Introduction

Death Stranding was first released in November 2019, exclusively for the PlayStation 4. The title is created by game development legend Hideo Kojima, who brought us the epic Metal Gear Series. Death Stranding is the first game published by Kojima Productions—Hideo's own game studio he formed after the split with Konami in 2015. Death Stranding is an open-world action game that's probably closest to an RPG even though it lacks most of the typical character development elements. The game also includes concepts from survival games and base building games.

A unique and completely new component is that your single-player gaming experience can be influenced by other players. If they create helpful objects in their world, these objects can show up in your game, and will help you traverse the zones. You are able to thank them with "likes" and may also create objects on your own to gain likes in return. This functionality can be turned off though.



In terms of graphics, Death Stranding looks good, especially the environments are almost photo-realistic. It's built on the new Decima Engine, which is used by several other console titles; for example, Horizon Zero Dawn, which is coming to the PC soon. On the PC, the engine uses DirectX 12 exclusively, featuring realistic physics for objects and lighting. Death Stranding includes support for both NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FidelityFX. RTX raytracing is not included.

In this performance test review we put the game through our huge selection of graphics cards at three resolutions and also include a mini-review at the end, so you know whether the game is worth paying full price for or you had better wait for a discount.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken at the highest settings profile. The gallery can be navigated with the cursor keys.

Graphics Settings

• The screen modes are limited to "windowed" and "fullscreen"; borderless is not available.
• 16:10 aspect ratio and 32:9 ultra-wide are not available.
• The FPS limit can be set to 30, 60, 120, 144, and 240 FPS; an "unlimited" setting is not available.

• For graphics quality, you may choose between "Low", "Medium", "Default", "Very High", and "Custom".
• "Memory for Streaming" lets you define a limit for the texture-streaming. Settings are "Low" (1536 MB), "Default" (2816 MB), and "High" (3072 MB). This is not good enough. Where are "6 GB", "8 GB" and more?

• Not much to say here as there are just the usual lighting options.

• By default, the game uses TAA anti-aliasing. The AA options are "Off", "FXAA" and "TAA".
• The sharpness slider is only enabled when FidelityFX Sharpening is enabled, guess it's one position too far down.
• Good, you can turn off Motion Blur and Depth of Field.