New Dead Space is a great remake (opens in new tab) A survival horror classic. I have few complaints about his first 90 minutes of Necromorph Chopping on PC.but until yesterday 1.03 patch (opens in new tab)it also had one nasty graphical flaw — forced Variable rate shading (opens in new tab) (VRS) Created a blurry, flickering texture for Ishimura’s dark corners.
Digital Foundry specifically pointed out Dead Space’s issues with VRS in an in-depth technical analysis video. Just a day later, EA has already issued a patch that allows his PC players to turn off his VRS completely and disable it on consoles. In fact, this option seems to be off by default on PC.
To be honest, I can hardly tell the difference in setup. The game definitely looks better with VRS off, but whether it’s noticeably blurry on PC mostly depends on what other graphics tricks you have on.As this points out Comparison video for reference (opens in new tab) According to YouTuber Sholva, the ambiguous VRS textures were most noticeable when combined with the DLSS performance mode.
This makes sense given that we’re stacking two different technical solutions that optimize performance on top of each other. VRS was rendering parts of the screen at lower fidelity, and his DLSS performance mode got worse when upscaling, resulting in heavy pixelation on some edges. I have his DLSS set to Quality and barely noticed any blurriness with VRS enabled.
Suffice it to say that Dead Space will probably look very good whatever configuration you’re running. VRS can boost average fps by an order of magnitude, but you can keep it comfortable especially when running DLSS at the same time due to cleaner textures and blur-free dark corners. Primarily Digital DF staff writer John Linneman reports on the PS5 version, the version where Foundry highlighted VRS issues in the video. significantly improved (opens in new tab) Since patch 1.03.
