Conclusion

God of War Ragnarök is one of the best action-adventures I've played quite a while, probably in the list of best games I ever played. It does a perfect job at immersing you in its world with a healthy mix of fighting, puzzles and storytelling. The game originally released in November 2022 as an exclusive for PS4 and PS5—now it's available for PC. You follow Kratos and his son Atreus as they embark on a perilous journey through the nine realms, preparing for the impending doom of Ragnarök. Along the way, they confront powerful gods such as Thor and Odin while uncovering secrets about Atreus' true identity and his role in the fate of the world.

I love how well-crafted the game is, it builds upon its predecessor's success without being a completely transformative entry. It introduces more complex character dynamics, particularly between Kratos and a now-teenaged Atreus, while offering a refined and expanded combat system with a variety of build options. There are some gear choices and character development options, too. I also liked the pace at which new skills and elements are introduced to help you challenge the puzzles and combat.

If you haven't played the game yet, definitely do check it out. Don't listen to all the forced PlayStation account drama—it's a fantastic game. On my main PC I got a black screen on startup with the Steam version and the game would never load, due to the PSN network registration stuff, the game worked fine on the GPU test system. Interestingly, the pirated version of game runs fine on my main PC, so the issue was not with the game itself, but with the added Sony spyware. Update: This is fixed by Patch 2

Graphics
The graphics look amazing, everything is well-crafted with lots of little details. I have to applaud the production team for building great environments that are interesting and varied. If you take a closer look however, it becomes apparent that the polygon budgets are not up to today's standards—not surprising for a 2022 console-exclusive game. I still would have wished for a bit more detailed model geometry on the PC release. Textures are top-notch, super sharp and crisp at all times. Despite the engine's limited lighting abilities, the designers did a great job bringing together light, shadows, and ambient effects like fog and god rays. Characters are highly detailed, especially in the real-time rendered cut-scenes, which are also directed very well. There is no support for ray tracing, but the engine uses screen-space reflections quite a lot and sometimes there are cube map reflections, too.

Shader Stutter and Accessibility
Unlike many recent titles, especially those utilizing Unreal Engine, God of War Ragnarök does not suffer from shader compilation issues or shader stuttering. The game does compile shaders at the start, but that doesn't stop you from going in-game. Rather it runs in the background, very smoothly, for approximately five minutes. Once that is complete, there is no more shader compilation, even when the game is restarted, until a GPU hardware change or driver update. Level loading is pretty fast, too, no complaints here either. The game offers several options to adjust difficulty, mini-games, puzzle hints, etc.—I like. This opens the game to a wide range of players, of all ages and skill levels.

Effects & Upscalers
God of War Ragnarök has support for NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS. There's also support for Frame Generation for both NVIDIA and AMD, but that feature is completely broken, enabling it doesn't do anything. Edit: Patch 2 fixes Frame Generation, it's working correctly now. Sharpening is very well-behaved, and you can turn off motion blur completely. The FOV is alright, I still would have liked a slider to dial it up a tiny bit more to make it perfect.

Hardware Requirements
Hardware requirements of the game are a refreshing change for 2024. The game runs really well and reaches excellent frame rates. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p, ultra settings, without upscaling, you just need a RTX 4060, RX 7700 XT or RX 6700 XT. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you need a RTX 4060 Ti, RTX 3070 Ti, RX 7700 XT or RX 6800 XT. 4K60? RTX 4070 Super and faster can achieve that. On the AMD side you either need a RX 7900 XT or RX 7900 XTX, but the RX 7900 GRE is pretty close, too, with 56 FPS. The game runs a bit better on NVIDIA than on AMD, considering the usual placement of the cards. Intel GPUs have a hard time handling the game, despite game-ready drivers. As always we opted for our own custom test scene, which is located in a large town area with lots of eye candy. All GPU vendors have released game-ready drivers for God of War Ragnarök.

Settings Performance Scaling
The performance scaling of Ragnarök is quite bad, going from ultra to low, you can increase FPS by only +25%, except some edge cases, where the gains can reach up to +60%. This isn't a big range, and what makes things worse is that even at lowest settings the game almost looks like ultra—the differences are pretty minor. Some might say "isn't that good?" In my opinion having different settings should provide a meaningful choice that ideally would let me go down to graphics from 15 years ago, with an appropriate boost in FPS. If the game practically looks the same on all settings and FPS is similar, too, then why even bother with settings? Black Myth Wukong handles this much better, letting you triple the FPS with just settings.

VRAM
Our VRAM testing shows that GoW is very well-behaved in terms of VRAM usage. Even at 4K you're barely hitting 10 GB; lowest settings runs at around 6 GB, so most cards can handle the game without problems.

Overall, I can't recommend God of War Ragnarök enough, and it's my favorite of all the recent releases. While the pacing is sometimes a little bit off, and there are annoyances like the PSN network registration, I'm having a blast and will spend what little spare time I have with the game.