Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 PC Isn’t Off to a Great Start [Hotfix Live Now]

[UPDATE] Sony has just released a hotfix (v1.31.0.0) that should resolve that pesky crash issue in Marvel's Spider-Man 2 for PC.

This hotfix addresses some of the device hang crashes that could occur while playing the game with ray-tracing enabled. The changes in this patch are based on player feedback and data from our crash reporting system. While we are aware of other crashes, we intend to get these first fixes out as soon as possible.

[ORIGINAL STORY] Sony has released Insomniac's Marvel's Spider-Man 2 on PC without too much fanfare. The system requirements were only shared a couple of days ago, way later than usual, and the launch experience leaves more than something to be desired, which was a bit surprising since the port was handled by the usually very competent Nixxes Software.

The biggest issue that is driving Steam user reviews way down (only 55% are positive at the time of writing) is the crashing. The game often crashes, as I experienced myself, with the following error message:

A problem has occurred with your display driver. This can be caused by out of date drivers, using game settings higher than your GPU can handle, an overheating GPU (current GPU temperature: 70 Celsius), or an error with the game. Please try updating your graphics drivers, or lowering your in-game settings. Current GPU and graphics driver: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, 572.16
(0x887A0006: DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG). 

Now, 70° Celsius is definitely not a possible cause for GPU overheating; the drivers are the latest published just yesterday by NVIDIA; and there's no way the problem would be too high in-game settings with the GeForce RTX 5090. Clearly, the issue is related to the game itself, as evidenced by the fact that many users have reported it across wildly differing PC configurations.

Since we mentioned graphics settings, let's take a look at what's available in Marvel's Spider-Man 2 on PC:

• Texture Quality (up to Very High)
• Texture Filtering (up to 16x Anisotropic)
• Shadow Quality (up to Ultra)
• Depth of Field (up to High)
• Level of Detail (up to Ultra)
• Traffic Density (up to Very High)
• Crowd Density (up to Ultra)
• Hair Quality (up to Very High)
• Screen Space Reflections (up to High)
• Weather particle quality (up to Very High)
• Ray traced reflections (up to Very High)
• Ray traced interiors (up to Very High)
• Ray traced shadows (up to Very High)
• Ray traced ambient occlusion (up to Very High)
• Raytracing object range (a slider that goes up to 10)
• DLSS Ray Reconstruction (Legacy, which means CNN, or Transformer)

The biggest surprise is the inclusion of the latest transformer model for DLSS Ray Reconstruction, which greatly improves the ray tracing quality. Menno Bil, Graphics Programmer at Nixxes, said about the feature:

In Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on PC with ray reconstruction enabled, we see more detailed ray-traced reflections and better-defined ray-traced shadows, especially when viewing raytracing effects at steep angles. We also see improvements in the ray-traced interiors and less ghosting and noise in the ray-traced ambient occlusion.

We’ve included two models of NVIDIA’s Ray Reconstruction, the original model introduced in DLSS 3.5 and a newly improved model designed for RTX 40 series GPUs and newer. This new model results in an overall more temporally stable image, further improving the visual quality of raytracing

However, in between the crashes, I also noticed a graphics issue during cutscenes with character hair flickering in a very distracting way. Between this, the crashes, and the fact that NVIDIA said DLSS Multi Frame Generation will be added soon to the game, it's best to take a rain check on the PC version of Marvel's Spider-Man 2 for the time being.

As you can read in my original review of the PlayStation 5 version, the game itself is well worth waiting for the fixes, though.

Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.