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The developers of this port did not have to start from scratch.

The port developers didn’t have to start over.

In the month of August, Sony’s gaming division released Spider-Man on PC. Nixxes launched the game with the new platform in 2021, a studio bought by Sony.

After the release of Spider-Man’s PC, the developers gave a big technical interview to Digital Foundry.

Nixxes CEO Jurjen Katzman and programmers Rebecca Fernandez, Cohen Frauenfelder and Michal Roza discussed the challenge of taking the game from the new platform to the new platform. These are their most interesting moments.

Here’s another story: I’m on vacation.

  • The port has undergone a long time. The project was fully launched in September 2021, shortly after the purchase of Nixxes by Sony Corporation.
  • When I made the port, I took Insomniac Games’ opinions into account and was in a good, friendly position. For example, the developers decided to use the hardware to better understand how well it works.
  • In addition, Insomniac advised Nixxes from source code at incomprehensible moments.
  • It was to be able to use this platform with the Insomniac engine running on the PC.
  • When opening the port, the render was completely refreshed. Insomniac used the latest version of DirectX 11 for the port, everything was rewritten to DirectX 12.
  • They chose DirectX 12 simply because Nixxes has a lot of experience with this API.
  • By reworking the render, the developers of the port worked blindly for several months: only one black screen was visible.
  • I had to do the work in memory: the PlayStation 4/5 has it in common, and on PCs you can do things between memory and video. Two memory pools still exist: the latter and the latter.

Yurien Katzman

Nixxes director is the boss of an art studio.

Consoles are simple and elegant machines. We like to work with consoles.

  • Using a players PC is not a standard game. That means it won’t have a better framerate than a PlayStation 5. Even if you’re on PC, you’ll need to consider the lack of hardware acceleration in the number of games available on the PlayStation.
  • For example, a computer has no hardware decompression of data, so downloading data is more expensive. The GPU is much more loaded thanks to DirectX 12 and DXR (the PlayStation 5 uses a lower API faster).
  • Spider-Man’s PC doesn’t use directStorage, but the developers used it to experiment with it. I’ve tried to speed up the program-level data load, but the developers are happy with the results.
  • There were a lot of optimizations that had to be given up: they speeded up loading, but they loaded too much of the processing space.
  • To support ray trapping on the PC, the port developers had to convert to shaders.
  • The PlayStation 5 uses Sony’s proprietary ray tracing API and many of the ray tracing calculations were rigged in shadesrs, which had to be rewritten to be compatible with DirectX ray tracing, removing the appropriate code. But most shaders have remained the same as consoles.
  • In order for DLSS and FSR to work properly in the port, the developers had to modify the noise canceller to generate reflections: a temporary deluxe version was originally brought to the PlayStation 5 with a new look and feel.
  • They didn’t cache any trees for the harbor. The developers told the testers to enter the entire game, then record how to load certain shaders and load on the loading screens.
  • It seems that this approach is very wrong. First, it takes a little longer to download. Second, as shaders change, testers have to replay the game and collect data. This process takes two or three days.
  • The hair color setting was made in the Spider-Man port thanks to the simulation on Steam Deck.
  • For the port, the dynamic resolution system has been improved and the fast frame rate response has decreased.

Michil Roza

programmer

We thought performance would be more impactful on PCs due to the nature of the platform. What happens, what happens, what does Windows decide to do in the background? We’ve had it respond quite a bit faster than the PlayStation 5.

Players appreciated Nixxes’ work: now Spider-Man has 96% positive reviews on Steam. According to an article, the studio will continue portability of the Sony game to the PC.

It’s interesting to see it.

Spider-man learned to add models. Now it’s a game about Spider-Man and Fat Spider.