Earlier this month, Sony released a remake of Until Dawn on PC. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, it’s time now to benchmark it and examine its performance on the PC.
For our benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX580, RX Vega 64, RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX, NVIDIA’s GTX980Ti, RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080 and RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 565.90, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 24.9.1 drivers. Moreover, we’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.
Ballistic Moon has added a lot of graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Draw Distance, Shadows, Textures, Effects and more. There are also options for Bloom, Motion Blur, Film Grain, and Chromatic Aberration. The game also supports VSM and Ray Tracing. However, I suggest staying away from them. VSM introduces major shadow flickering issues. On the other hand, Ray Tracing is still broken and not working.
Until Dawn does not have a built-in benchmark. So, for our benchmarks, we used this scene. This appeared to be the most demanding area early in the game. As such, it should give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of the game runs. Our GPU benchmarks are also at native resolution. The game supports NVIDIA DLSS 3 and AMD FSR 3.0. And although Ballistic Moon fixed the AMD FSR 3.0 Frame Generation issues, the game suffers from major stability issues.
When changing between the available upscaling methods, we noticed a performance degradation. At first, Native 4K and DLSS 3 Quality ran with 51/54fps and 88/92fps, respectively. When we switched to AMD FSR 3.0 and then back to Native 4K and DLSS 3 Quality, we got 44/47fps and 78/81. Then, when we restarted the game, we were able to get back to our first performance figures.
And that’s not all. When we restarted the game, we got MASSIVE stutters when changing the graphics settings or loading a save. We’re talking about “pauses” that could last over 30 seconds. Hell, even when closing the game, it will still run in the background for over one or two minutes (and you’ll have to close it by force via Steam).
Due to these issues, we did not test any different graphics settings or the available upscaling methods. To put it simply, it was a pain in the ass to benchmark this game. And that’s on its latest version. This is a technical mess. But hey, at least the game no longer suffers from the following visual glitches that were in the launch version. So, perhaps in 2025, we might get a version that works the way it was meant to be.
Until Dawn is mainly a GPU-bound title. As such, we did not test the game on different CPU configurations. Thank God as that would be a real nightmare due to its aforementioned technical issues.
At 1080p/Ultra without Ray Tracing, the game will run smoothly on GPUs that are equivalent to the NVIDIA RTX 2080Ti. This particular GPU was able to push a minimum of 56fps and an average of 59fps. So, if you have a G-Sync/FreeSync monitor, you won’t even notice those drops.
At 1440p/Ultra, the only GPUs that were able to push over 60fps were the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX and the NVIDIA RTX 4090. Also, contrary to Silent Hill 2, Until Dawn appears to run great on AMD’s hardware.
Finally, there is no GPU that can offer a constant 60fps experience at Native 4K with Ultra Settings. For instance, our NVIDIA RTX 4090 was pushing a minimum of 51fps and an average of 54fps. Again, we’re using a demanding scene. However, some areas later in the game may run similarly to it.
As said, the game supports DLSS 3 and FSR 3.0. So, if you manage to enable them without having to constantly restart the game, you’ll get really high framerates. For example, our NVIDIA RTX 4090 was able to push around 100fps at 4K with DLAA and DLSS 3 Frame Generation. Thanks to DLAA, the image quality was great and I did not notice any major input latency issues from DLSS 3 FG.
Graphics-wise, Until Dawn can look great. As I said, the devs have fixed A LOT of the visual glitches that plagued its launch version. Still, I’m not really that impressed by the human characters or their animations. They look great, but they are nowhere close to what you’d expect from a UE5 title. And for a story-driven game that relies heavily on its characters, these 3D models are a bit disappointing. Also, since we never got the original version on PC, I can’t comment on their differences. The environments also look great but, again, they will not blow you away.
Before closing, I should note that each and every time you launch the game, it will compile its shaders. This isn’t normal. The game should only compile its shaders once, not every time you launch it. Not only that but it will not compile all of the shaders. During my tests, I encounter numerous shader compilation stutters, especially during cutscenes.
All in all, Until Dawn Remake has a lot of tech issues on PC. If you have a high-end PC system, you can brute force your way through most of them. Especially if you don’t mess around with the graphics settings. However, if you take a closer look at it, you will understand how broken this game is. There are stability issues. The game, for whatever reason, will run in the background after you quit. The game may crash and corrupt your saves (it happened to me and thank God our benchmark scene is at the beginning). If you start tweaking the settings, you will encounter the performance degradation bug. And finally, both Ray Tracing and Virtual Shadow Maps are still not working!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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