Impressive PC port.

Well this is a surprise, what with Japanese developers' reputation in the PC world but this game is turning out to be one of the best PC ports i've seen in a while. It's not without issues but most of them are fairly benign and will either be patched or people will find workarounds. Regardless, my ancient PC which falls short of even the minimum requirements handles it like a champ.

The rig!:

• i5 760 2.8GHz
• GTX 460 1GB
• 8GB RAM
• Win 7 64 bits

The results!

At 1080p, V-Sync disabled, everything else set to High (most options go from off/low, med, high and extra high) and running in the middle of the base, in the rain and gunning down people and shooting explosive barrels the game without fail stays above 30 fps, most of the time between 40 and 60. If you like the silent approach and keep the explosive action to a minimum a constant 50+ fps is possible.

Screen filtering seems to be one of the most demanding option and lowering it to low while at the same time increasing textures and texture filtering to extra high means an almost constant 60 fps. I don't mind turning it down either since it removes the depth of field which i generally dislikes. It would have been nice to have an individual option for the depth of field itself however. Lighting and Model Quality are also 2 other options which have a significant impact on performance when going above high. Lighting adds a bunch of additional lights at long distance and Model Quality controls the draw distance and level of details on objects, displaying them with more details at longer distance. Basically turning any of those options all the way up to extra high means taking a 10-15 fps hit on my rig. No can do. Well i can turn up one of them, maybe 2 if it's not raining but not all 3.

Now for some of the issues, most notably there is no mouse control in the menus. It makes navigation a bit cumbersome but once you've set all the options to your liking this becomes a non issue. I also have some problems with the mouse sensitivity. Specifically while zoomed in. You can't set the sensitivity separately for your regular aim and while zoomed in (either with a weapon or the binoculars etc.) This means that the further you zoom in the faster the camera moves. I'm used to play with a fairly low sensitivity so this isn't unmanageable but for high sensitivity users it may be a problem. Otherwise keyboard and mouse control work well.

Some people are also reporting crashes on start up. Having a controller plugged in appears to be one of the culprits but at the same time others are playing with a controller without issues. I haven't personally experienced any stability issues.

If you were on the fence about it because of the listed system requirements or general quality of the port well there is nothing to worry about.

Edit: Deleted the in-game screenshots because low res steam screenshots look no where near as clean as the game actually does.

I love this port, it is a great indicator of things to come for The Phantom Pain.

Only issue I can really find is that there is no way to turn off DoF without turning off a bunch of other stuff. I am fairly certain that DoF is a PC specific feature, but it gets really distracting, particularly as it has a tendency to freak out when using the binoculars.

Well PC was always a target platform for the engine so I'm not surprised.

That is the dumbest thing...why, WHY tie multiple options together? Just separate them so people can turn off DoF without disabling other features.

A friend's laptop with a nvidia 650M and a 3rd gen i7 with a 2.3ghz processing speed can run the game on high settings (model quality, textures, texture filtering, lighting, effects) at a constant 60 FPS.

This always annoys me, Crytek does this a lot as well where they tie things like ambient occlusion levels into the "shader" option and bundle up POM and Tessellation into the same "object detail " option.

@korwin: Yeah, I remember that. It also annoys me when games have AA and AF settings at Medium, High, and Ultra...just tell me if it's 2x, 4x, 8x, or something else.

Wolfenstein New Order was the absolute worst about this.

Do you get a lot of tearing? I've heard there are problems with that.

@hassun: There is some when not using V-Sync but definitely not an overwhelming amount. And i definitely don't like tearing in general but can deal with it if there isn't too much of it.

Keep in mind Nvidia users that a new Beta driver was put out yesterday for this game (also Elite).

The game looks pretty damn nice and runs beautifully. Only complaint I have is the obvious omitting of any audio settings whatsoever. Kind of a strange and lousy decision. Other than that, however, its a great version of the game, at a price I'm willing to pay for once.

I mean I loved the game, but jesus it took me so fucking long to even get the game running (not to mention having to restart the final level because the game dipped to 1 frame per second :/)

So on my 980 I've got everything cranked at 2560x1440 and it's sitting at 60, isn't even keeping the GPU usage pegged.

