Stellar Blade's PC Port Is a Rare Sight 

Many PC ports of once-console exclusive titles leave a lot to be desired, seemingly failing to clear basic QA testing at launch with abysmal performance or weird hitches. The problem has also plagued PlayStation exclusives, as seen from the initial PC launches of The Last of Us and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, bringing heaps of issues with them. Shift Up, the developer behind last year’s somewhat controversial hit Stellar Blade, seems to be aware of the blowback and has delivered a rare, near-perfect PC port.

I never played the original game, and thus had to watch gameplay footage online amidst some criticism about its direct inspirations from Nier: Automata. The larger point of criticism, though, was directed toward its eponymous character Eve, a synthetic creation most famous for her sultry outfits. Eve’s outfits seem primarily designed for the male gaze.

Of course, all of that always directed the conversation away from what matters — the actual game. It’s easy enough for me to dismiss any obvious similarities it has with Nier: Automata. I simply don’t care as much, given the difference between the two is vast enough for each to stand on its own.

The first thing that jumps out in Stellar Blade is its soundtrack, with the Soulslike combat design being the second. Say what you will, Stellar Blade can craft a beautiful atmosphere with confidence. Given that the game was originally designed for PS5, I was apprehensive about its control scheme on keyboard and mouse. Shift Up has done a good job here, and I got pretty comfortable using KBM while exploring Xion and its neighbouring areas.

We’ll get to the numbers below, and it’s mostly good news, but one thing that still bugs me about many PC ports is the inability to skip cutscenes. WHY?? It’s 2025, let me skip cutscenes when I want to.

There’s also the question of the PlayStation overlay on PC titles. With most games, they tend to work just fine, displaying your trophies and friends list from PSN. Here, though, it seems to be completely broken. Using the keyboard shortcut to summon the PSN overlay will pause the game, but I don’t see any overlay on top of it. It might be patched in a future update, or it could be an isolated incident. Either way, I don’t see much point in reporting back on it.

Before diving into the technical details, I want to appreciate the game for what it is — a solid post-apocalyptic action title. The world-building here is ripe for exploration with future sequels, and the game balances its storytelling with bombastic set pieces and light puzzle-solving.

Stellar Blade PC Performance Benchmarks

I played Stellar Blade on a suitably high-end PC, equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super, and 32GB of DDR4 RAM. Like most PC titles, Stellar Blade supports modern upscalers and frame generation tools.

Even without DLSS or frame generation, I got over 70fps at native 4K during the opening mission, which is quite heavy on graphical effects. If you want the numbers, here they are:

Of course, I recognise the privilege I have with using an RTX 40 series GPU, which comes equipped with the exclusive frame generation technology. However, given how the game scales across resolutions and settings, I think players using older 30-series or AMD equivalent GPUs will be happy with the performance. As seen from Digital Foundry’s testing, it’s quite easy to get over 80fps during intense scenes with an RTX 4060 and an older Ryzen 5 3600 with more than acceptable image quality.

What I also respect is that Stellar Blade can easily put up numbers comparable to an esports title without losing much of its visual identity. Want to drive that high refresh-rate monitor with decent image quality? Be my guest.

On Steam Deck, you can easily stay above 50fps with the lowest settings. With some tweaking, you can lock the game to 40fps with decent image quality, relatively speaking, since it originated on the PS5.

Speaking of that, what also surprised me was its perfect frame rate locking. On PC, most FPS locker settings seldom work as intended, with smeary frametimes that throw the experience down a gutter. Not here, though, as locking the game to any given target results in perfectly smooth, appropriate frametimes.

For an Unreal Engine 4 title, there is surprisingly little to no traversal stutter. I did notice a few hitches while exploring large levels, but these were few and far between and in no way affected my enjoyment of the game.

While I have a stronger CPU than the one in the PS5, we’ve often seen many PC ports demand more resources from the PC chip. That’s not the case here, as CPU usage was consistently under 25%. That only changed when I was aiming for the highest frame rates using frame generation and DLSS ultra performance mode, where CPU usage rose to 45%. The only time the game really hammers the CPU is during the initial boot for compiling shaders, which is a welcome sight.

Verdict

Stellar Blade’s PC port is excellent, performing better than expected with slight improvements over its PS5 version.

Stellar Blade is available on PC and PS5.