The Dead Space remake was quite successful when it came out in January 2023, achieving a Metascore of 89 on consoles. Our own Nathan Birch wasn't quite as enthused, rating Motive Studio's latest effort 8 out of 10 in his review:
The new Dead Space is a mostly-successful revival of a survival horror landmark, offering atmospheric new visuals and a series of precision updates to combat, level layouts, and the game’s scary bits that ought to surprise and excite veteran engineers. That said, there was room for Motive Studio to push ever further, as some game elements still feel a bit dated. Dead Space should satisfy long-suffering fans of the franchise, but compared to the latest, greatest AAA horror competition, it’s no longer a cut above.
In my PC test of the game, I noted that the visuals weren't that great even when maxed out. More annoyingly, the performance was plagued by constant traversal stuttering.
I would really love to say that Dead Space was completely free of stutters, but that's just not true. On my configuration (Intel i7 12700KF, RTX 4090, 16GB DDR4), stutters happen on a fairly regular basis, even with DLSS 2/Super Resolution enabled. I've manually benchmarked (and captured with Shadowplay) a 14-minute-long gameplay session from the first Chapter with NVIDIA's FrameView software; as you can see from the table below, the average frame rate was very high at just over 144 FPS, but the game's minimum frame rate went as low as 15 frames per second.
Unfortunately, Motive Studio did not meaningfully improve the PC performance through post-launch updates, leaving this version of the remake in a less than ideal state.
However, modder LukeFZ has now attempted a rescue of sorts by releasing a DLSS 3 (Frame Generation) mod for Dead Space. You might remember him for his previous Starfield, Lies of P, and Assassin's Creed Mirage mods.
Whereas those mods were immediately released for free, LukeFZ chose to release this one for his Patreon backers first, in a similar fashion to PureDark. That said, he promised to upload it to Nexus Mods in a matter of days, whereas PureDark keeps his mods under permanent paywall.
LukeFZ's DLSS 3 mods work a bit differently than PureDark's. Here's his install guide:
- Move all existing DLLs that start with sl. out of the game folder.
- Extract the release archive into the game folder.
- Grab the newest DLSS/DLSS-G DLLs from Latest DLSS/DLSS-G DLLs and extract the archives into the streamline sub-folder in the game folder.
- Run the game.
- Note: If FG does not work, please try and toggle it on by pressing the down arrow key. There might be a small lag spike while FG is being toggled.
Don't expect miracles, though. NVIDIA DLSS 3 was never able to completely fix significant instances of traversal stuttering as those experienced to this day in the Dead Space remake, even when implemented natively, as already seen in Immortals of Aveum and other PC games released recently.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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