God of War Ragnarok in 8K makes me question the point of PS5 Pro and RTX 5090

Our 8K Test System

Computer built by Stormforce Gaming

Motherboard: Asus PRIME Z-790P LGA 1700
Editor: Intel Core i9-13900K, 24 cores / 32 threads
CPU Cooling: Corsair iCUE H100i 240mm ELITE CAPELLIX CPU Liquid Cooler
Graphics processor: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card
Storage: Seagate FireCuda 530 M.2 NVMe 1.0TB SSD
Thing: Corsair iCue 5000X RGB
ARIES: Corsair Vengence 32GB DDR5 4800MHz
Screen: LG 55NANO966PA

God of War Ragnarok is now available on PC, and with other PlayStation 5 games making the move to the best gaming laptops and gaming desktops, the latest installment in Kratos’ epic adventure offers some great PC-exclusive features.

Unlike the previous game, which I played on PS4 Pro and then replayed on PC, I didn’t get a chance to play this one God of War Ragnarok ahead of its PC launch, as I’d been holding off on purchasing a PS5, hoping the inevitable PS5 Pro announcement would lure me back to console gaming.

So with God of War Ragnarok now resides in my Steam library, I wanted to see if it lived up to its excellent predecessor, as well as how well it handled 8K resolution on our Stormforce Gaming test system.

Considering the computer is a few years old now, the results were incredibly impressive — enough to kill any interest I had in the PS5 Pro — and even the rumored Nvidia RTX 5090 graphics card that’s likely to be revealed soon.

Instead, it reminded me what a beast the RTX 4090 graphics card still is, even though it’s been two years since it was introduced.

Combined with software improvements, the teams behind the game, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Santa Monica Studio, are becoming increasingly adept at developing the title for PS4 and PS5 hardware, as well as Jetpack Interactive, the team that ported God of War Ragnarok on PC (they also ported the previous game), gaining more experience, and given the continued development of scaling technologies like Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR, it really doesn’t feel like there’s a need for upgrades, especially if you have high-end hardware.

8K playback capability out of the box

When I started testing the possibilities of 8K gaming in 2019, it seemed like we’d never see 7680×4320 games running at a playable frame rate. Any 8K future certainly seemed distant when I struggled to run Red Dead Redemption 2 in ultra-ultra high resolution with a $2,499 Nvidia Titan RTX graphics card and a $3,000 Dell UltraSharp UP3218K monitor.

Back then, AI still seemed like a science fiction concept, and DLSS was just a twinkle in Jensen Huang’s eye.

We’ve come a long way in the last five years, and hardware has become more efficient – and even more affordable.

While the RTX 4090 will never be considered a cheap GPU, its starting price of $1,599 (around £1,359, AU$2,300) was still significantly lower than its granddaddy the RTX Titan. Meanwhile, 8K TVs may still be a long way from the mainstream, but they do exist and can cost significantly less than the specialist Dell monitor we once relied on.

Perhaps the biggest sign of how far the technology has come is that right out of the box, with native 8K resolution and graphics settings set to “Ultra,” God of War Ragnarok an average of 35 fps (frames per second). Even a few years ago, with the advent of DLSS and the RTX 3090, achieving a playable minimum of 30 fps seemed like a distant goal.

So in order to create a game as graphically impressive and ambitious as God of War Ragnarok Running at over 30 frames per second at 8K resolution (which is four times the resolution of 4K) without any modifications is truly impressive.

Still, 35 fps isn’t ideal and the game offers a lot of tools to help improve it, so I was curious to see how many changes would be needed to hit 60 fps.

(Photo source: Sony)

AMD FSR3.1

With upscaling enabled, the first technology option is AMD’s FSR 3.1 technology. This is the latest version, with AMD putting a lot of effort into improving image quality in this release, with a particular focus on reducing flicker and blurry ghosting that was distracting in previous versions.

Unlike rival Nvidia’s DLSS technology, FSR 3.1 doesn’t use AI (though there are rumors that it’ll be in FSR 4), and that means it can’t match DLSS in terms of results, but it also means that it’s less strict about the hardware it runs on. FSR doesn’t need an AMD graphics card to work — Intel and Nvidia cards can use it too.

This is especially good news for owners of older Nvidia cards that have not had the opportunity to take advantage of DLSS technology.

The even better news is that thanks to God of War Ragnarok, AMD FSR 3.1 offers excellent results. Setting FSR to “Quality,” which minimizes the amount of scaling performed (in this case, the native 5120×2880 resolution is scaled down to 7680×4320) to preserve image quality, allowed the game to hit an average of 55 fps—temptingly close to the 60 fps target. Image quality was very good indeed—and there were certainly fewer noticeable artifacts.

