Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 has launched on PC in a troubling state and a DirectX 12 feature appears partly to blame. While disabling DirectStorage does result in a welcome performance boost, many issues with the port remain.
PlayStation’s latest port to PC is facing some community backlash due to poor performance and bugs. In search of the culprit, eyes started turning towards DirectStorage, suspected of being part of the problem. Thus, Sebastian Castellanos put this theory to the test and found that manually forcing Resizable BAR netted a 5.9% performance boost, rising by another 1.6% after deleting the DirectStorage DLL files on their RTX 4090 system.
DirectStorage is a DirectX feature available on Windows and Xbox Series consoles meant to drastically reduce game loading times. Instead of using the CPU to decompress game assets, DirectStorage offloads the task to the GPU which is much better at parallel tasks. This in turn reduces CPU load while improving texture streaming, at least in theory.
Sebastian’s tests prompted Compusemble to dig deeper and confirm that DirectStorage is indeed degrading performance when enabled. The source of this hit seems to be the asynchronous compute of DirectStorage tasks which overloads the GPU, explaining why AMD’s GPUs fare better than Nvidia’s.
Unfortunately, Spider-Man 2 troubles don’t stop here as many users reported crashes and other problems. These show up as lighting bugs, broken cutscenes, audio desync, and stuttering, just to name a few. Importantly, these complaints come from high-end machine owners, so hardware capabilities aren’t in question here.
Developer Nixxes Software has already released two hotfixes in a bid to boost stability and address various crashes. However, it’ll take a heroic effort to get Spider-Man 2 up to speed.