And it's 33% off on Steam right now too.

@mb: Yeah.. specially since DOF sometimes makes everything look like shit on this, i really wish i could disable it.

other than that game is running perfect on an old gtx 680, everything on ultra high I get some dips to 50-52, if i bring AO or that stupid screen filtering option down to high it's solid 60

I kind of just defaulted to gamepad on this one because playing MGS with a keyboard just sounded wrong. Guess I'll have to give it a go.

@mb: Out of curiosity,which games label AA as low med and high? I have generally found that when games have MSAA and Screen Space AA in one slider then they will do that, but if they separate the options or only offer MSAA then they do the whole x2,x4 thing.

@humanity: To me it seems that the configurability issues in wolfenstein stem from the console focus of the engine (idTech5), there are a lot of weird things with that engine such as the weird resolution scaling and the poor Crossfire/SLI support. I didn't see what kind of settings the Evil Within offers but I suspect it is the same deal there (can anybody confirm?).

@korwin: This is a good looking game. I'm not sure how they are getting so much out of this. They use SSAO instead of HBAO, but that is the only option that I can see as weaker than other recent games. I'm on 1080p with everything at Extra on a r9 290, I can easily see how the console versions manage 60fps.

The default controls are pretty ridiculous (to the point where you can't do things like aim and shoot with a hostage), but the movement and aiming feel good. In fact, running and gunning through the entire base was trivial with mouse aim. If I can configure the rest of the controls to my liking, I'll probably play through all of MGSV with a mouse and keyboard.

Video for those interested to see how this game looks running. Pretty stunning, hopefully this means good things for the pc port of phantom pain.

Kind of hilarious that Konami put more effort into porting what many call a "demo" than Ubisoft did into an entire game.

That's interesting. My PC also doesn't meet the minimum requirements and I'd kind of written off getting the game at the moment, but my rig is pretty comparable to yours. I might have to give it a look.

@adequatelyprepared: I don't think you can really call this a port. Kojima stated that they were running the game on PCs before the consoles came out, I imagine a lot of game developers do. I find it amusing that Ubisoft develops the AC:U engine, years before the new consoles are released, and still needs a separate studio to fork over code from the console versions to do a "port". What where they using to run the game before the consoles were released?

Yeah, combined with the bad AI and rapidly replenishing health, running and gunning was pretty easy. Which, in my opinion, makes it a mediocre stealth game.

I'm still waiting for Ubisoft to fix the mouse support of From Dust.

So, basically never. Fuck that company a thousand times over.

Ive been loving this so far on the PC. Dan was right. This game does play great. Making me really excited for MGS 5.

This is really good, my only real complaints are the weapon select menu and the interrogate menu, it's clearly meant for a controller and the only way to select things from them is the number keys, so to interrogate you have to hold down 'q' and then press '1,' it just feels so awkward when they could've just made it so move mouse up select whatever's up etc.

??? Are you talking about carrying a prisoner or having a human meatshield? Because all you do is hold down RMB to grab a soldier, then let go, and then you can hold RMB again to aim. With a prisoner, it's just the same controls as if you don't have one, only if you click LMB you can throw them or if you hold down R you'll set them down.

"These things that don't factor into stealth makes this game a mediocre stealth game."

A little more work goes into porting an 'entire game' than a single area sandbox. You can polish the hell out of Ground Zeroes because the scope is so much smaller. Of course Ubisoft has had a pretty terrible track record with PC ports, I'm not denying that in the slightest, but you can't seriously compare Ground Zeroes to a sprawling game like Unity which had infinitely more layered systems taking place all at the same time.

This game looks pretty damn amazing visually I must say. Also nice to get it for $10 (if you go to GMG and use the voucher which you should).

Yes, definitely one of the better ports this year, but as usual the AMD performance is not so hot. GTX 670's and 680's performing better than a r9 290, for example.

