When a game arrives for review on the same day it’s released to the general public, this does tend to raise a red flag. I mean, if the quality of the game is good, why not tell people ahead of time? And yet that’s the situation that faced us on the release of Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut – the latest PC port from the masters at Nixxes. The pedigree of the developer has been established, so perhaps we shouldn’t have worried, but even Nixxes releases have been rushed in the past. Thankfully, initial impressions of this latest port are positive.
This is the first time Nixxes has produced a PC port based on the Sucker Punch engine, but it’s clear that the studio has an established framework of features and all of them slot straight into this Tsushima port. That starts with an enviable range of display technology features, including the must-have features of arbitrary frame-rate and ultra-wide support. And it extends to other Nixxes standards, including the ability to choose any and all upscalers available to your particular GPU – DLSS, XeSS, FSR 3 – along with both AMD and Nvidia frame generation. There’s an added twist, however. While DLSS frame-gen shipped from day one with the ability to use any spatial upscaler the user wanted (included none at all!), FSR 3 would only work with AMD’s own solution. That’s not the case with Tsushima though, meaning that owners of RTX 20 and 30 series GPUs can use DLSS upscaling in combination with FSR 3 frame generation.
Beyond that, Nixxes typical flair for scalability with their ports continues. Target 30 frames per second with dynamic resolution at 1280×800 at medium settings and the Steam Deck will work just fine. At the other extreme, I used an RTX 4090-equipped PC running fully maxed at 4K with Nvidia DLAA (think DLSS used for anti-aliasing only at native resolution), finding a minimum of 76fps across the first hour of play. And that’s without frame generation, which takes us north of 100 frames per second.
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