Devil May Cry 5 PC Performance Review

 

Conclusion – Will DMC make your Hardware Scream? 

Much like Resident Evil 2, Capcom has delivered an excellent PC version of Devil May Cry 5, setting up the company for a new golden age in the PC gaming market. Devil May Cry has already shattered PC records for the franchise, and launching a solid PC version is no doubt a big part of that success. 

While there are a few issues that we have with the PC version of Devil May Cry 5, such as the lack of in-game API options or an HDR toggle, none of these issues got in the way of the fact that this game runs exceptionally well on PC. Devil May Cry 5 offers PC gamers a wealth of graphical options; which allow the game to scale to some impressively low-end hardware, all while aiming for 60FPS framerates. Outside of that, there isn’t much else to say, unless of course, you want to get into the nitty-gritty of PC performance. 

Let’s start with improvements over Resident Evil 2’s recent PC release, the most important of which is the game’s DirectX 12 mode, which presented us with no issues when playing through the entirety of the game. If anything the game’s DirectX 11 version is less stable, at least in our experience. Please turn to page five for more details. Whether or not this game’s DirectX 11 issues will be addressed with patches or driver updates is unknown, but at least the Direct 12 version works as intended. 

Another change since Resident Evil 2 is the fact that we now consider the game’s interlacing option as usable, presenting gamers with less graphical judder and an image that is more than passable enough during gameplay. If you need a massive boost in the game’s performance at your native resolution, no other option in DMC 5 has an impact this large, though it comes at the cost of image clarity. In Resident Evil 2 we actively told our readers to avoid this setting, whereas in Devil May Cry 5 there are cases where we recommend it. Well done Capcom for making this feature usable. 

On the CPU-side, Devil May Cry 5 is very easy to run. If you exceed the game’s minimum CPU requirements, you should have no issues staying above 60FPS, assuming that you have enough GPU grunt to do so. Quad-core CPUs with eight threads are ideal, as anything more than that offers minor performance gains. From then on, clock speed (per core performance) is king.

At 1080p, Devil May Cry 5 is almost too easy to run, with even our ageing GTX 960 and R9 380 jumping in on the 60FPS action. Cards with 2GB of VRAM will need to use the game’s lowest texture settings, but truth be told they don’t look that bad. We believe AMD when they way an RX 570 can play this game at 1080p 60FPS, presumably at max settings, as our RX 580 Strix keeps the game at well over 80FPS minimum framerates at this resolution.   

Before talking any more about GPU performance, we have to note that gameplay and cutscenes are a different ball-game in Devil May Cry 5. Cutscenes are a lot more demanding that gameplay. At 4K max settings on an RTX 2080 Ti, cutscenes can dip to the mid-40s, whereas the cards are capable of staying above the mid-80s during gameplay. Performance dips in cutscenes aren’t a big deal though, as by their very nature players cannot interact with them. Page 3 details some graphical settings that impact cutscenes exclusively. 

Cranking things up to a resolution of 1440p we found that our RX 580 and GTX 1060 needed a few reduced settings to achieve a stable 60FPS in gameplay, with Ambient Occlusion (which is turned off in all console versions in gameplay) and turning Effects to Medium being enough to keep both GPUs over the 60FPS mark. 

As shown on page 10, 4K resolutions can prove challenging during tougher sections of gameplay, with only our RTX 2080 Ti staying above 60FPS at all times. That said, anything over our GTX 1070 can achieve 60 FPS using the correct settings, albeit with interlacing enabled. Based on our results we would also guess that Nvidia’s GTX 1080 Ti and RTX 2080 would be enough for 4K 60 as well as AMD’s Radeon VII graphics card at max settings. Even the GTX 1060 and RX 580 can take a stab at 4K 60, provided gamers are willing to make some significant sacrifices to their graphical settings. Devil May Cry 5 is a very versatile game.  

Devil May Cry 5 is a game that performs incredibly well on PC, with the developers making smart use of today’s graphics technology while aiming for high 60FPS targets on all platforms. Their effort has yielded a fantastic game, both in terms of PC performance and in terms of gameplay, assuming that spectacle fighters are your cup of tea. 
  
As an AMD optimised game, Devil May Cry 5 shines on Radeon hardware, but that doesn’t mean that Geforce cards offer lousy performance. Users of GPUs from either manufacturer will have a great time here, with 60FPS being relatively easy to achieve. AMD’s GPUs shine a little above their competitors, but AMD’s gain does not come at Nvidia’s detriment. 

Congratulations Capcom on releasing another stellar PC game. We hope to see a lot more from your RE engine in the future. 

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