Guys, my laptop is an i5 2430m with an nvidia GT540m. The game performed for me quite well despite it being under what the minimum requirements are. It was super smooth except for one thing. When I walked into the armory slightly east of the main entrance, my frame rate took a hit for a bit. After I went back out, it would stabilize and be good again after a short amount of time. No other area I visited caused that to happen. Despite this though, I am super impressed by what I got. The game looks fantastic and is running at higher settings then I would use in most games I am within the requirements for. Fox engine is no joke.

They do. Because they trivialize stealth.

Previous games in the series had this problem too, but at least you could start them on harder difficulties. It's completely stupid that Hard mode has to be unlocked.

To be fair MGS4 was equally as guilty, the problem is that when you have the ability to adequately resolve combat without crap like instant fail states the whole stealth game play design philosophy sort of comes apart at the seams.

I will never understand these kind of complaints when there are multiple difficulty settings present. I'm not disagreeing that "normal" is, in fact, pretty easy, but that's always been the case with the MGS series. Not to downplay Drew's recent efforts if you've been following Metal Gear Scanlon, but that video-series is a perfect example of what I'm referring to.

If you're not just there for the story, you have to tune the difficulty up in this franchise. And that continues to be the case with Ground Zeroes. I realize I sound like something of an apologist here, but there's little I can do on that front as I think Hard mode makes for genuinely terrific game play. I also can't picture said mode being gated in the full release of Phantom Pain.

it even works well in 4k.. which is always unexpected from a Japanese console port. Not a very demanding game. running extra high on all settings (that have extra high as an option)

holy crap the ending is cool. I can't wait for the full game

So is there a confirmation exactly what resolution MGS4 was? I know for a fact it was running on the MGS3 engine. The whole in screen capture renders felt like it was upscaled 640p. The hair on Ground Zero Snake reminds me of MGS3, and some of the dithering reminds me or old tech from PS2 era, except no individual blades of grass that bends like in MGS3.

My favorite thing about all the Ground Zeroes cutscenes is that none of them have any editing, they're all presented as a single continuous shot. I hope this is true of The Phantom Pain as well, it's a really interesting choice and it's extremely effective at putting you there in the moment.

I don't know if it is still the case, but i had to go into my device manager and turn off my G13 keypad so that it would launch. Other than that its a solid launch

I love this port.

Finished my 100% yesterday, and still want to play around in the base.

I have a gtx 570, and i7 950, and 12 gb's of ram. It's an old build now, and it can still enjoy this game.

They did a wonderful job of delivering visual spectacle, without sacrificing performance.

Not so much on AMD. With a 7970 framerate was all over the place on various settings during the nighttime mission.

God, every time that nvidia logo pops up in games during pre menu logo sequence I know I'm in for a miserable experience.

Am I crazy or is there something off on the controls like a large dead zone from walking to sneaking movement? And aiming just feels really off from it's console version.

My only problem with this was getting it to recognize my controller. I use a Thrustmaster wired Xbox 360 controller and the only way I could get the game to recognize it was to unplug my keyboard and mouse as soon as I launched the game in steam and then plugging in the controller once it got to the title screen. It was pretty silly because at first the controls were all the way fucked up where somehow fire ended up being bound to the start button.

@super2j: I'm in the same boat, on a laptop that shouldn't be able to even run the game, yet I'm playing on high with smooth framerate. Hopefully Phantom Pain will perform just as well.

It's a gorgeous game and it runs beautifully on high settings on my PC.

While it may be impressive, the fact that it's a measly 3GB make me feel like that much of a sucker. I mean, I wanna get my hands on the MGS5 experience, try out its mouthfeel, but I know I'm paying a premium for a demo.

What makes me heartily chuckle is that they had to somehow squeeze 3GB onto a Blu-ray. Should have come with all the movies that inspired MGS for that price. And if I'm not mistaken, it was 40 bucks day one for current-gen consoles? Talk about getting bent over a barrel.

I didn't really know where to put this but Phantom Pain is going to have a easy mode where you have to wear a chicken hat.

Running on a Dell Ultra Sharp U2713HM With GT660 Ti and Core i7 3770K with 8gigs of ram . Got to say it very impressive looking game, and runs buttery smooth.