Warner Bros has just released Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League on PC. Powered by Unreal Engine 4, the game was heavily criticized for looking quite bad. Or at least that’s what some people who got early access to the game claimed. After trying it, though, we can say that Suicide Squad can look great on PC. And no, it’s nowhere close to how bad those people tried to make it look like.

For our initial tests, I’ve used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, and NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4090. I also used Windows 10 64-bit, and the GeForce 551.23 driver. Moreover, I’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.

Suicide Squad supports DLSS, FSR and Ray Tracing. Rocksteady used RT to enhance the game’s reflections. However, not all of the reflections are ray-traced. For instance, I found some windows while exploring the environments that had low-res cubemaps (and could not reflect the players). That’s kind of disappointing.

For those wondering, our NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 was able to run the game with constant 60fps at Native 4K/Max Settings with Ray Tracing. For our tests, we used the first open-world area you encounter (right after meeting Green Lantern). The game’s open-world areas put a lot of stress on the CPU and GPU. As such, they can give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of the game will run. I’ve heard that later stages are more demanding but I haven’t tested these late stages yet.

NVIDIA DLSS looks great in this game, and we highly recommend using it. The following screenshots are with DLSS Quality at 4K. So, go ahead and take a look at them.

As I said, Suicide Squad can actually look great on PC. From what I know, the PC version has identical settings to the consoles. So, I don’t know how people made the console versions look this bad. Seriously, take a look at the following comparison. Here’s the water on PC (left) and the water that people shared online for drama purposes (right). Look at them. Just, LOOK AT THEM.

The big problem with Suicide Squad: KTJL is that it uses a real-time lighting system. Since the game does not use RTGI and RTAO, it can look flat during specific lighting conditions. This is nothing new. We’ve seen this in all games that use a rasterized real-time lighting system. Unreal Engine 5 was able to address this with Lumen, but Suicide Squad uses UE4.

So, there are times when the game can look flat. Take for instance the second to last screenshot. Yes, that one looks flat due to its lighting. However, for the most part (at least in its opening hours), the game can look great.

Another graphical issue with this game is its low LOD. In some panoramic screenshots, you can easily spot the low-quality models in the distance, especially for the trees. The game, especially on PC, would GREATLY benefit from higher LOD settings. So, I really don’t know why Rocksteady has not offered an “Extreme/Ultra” setting for it.

And I get it. We all hate Suicide Squad. But let’s hate it for legit reasons. Let’s hate it because Rocksteady lied about it not being a GaaS game. Let’s hate it because it’s a bad game. However, let’s not straight-up lie about its graphics. Yes, this isn’t a graphical powerhouse. But if you believe the following screenshots look bad, then you really need to check your eyes.

And you know what? We’ve known about the benefits of pre-baked lighting for quite some time. This is nothing new. Take for instance Assassin’s Creed Unity and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. AC: Unity used pre-baked lighting, and looked spectacular. AC: Valhalla (and Mirage and Origins) used a real-time rasterized lighting system. As such, Unity had more consistent visuals than these other games.

Anyway, our PC Performance Analysis for this game will go live later this weekend. Until then, enjoy the following screenshots!