some world objects could do with a little bit higher geometric detail, but that's alright I guess.

As expected from a modern title, Dead Space ships with support for AMD FSR 2 and NVIDIA DLSS 2.5.0. DLSS 3 is not supported. The options menu has a ray tracing option for ray traced ambient occlusion, which really looks no different than RT off. I suspect they added this at the last minute, to have the "ray tracing" checkbox and get marketing support from various vendors. The various settings presets also do very little and look pretty much all the same, with fairly similar FPS rates.

In terms of hardware requirements, Dead Space is very demanding. In order to reach 60 FPS at the 1080p Full HD resolution you need a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 3070, or a Radeon RX 6700 XT. For 1440p gaming, an RTX 3070 Ti or Radeon RX 6800 XT is required to achieve 60 FPS and beyond. If you're gaming at 4K then you'll need an RTX 4090 or RX 7900 XTX. There's no integrated benchmark, we used our own test scene which represents a demanding, but not worst-case scenario. Most of the time in the game you'll be stuck in a narrow tunnel with very little things to see, at these points the FPS will be higher. Generally, AMD Radeon graphics cards do a little bit worse than their counterparts from NVIDIA, but the differences are not huge.

VRAM requirements are "alright" I'd say. Maybe "high" for 1080p. With slightly over 6 GB allocated at Full HD, some 4 GB and 6 GB cards might require you to dial down the details a little bit. Most cards nowadays have 8 GB and (much) more VRAM, which means 7 GB at 1440p and 8 to 9 GB at 4K are really not a problem. Despite the good graphics, I feel like the the hardware requirements are still higher than what is offered, yet I would recommend the game to all lovers of the genre.