Introduction

God of War is the latest entry to the popular console action adventure franchise by the same name. There's more than one game with this title, but this particular one originally released on PlayStation 4 way back in 2018, and the PC port is the first version of God of War that's available to the PC Master Race. 2022 will see not just God of War, but also its successor "Ragnarok" release, although as a PlayStation exclusive, with no word on a PC version. The protagonist in God of War is Kratos, a Greek God. Much of the character is hence derived from Greek mythology. In the current title, though, we see the character's lore intersect with Norse mythology.

Kratos emigrated to the Nordic lands with his wife and son to avoid all the drama surrounding his god powers and life a peaceful life. His mother's dying wish is for her ashes to be scattered across the highest peak of the nine realms, and thus Kratos and Atreus embark on a perilous quest. The two encounter foes—both monsters and gods—from the Norse world. Atreus isn't just a tag-along, but serves as a vital gameplay element, assisting in combat and introducing certain role-playing elements.



The PC version of God of War has been developed by Jetpack Interactive, based on the original by the Santa Monica studio of Sony Interactive Entertainment. A lot of water has flown in the gaming world since 2018, so the Jetpack title introduces high-resolution assets, support for 21:9 ultrawide display resolutions, and the NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR performance enhancement features, which we tested separately here. The game uses DirectX 11, and lacks support for DX12 Ultimate Technologies like ray tracing or variable rate shading. In this mini-review, we put God of War through a selection of modern graphics cards.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken at Ultra settings. The gallery can be navigated with the cursor keys.

Graphics Settings

The graphics options are one long list I split into three sections to discuss them individually.

• The first section deals with the usual monitor-related settings
• A serious limitation is that God of War supports only "windowed" and "borderless fullscreen"—there is no "fullscreen" option(!)
• The FPS limit can be set between 30 and 120 FPS, and there's also "off"
• While you can disable motion blur and film grain, the depth of field effects can't be disabled and are a little bit distracting
• In the "Resolution Scaling" section, you may choose between DLSS, FSR, and classic upscaling—only one of those three can be active at a time
• For DLSS, the game implements the sharpening slider that was added with DLSS 2.3

• When you select "Advanced" on the previous screen, you get access to NVIDIA Reflex settings, which optimize the rendering latency. I am not sure if that's really relevant for a single-player title and am happy to hear your thoughts on that, let us know in the comments.

• There are four quality presets: "Low", "Original," "High," and "Ultra."
• "Original" uses the same settings as the title on the PS4 (2018)
• Going beyond "Ultra" is possible; you can select "Ultra+" for the "Reflections" setting. This still doesn't enable ray traced reflection, but still look really good.