Introduction

Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered has finally released on PC, with plenty of visual enhancements over its original PlayStation 5 release, such as improved shadows, higher quality of ray traced reflections, NVIDIA HBAO+, full support for ultra-wide screens, and this version on PC also has support for NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing (DLAA), NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), Insomniac Games Temporal Injection (IGTI) and AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 (FSR 2.0) from day one. In order to run this game at maximum graphics settings and reasonable framerates at native resolution, quite a powerful GPU is required, which is why upscaling solutions are so important. But depending on the game, there are subtle differences in the implementation of NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 (FSR 2.0), so we are keen to have a look at both in this game.

Below, you will find comparison screenshots at 4K, 1440p, 1080p, and in different DLSS, FSR 2.0 and IGTI quality modes; the DLAA and TAA screenshots are also available in the dropdown. For those who want to see how DLSS and FSR 2.0 perform in motion, watch our side-by-side comparison video. The video can help uncover issues like shimmering or temporal instability, which are not visible in the screenshots.

All tests were made using a GeForce RTX 3080 GPU at Very High graphics settings with ray tracing enabled; motion blur, chromatic aberration and depth of field were disabled for better image viewing. DLSS in this game shipped with version 2.4.12.

Screenshots

Side-by-Side Comparison Video

Conclusion

In Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, DLSS, DLAA and FSR 2.0 use a sharpening filter in the render path without the ability to tweak the sharpening level, and the developers decided to set the sharpening filters in those render paths to the highest available value, which results in a heavily oversharpened image even at high resolutions. The image looks grainy and too sharp, especially outdoors in the city, but less noticeable indoors and during cutscenes. Only the IGTI and native TAA image does not use any sharpening filter in the render path.

Insomniac Games, in collaboration with Nixxes Software, have implemented the newest DLSS and FSR versions, so the underlying technology has the ability to add a customizable sharpening pass, but the developers chose not to include that feature. We saw the same issues excessive sharpening values in the God of War PC port and the God of War developers patched these issues a few weeks after initial release. We hope that the Spider-Man Remastered developers will do the same in the near future.

Speaking of image quality, there are a few important issues of note. Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered is a fast paced action game, so when using any temporal upscaling solutions, the temporal stability of the image is key to enjoyable gameplay. When using DLSS or DLAA, the image with it enabled was stable in motion, the level of detail rendered in vegetation and tree leaves is improved in comparison to the in-game TAA solution and small details in the distance, such as wires or thin steel objects, are rendered more correctly and completely. The only downside with DLSS that we’ve discovered is the quality of some distanced textures in the game world. When swinging through the city, some objects, like billboards, might appear low-resolution. The DLAA output does not have this issue as it occurs only when using DLSS (and also FSR 2.0). We not sure if it’s a wrong LOD bias setting or just a bug, as it appears individually on random textures and not on the whole image.

The FSR 2.0 implementation comes with noticeable compromises in image quality—in favor of performance in most sequences of the game. We spotted excessive shimmering and flickering on thin objects and especially steel objects; they are shimmering even when standing still. Also, the FSR 2.0 image has some visible pixelation around Spider-Man and it can be distracting in motion, especially at lower resolutions. To be fair, the in-game TAA solution also has issues with shimmering, even though FSR 2.0 uses its own anti-aliasing algorithms, and we definitely recommend using FSR 2.0 instead of TAA on GTX or AMD GPUs, to avoid the less detailed and blurry image of TAA.

Performance-wise, compared to native resolution, the DLSS and FSR 2.0 performance uplift is a great improvement to the game, and compared to DLSS 2.4 in this game, FSR 2.0 basically works identically to DLSS 2.4 in terms of performance gains across all resolutions. The DLAA solution has a performance cost of around 6%, compared to the TAA solution. Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered is a very CPU intensive game on PC, and high-powered GPUs such as the GeForce RTX 3080 can end up CPU bottlenecked in some sequences of the game, even at 1440p and below. At 4K, there is no such issue, and with DLSS or FSR 2.0 enabled, you can expect around 30% more performance in “Quality” mode with all graphics settings maxed out, which definitely helps cushion the performance penalty of enabling ray tracing.