Electronic Arts has just released the highly anticipated remake of Dead Space. Powered by the Frostbite Engine, it’s time now to benchmark it and see how it performs on the PC platform.
For this PC Performance Analysis, we used an Intel i9 9900K, 16GB of DDR4 at 3800Mhz, 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 528.24 and the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 22.11.2 drivers (for the RX7900XTX we used the special 23.1.2 driver).
EA Motive has added a few graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Anti-Aliasing, Light, Shadows, Reflections, Volumetric Resolution, Ambient Occlusion and Depth of Field. Furthermore, there is support for Ray Tracing Ambient Occlusion, as well as support for both NVIDIA DLSS 2 and AMD FSR 2.0.
Dead Space Remake does not feature any built-in benchmark tool. As such, we’ve used the prologue sequence for our GPU benchmarks. That sequence is one of the heaviest scenes in the game. Thus, consider our benchmarks as stress tests (worst-case scenarios benchmarks). Less taxing areas will, obviously, run faster. However, we always prefer benchmarking the most demanding areas of games.
Unfortunately, we won’t have any CPU benchmarks as the EA Origin App was constantly locking us out for 24 hours after three hardware changes. For simulating four CPU systems (and testing each of them with/without Hyper-Threading), we’d have to wait for over a week. Suffice to say though that our Intel i9 9900K was able to push over 100fps at 1080p/Max Settings on the NVIDIA RTX4090. Therefore, most of you won’t encounter any weird CPU bottlenecks (unless you have older/weaker CPUs).
At 1080p/Max Settings/No Ray Tracing, only half of our GPUs were able to provide a constant 60fps experience. Surprisingly enough, the RTX2080Ti was unable to run the prologue sequence smoothly. The game was also constantly crashing on the GTX980Ti.
At 1440p/Max Settings/No Ray Tracing, the only GPUs that could run our benchmark scene smoothly were the AMD RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX and NVIDIA RTX4090. And as for 4K/Max Settings, there wasn’t any GPU that could run it with constant 60fps.
As said, our benchmark is a stress test and a “worst-case scenario” scene. For instance, the RTX3080 can run less taxing areas with 44-50fps as you can see in the following screenshots. Nevertheless, we don’t really know whether there are any similar GPU-heavy scenes in later stages. And, for what is being displayed in the prologue sequence, the game does not justify its enormous GPU requirements. At least during those GPU-heavy scenes.
Graphics-wise, Dead Space Remake looks great. EA Motive has used a lot of high-quality textures, and the environments look absolutely beautiful. Players can also interact with a lot of objects, and your flashlight will cast shadows on all objects. The new 3D models for all characters and the Necromorphs are also highly detailed. However, the game currently has VRS enabled by default, so avoid using DLSS 2 or FSR 2.0 (otherwise you’ll get blurry textures). EA Motive plans to release a patch that will allow PC gamers to disable VRS.
Unfortunately, Dead Space Remake suffers from numerous traversal stutters. PC gamers will encounter small stutters when visiting specific locations. These aren’t shader compilation stutters (the game compiles shaders when you first launch it). So, let’s hope that EA Motive will eliminate (or at least minimize) them via a future update.
The game does not also feature any setting for adjusting the quality of Textures. As such, some players will encounter VRAM issues, even at 1440p. During our tests, the game can use a bit more than 8GB of VRAM at 1440p and over 12GB at 4K. Below are two screenshots showcasing these extremely high VRAM requirements. Pay attention to the Memory stats. The left number is “total VRAM allocation” and the right number is the “VRAM application usage“.
All in all, the PC version of Dead Space Remake currently suffers a number of issues. The traversal stutters will undoubtedly annoy a lot of PC gamers. DLSS 2 and FSR 2 are also a no-go right now due to the VRS issue. And then we have some really GPU-heavy scenes that will make you wonder why the game performs so poorly. NVIDIA owners will also encounter major VRAM limitations as the game does not have any setting for Textures.
Don’t get us wrong, this isn’t a mess. However, there is no denying that there is room for improvement. Seriously, a setting for Textures will fix a lot of the performance issues that some are currently facing. It’s inexcusable for a 2023 game to not offer such a thing. Thus, we really hope that EA Motive will further optimize the game via future updates.
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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