Conclusion

It took Sony quite some time, but they finally brought the epic PS5 hit "Spider-Man 2" to the PC platform—allowing PCMR gamers to dive back into the fast-paced, cinematic action that made the series a fan favorite.

In Spider-Man 2, you step into the shoes of both Peter Parker and Miles Morales as they face new challenges and formidable foes. The story explores their evolving friendship, the weight of their responsibilities, and the dark influence of the Symbiote. With an expanded open world, players can seamlessly switch between the two heroes, each with their own unique abilities. The main plot is interesting and in-line with what you would expect from a Spider-Man game, not just pure action, but also showcasing the challenges of being a hero.

New York is more alive than ever, teeming with criminals, side missions, and hidden secrets. Combat remains fluid and satisfying, with the addition of new abilities like Peter's Symbiote powers and Miles' evolved bio-electric attacks. The web-swinging has been refined, feeling faster and more dynamic, with the addition of the Web Wings allowing for glides across the city, which also help reduce travel time. Some mechanics, like gadget management, can feel a bit overwhelming at times, but overall, the gameplay is a thrilling mix of action and strategy. For those craving a challenge, higher difficulties demand careful resource management and precise combat execution.

Graphics
The game was brought to PC by Insomniac—porting experts who are known for their work on Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and Spider-Man Remastered for PC. As expected from them, the transition to PC is handled well, even though there are quite a lot of crashing issues, which seem to be graphics related, more on that later. Picking Insomniac's in-house engine for Spider-Man 2 was definitely a good choice. Visually, the game ranges from good to stunning, with certain areas showcasing excellent detail and lighting effects. The incredibly high production value is especially evident in the real-time rendered cutscenes, which look cinematic and polished. However, not everything is perfect—some character models appear somewhat stiff, and MJ in particular has received a noticeable visual downgrade compared to previous iterations. The map design, on the other hand, is fantastic, with the developers carefully optimizing shadows, lighting, and reflections to maintain visual fidelity, even at lower settings and without ray tracing enabled. The end result is a visually striking game that remains impressive across a variety of hardware configurations.

Looking at our comparison screenshots, the game looks still pretty good, even at lowest settings. You get shadows that look pretty good for "Lowest" settings and models look fine, too. This is also a missed opportunity though, because I'd expect "Very Low" to look really weak, but with higher FPS. However, since the game runs pretty well as long as you don't turn on RT, this isn't a big problem.

Shader Stutter and Accessibility
Spider-Man 2 doesn't use Unreal Engine, which means shader compilation and stutter is a complete non-issue. There is no "compiling shaders" screen on startup, the game loads within seconds. It uses DirectStorage, just like previous titles using the same engine. When changing some RT settings there's sometimes a "compiling shaders" icon, but the game runs perfectly fine during that time and is perfectly playable, not sure what it really does while that's running—just ignore it.

I really like that you get to pick from several difficulty settings, and can change them seamlessly and individually during your playthrough. This makes it much easier to beat a difficult encounter, or an unbalanced one, which happens from time to time on higher difficulties. The tutorials provide sufficient hand-holding to learn the controls. For visually impaired people there's a lot of option to help with contrast, enemy highlighting etc. There is no DRM, which is a welcome change—you can actually own your game.

CPU Bottleneck
Especially in the city with pedestrians and cars around, the game is heavily CPU-bound. You will often end up with GPU usage dropping below 70%, especially on weaker processors. This drags down FPS accordingly, because the GPU is sitting idle while waiting for new work to come in from the CPU. Disabling RT helps a bit with CPU load, but overall it's similar to previous Spider-Man games—I guess this will make it a great addition to my CPU benchmarking test suite.

Effects, Upscalers & Driver Crashes
Spider-Man 2 has support for NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS, and there is also support for Frame Generation, from both AMD and NVIDIA. DLAA and FSR Native is supported, too—very nice. The biggest issue is the myriad of crashes when ray tracing is enabled (even after the first hotfix that has fixes for that). On AMD Radeon 7900 Series the game is basically unplayable with RT enabled, it will crash every few minutes or right at startup. Considering that we used their 25.1.1 beta drivers which officially support the game I wonder how nobody in Q&A noticed that. Things are not much greener on the NVIDIA side. I encountered a lot of crashes on NVIDIA when Ray Reconstruction was enabled, also there are some serious rendering problems with it enabled, like pixelated hair, broken mirrors—WTF has nobody actually played the game on their product? Intel? XeSS does not work at all for me with RT and just crashes on startup. Downgrading the NVIDIA drivers from 572.16 to 566.36 did help with stability as well—so much for Game Ready. It also sometimes helps stability if you lower the RT Object Distance.

Hardware Requirements
Without ray tracing, hardware requirements are pretty manageable, even at highest details. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p, Max settings, no RT, no upscaling, you need a RTX 3060 Ti, RX 7600 XT or RTX 4060. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you need a RTX 3080, RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB, RX 7700 XT or faster. 4K60? RTX 4070 Ti Super and up have you covered, the RX 7900 XT is pretty close with 58.8 FPS. Once you enable ray tracing, things change dramatically, especially for AMD. We tested only at the "Ultimate" RT setting, so you can still lower settings a bit manually. For 1080p you need a RTX 3080 / RTX 4070, or RX 7900 GRE and faster. 1440p with RT is only for NVIDIA cards, RTX 4080 and faster, the RX 7900 XTX reaches 55 FPS. At 4K only the RTX 5090 can reach 60 FPS with maximized RT settings. By popular request we're testing upscaling now, with maximum settings included in RT and DLSS quality, cards faster than RTX 4080 reach 60 FPS, and you can enable frame generation on top.

VRAM
Our testing shows that Spider-Man 2 does need quite a lot of VRAM, especially when you dial up the settings an enable things like RT and frame generation. Also, especially on cards with 8 GB VRAM, you'll be maxing that out even at fairy low settings. Interestingly, and we've seen this in other games, AMD cards with 8 GB VRAM take a pretty big performance hit, while their NVIDIA counterparts are not affected as much. This is probably due to the GPU architectures managing their memory differently.