Conclusion

Thank you, Sony! The Japanese media giant continues its push to bring PlayStation exclusives to the PC platform. Ghost of Tsushima was first released on PlayStation 4 in July 2020. The upgraded version, titled "Ghost of Tsushima: Director's Cut," was released for both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 in August 2021 and has now made it to PC. The game offers a compelling story set in feudal Japan, enriched by a ton of side quests that enhance the immersive experience. While the game can feel repetitive at times, its strengths lie in the character development options and in fluid, satisfying combat mechanics. I definitely appreciated the nuanced growth of the main character and the beautifully crafted world. Despite some monotony in mission structure, the overall journey is engaging, making "Ghost of Tsushima" a rewarding adventure for fans of open-world action games. While the main story is linear, many parts of the game can be tackled in any order, think Skyrim: just walk around on the map to points of interest. Overall I'm having lots of fun with Ghost of Tsushima—do check out the various reviews.

Despite being a few years old, the game showcases good textures, which are crisp and of high quality most of the time. The lighting effects, particularly the shadows, are well-executed and contribute to the game's visual appeal. However, the geometry of many assets can appear dated—looks like the models weren't updated for the PC version. While many players appreciate the atmospheric dark art style, it may not appeal to everyone. The maps in this game are intricately crafted, with high production value, showcasing the skill of the level designers involved.

While there's no support for ray tracing (which isn't unexpected for a Sony port), the game has excellent support for upscalers: DLSS, FSR, and XeSS are supported. Ghost of Tsushima is also one of the few games that has support for both frame generation technologies: DLSS 3 and FSR 3. Like always, we will compare these in an upcoming, separate, article. During my playthrough I noticed that the game looks quite blurry, even at native resolution scaling. It turns out Depth of Field is to blame for that mostly, but the terrible TAA implementation doesn't help either—I almost prefer no AA to TAA. If you have an NVIDIA card, definitely test out DLAA, as that's the best-looking option in my opinion.

While the game menus and hardware config options are flawless—Nixxes knows what they are doing—I really hate the fact that you can't skip cutscenes or dialogues. "Compiling shaders" and stuttering has been a problem for many PC releases, it's a total non-issue in Ghost of Tsushima. While there's a short 10-second shader compilation stage when you first load into the map, this takes only a few seconds and the results are cached, so subsequent game loads are much faster, unless you change graphics card or the GPU driver.

Hardware requirements of the game are not too bad. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p with the highest settings you need a RTX 4060, RX 7600 or Arc A770. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you need a RTX 4070, RTX 3070 Ti, RX 6800 or RX 7700 XT. 4K60? Here things get a bit tough, Radeon RX 6900 XT gets only 53 FPS, but both RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX can break the 60 FPS barrier. On the NVIDIA side you need an RTX 3090 Ti or RTX 4080. As always we opted for our own custom test scene, which is located in a typical open-world area with vegetation and water. There are some indoors locations that get much higher FPS. The game runs a bit better on AMD, especially Radeon RX 6000 cards are a bit faster than where we usually see them in our performance charts. Intel's cards handle the game really well, usually we see them fighting it out with the RX 7600, here they can beat the RX 7600 XT.

The settings performance scaling is alright. You can gain roughly 40% extra FPS with just settings, and the game is still extremely playable at "Very Low." As mentioned before, all the upscalers are included, so it will be easy to reach 60 FPS, no matter the hardware you have, and you can choose between employing upscaling with higher in-game detail settings, or using lower detail settings but at native resolution, plus there's frame generation.

Our VRAM testing shows that Ghost of Tsushima is demanding but reasonable with its memory requirements. While it allocates around 10 GB, 8 GB is enough even for 4K at highest settings, which is also confirmed by our RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB vs 16 GB results—there's no performance difference between both cards, even when maxed out. Once you turn on Frame Generation, the VRAM usage increases by 2-3 GB, DLSS Frame Gen does use a few hundred megs more than FSR Frame Gen. For lower resolutions, the VRAM requirements are a bit on the high side, because even 1080p at lowest settings reaches around 5 GB, which could make things difficult for older 4 GB-class cards.

Overall, Ghost of Tsushima is a fantastic game that's worth your time. The PC version is outstanding, done by the porting masters of Nixxes. The game is also DRM-free and works fine completely offline. While there has been some drama about a Sony PlayStation Network registration, the single-player portion of the game runs flawlessly without registering.