In case you’re not familiar with the game, Miles Morales was released as a PlayStation 5 launch title (although it is a cross-gen game, so it’s also available on PlayStation 4), making it roughly two years old at this point in time. It also launched two years after the original game and brings with it some slight improvements across the board while keeping the same extremely solid formula. Our Kai Powell even said in his review (scored 8.5 out of 10) he appreciated the main character more than Peter Parker himself. On the other hand, Marvel’s Spider-Man Miles Morales is much smaller than the original game. Ahead of the launch, Sony likened the difference between the two titles to that of Uncharted: Lost Legacy and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, that is to say, more than an expansion and less than a full-fledged sequel. According to HowLongToBeat, the average player finishes the main story in 7.5 hours, while side content can bump that to 12 hours. For comparison, Marvel’s Spider-Man sits at 17 and 25 hours, respectively. Content-wise, just like Peter Parker’s adventure, Marvel’s Spider-Man Miles Morales PC is identical to the console release. As such, we will focus on the technical aspects. Insomniac’s in-house engine did wonders in Spider-Man Remastered, delivering great visuals and outstanding performance. Here, the developers added a few extra bells and whistles, chiefly ray traced shadows on top of the already available ray traced reflections. Subjectively, there isn’t that much of an improvement compared to the original game, except for select nighttime scenes. Ray traced global illumination would have been more impactful for sure, though it would also have taxed hardware way harder. For our test, we pushed every single graphics setting to the max. Using an Intel i7-12700KF and MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Gaming X Trio, we tested DLSS 2 + Reflex against DLSS 3 for frame rate and latency. Super Resolution was set to Quality Mode at 4K resolution. We got the following results by benchmarking the intro portion of the game with NVIDIA’s FrameView software. In both cases, Marvel’s Spider-Man Miles Morales PC gameplay experience was very smooth. That’s not surprising, given the engine’s optimization and the hardware used in the test. However, DLSS 3 definitely helped smooth over most of the lower spikes, such as 1% low FPS (which goes near 50 FPS with DLSS 2) and 0.1% FPS (nearly 35 FPS with DLSS 2). All in all, DLSS 3 enables a near-flawless experience at extremely high frame rates without hitches of any sort. If you have a 4K 144 Hz display, you can expect to take full advantage of your expensive product. Unfortunately, there is no video sharing platform with support for 4K 120+ FPS videos, so you can’t really get a feeling for that unless you see it for yourself.
Here’s a recap of the DLSS 3 performance boosts in the various categories.
Average FPS: DLSS 3 +43.975%; 1% Low FPS: DLSS 3 +74.603% 0.1% Low FPS: DLSS 3 +24.802%; 0.1% FPS: DLSS 3 +72.766%; 1% FPS: DLSS 3 +65.722%; 5% FPS: DLSS 3 +27.654%; 10% FPS: DLSS 3 +44.396%
Now, let’s discuss latency. DLSS 3, more specifically its defining Frame Generation component, inevitably adds latency since it adds extra frames generated independently of the CPU (which is why it helps a lot with CPU-bound games). Indeed, that’s what we see here.
Avg Latency: DLSS 3 +39.748%; Min Latency: DLSS 3 +25.046%; Max Latency: DLSS 3 +26.614%
Granted, these measurements were taken with Reflex enabled on DLSS 2. Without that, it would have been a lot closer. Additionally, given that this is an action/adventure single player game, latency concerns don’t have a lot of weight. Subjectively, we did not feel that our controls were negatively impacted in a meaningful way with DLSS 3 activated. We also didn’t spot any visual artifacts while in motion. Of course, gamers without a GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics card can use NVIDIA DLSS 2 (and Reflex) if they own a GeForce RTX 20 or 30 Series GPU. Everyone else can select AMD FSR 2.1 or Intel XeSS as alternative upscaling options.
Final Thoughts
With Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales PC, Sony confirms its commitment to the platform. It’s the latest in a series of great ports that deliver the definitive version of a great game, providing enhanced visuals (including Ultrawide support), amazing granularity for tweaking all kinds of settings, and even full support for the DualSense controller’s haptic feedback and adaptive triggers. In that sense, they could push Microsoft to do better, as they’ve been a bit lacking in the area despite being in the PC market for much longer. On the other hand, Sony’s ports remain long staggered from the console releases. PlayStation president Hermen Hulst recently said it would be at least a year before a PS5 game gets to PC (live service titles notwithstanding). If that’s the case, Horizon Forbidden West could be coming out early next year, and God of War Ragnarok late next year. PC gamers certainly hope so.
