Dead Island 2 PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide

Conclusion

There is a lot to like and a lot to dislike about Dead Island 2, especially if you have played a lot of newer zombie games. If you are expecting cay parkour like Dying Light 2, this game doesn’t deliver that, but if you want great zombie melee combat and something that is a little more focused, Dead Island 2 can deliver that. 

In a sense, Dead Island 2 is Dying Light 2 with most of its bells and whistles taken off. There is no parkour, Dead Island 2 isn’t and open world game, and the game does not feature an almost endless supply of side content. Dead Island 2’s world features interconnected hubs areas and a lot of linear story sections, and players cannot simply run away from combat encounters and parkour their way to safety. In Dead Island 2, players are on the ground, and they need to face their zombie opponents head on with whatever items they can mash together, and the good news is that the melee side of this game is very satisfying. 

On PC, Dead Island 2 is a highly scalable release, being playable on both old and new graphics cards with the right settings. AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 technology adds a lot of scalability to the experience, though we think it is a shame that Dambuster did not add DLSS and XeSS to this game to give players more options.

Unlike many PC releases of 2023, Dead Island 2 doesn’t ship with any major issues to report. The game’s shaders quickly compile when the game launches, and the game runs smoothly if you play the game with suitable graphical settings for your hardware. We did not experience any major issues when playing this game with 8GB graphics cards at 4K, though 6GB GPUs do struggle if you don’t lower this game down from its ultra preset.

With Dead Island 2 being a cross-generation release that supports both last-generation and current-generation consoles, it makes sense that Dead Island 2 can run well on both old and new PC hardware. Even our aging RX 480 and GTX 1060 can achieve 60+ FPS framerates at 1080p medium settings with a dabble of FSR2 to increase framerates further. And the good news here is that Dead Island 2 looks great at medium settings, and even its low settings don’t look that bad. Low settings are not a potato quality options with this PC release, though obviously higher graphical settings deliver stronger visuals, but when you are focusing on mashing zombies to pieces it is hard to tell the difference between Medium and Ultra settings. 

The only problem that we have with Dead Island 2 on PC is that its performance levels can vary significantly on a scene-by-scene basis, especially if your system is CPU-limited. With our RTX 4090 at 4K Ultra settings we had times where performance dipped into the 90s, and areas where the game ran north of 155 FPS, which is a huge level of variation. For some players, we would recommend capping this game’s framerate is that level of performance variation bothers you, but the good news is that most folks with a relatively modern CPU should not have any issues keeping this game above 60 FPS in most satiations.

When compared with a lot of new releases from 2023, Dead Island 2 is a refreshing sight. The game does not ship with any major flaws, and the game is scalable enough to run on most gaming PCs without any issues. There isn’t anything major to complain about with this game, unless you demand that every new PC game features some form of ray tracing, or needs to push graphics to never before seen heights. That’s not to say that Dead Island 2 isn’t a good looking game, it just isn’t a technological showcase.

You can join the discussion on Dead Island 2’s PC version on the OC3D Forums.