Switching to ‘Balanced’ mode dropped the native resolution to 4512 x 2536, meaning the hardware had to do more work scaling the image to 8K. This is where I hit 59fps – basically the 60fps I was after (right now, 8K displays and HDMI 2.1 only support 8K at a maximum of 60fps, which sometimes results in 59fps being recorded as the average frame rate by the benchmarking software we use).

The game still looked great (graphics settings remained at “Ultra”), and the jump from 35 frames per second to 60 frames per second made the game feel much smoother and more responsive — especially important in a game like this, where quick reactions are key.

Having already hit the 60fps milestone, I was ready to try out other scaling options, but out of curiosity I tried the “Ultra Performance” mode. Again, it maxed out at 59fps, but the image quality was noticeably reduced and the image looked very pale. This isn’t too surprising since the game’s native rendering resolution is 2560×1440. 1440p is considered quite low these days, and with FSR working hard to scale it up to 7680×4320, it’s inevitable that the image quality will suffer.

Still, it shows that it could be played with a mid-range graphics card God of War Ragnarok in 8K and 60 fps. I would advise against trying it, but it’s still impressive.

(Photo source: Sony)

Intel® XeSS®

Next up was Intel XeSS. While it’s designed to work with Intel Arc graphics cards, it’s not exclusive to Intel hardware, which, like FSR, is a big plus for those who don’t have the latest Nvidia GPUs.

I’ve been impressed with XeSS since its launch and once again it delivers brilliantly. God of War RagnarokIt offers “Ultra Quality+” as a preset that renders the image at 5904 x 3320 resolution before scaling it to 8K. This is a higher setting than AMD FSR 3.1’s Quality preset, meaning less scaling is needed.

Image quality was excellent, but the performance boost was more muted, with the game averaging 45 fps. That’s a decent 10 fps increase over native 8K games, but when set to “Ultra Quality,” which drops the native resolution to 5120 x 2880, the same as the “Quality” preset in FSR, the game averaged 57 fps. Basically the same as “Quality” in FSR, albeit a tad faster.

Switching to “Quality” in XeSS gave me that magic 60fps (actually 59fps) on average. Image quality still looked very good, with a native resolution of 4512×2536. Interestingly, this is basically the “Balanced” setting in AMD FSR at the same resolution and performance. You could argue that Intel is overdoing XeSS by having three “Quality” levels, but I like the option of an additional Ultra Quality+ setting that AMD lacks. However, I think AMD is being more honest when describing this resolution and scaling level as a balance between image quality and performance.

(Photo source: Sony)

DLSS

Finally, we come to Nvidia’s DLSS 3. This is the most mature scaling option, and traditionally the one I’ve found to offer the best results. However, unlike AMD and Intel’s offerings, DLSS is only compatible with Nvidia’s latest RTX graphics cards (and DLSS 3 is only available on the latest RTX 4000 series GPUs).

While this isn’t a problem for RTX 4090-equipped systems like our test bench, it does limit the availability of this fascinating technology.

As if to prove DLSS’s superiority, I only had to enable its first setting, “Quality,” to hit an average of 59 fps. It uses the same 5120×2880 native resolution that the XeSS and AMD FSR “Quality” settings use, but it offers higher, more stable frame rates.

Conclusion: DLSS works like magic again

As with previous recent 8K tests, DLSS came out on top, offering excellent performance and image quality, effectively doubling the frame rates the RTX 4090 can achieve when running God of War Ragnarok at a demanding resolution of 7680 × 4320.

I didn’t even need to change my DLSS settings to lower ones, or lower my graphics settings below “Ultra,” or enable frame-generating (another great AI-assisted feature that can help smooth out frame rates).

Still, if you can’t get DLSS 3 working, both XeSS and AMD FSR 3.1 performed really well, with Intel’s technology coming out on top of AMD’s thanks to slightly more resolution options available.

When any of the three scaling technologies are enabled God of War Ragnarok looked amazing in 8K resolution.

The game’s impressive performance at such a high resolution comes with a few caveats. For starters, God of War Ragnarok was a cross-gen game, released on both PS5 and PS4, that is now 11 years old.

There are no advanced lighting effects like ray tracing either. But don’t get me wrong: it’s still a gorgeous-looking game. And when you play it on PC at the more achievable 4K resolution, it runs even better at native resolution, meaning image quality isn’t compromised.

Still, the power of these scaling tools leaves me — and many other gamers — baffled when new hardware comes out. Is it worth the upgrade? It’s clear that the DLSS-enabled RTX 4090 remains an astonishing GPU that will power new games at high resolutions for years to come.

This also means that if I want the best PlayStation gaming experience, I don’t have to buy a PS5 Pro. All I have to do is be patient until Sony exclusives finally make it to PC.