Warner Bros released last week Rocksteady’s GaaS game, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Powered by Unreal Engine 4, it’s time now to benchmark it and examine its performance on the PC platform.
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 551.23, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 24.1.1 drivers. Moreover, we’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.
Rocksteady has added a few graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Shadows, Textures, Volumetric Fog and Level of Detail. As we’ve already reported, the game also supports Ray Tracing and DLSS/FSR. PC gamers can also find options to disable Chromatic Aberration, Bloom, Film Grain and Lens Flares, as well as an FOV slider.
Suicide Squad does not feature any built-in benchmark tool. So, for our tests, we used the first open-world area you encounter (after meeting Green Lantern). This area appears to stress both the CPU and the GPU. As such, it should give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of the game runs.
To see how the game runs with different types of CPUs, we simulated dual-core, quad-core, and hexa-core CPUs. For our CPU tests, SMT was set to Off. Suicide Squad uses the Denuvo anti-tamper tech and will lock you for 24 hours after five PC hardware changes. As such, we were unable to test with and without SMT (Hyper-Threading). We might update this article tomorrow with some tests with SMT.
On our simulated dual-core system, the game was crashing when loading a level. On the other hand, our simulated quad-core was able to provide a constant 60fps experience at 1080p/Max Settings/No Ray Tracing. It’s also worth noting that Suicide Squad: KTJL can effectively take advantage of five CPU threads. Take a look below at the core/thread scaling on our simulated hexa-core CPU (five out of six CPU cores were used at 80-90%).
At 1080p/Max Settings/No RT, the game could run smoothly on the majority of our GPUs. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League uses the DX12 API. So, it’s a bit weird to see the NVIDIA RTX3080 outperforming the AMD RX6900XT and RX7900XTX at 1080p.
At 1440p/Max Settings/No RT, our top five GPUs had no trouble pushing framerates over 80fps. As for Native 4K/Max Settings/No RT, the GPUs that were able to stay above 60fps at all times were the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT, the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090.
Suicide Squad: KTJL suffers from traversal stutters. However, it appears that people have been exaggerating about them. Don’t believe me? Well, here’s a video showcasing the open-world area of the game. As you’ll see, there are some traversal stutters, but this isn’t a stutterfest. In fact, I am certain that most of you won’t even notice most of them. And no, it’s nowhere close to the mess that Batman: Arkham Knight was at launch.
Graphics-wise, Suicide Squad: KTJL is a mixed bag. At times, it can look great. While it isn’t a graphical powerhouse, it’s way above an average-looking game. Rocksteady has used, for the most part, high-quality textures. The main characters are also highly detailed. Plus, the game has lots of destructible objects. The biggest issue with this game is that it has a fully dynamic time of day and that it doesn’t support RTGI and RTAO. As such, it can feel flat or washed out in certain conditions. This is an issue that affects all rasterized games that have a fully dynamic time-of-day system. And then we have the really low LOD that can make the panoramic views look underwhelming. If there is one word that can perfectly describe the game’s graphics is the word “inconsistency”. At some times it can look great and at some times it can look bad.
All in all, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League does not seem to require a high-end GPU. After all, the AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 can push an average of 60fps at 1080p/Max Settings. A modern-day quad-core CPU can also run its open-world area with over 60fps at all times. So, if you experience major stutters, I suggest disabling/closing your background programs. I’ve said multiple times that background applications can eat CPU cycles and introduce stutters. This isn’t something new.
And don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that you can get a stutter-free experience. No. The game does suffer from some stutters. However, they are nowhere close to what we’ve seen in other unoptimized titles. Also, as I’ve already said, its Ray Tracing reflections are as underwhelming as they can get. Since these RT reflections increase the CPU load, they will bring additional performance issues to those with weaker CPUs. And again, they do not add anything particularly impressive to the game. Suicide Squad needs RTGI and RTAO, not RT Reflections. So, make sure to disable them.
Without RT, you can enjoy Suicide Squad on a variety of PC configurations. That is of course if you are fans of GaaS titles!
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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