On PlayStation 5, everything goes well, but the PC version has a few problems.
My coworkers have been playing Stray on PS5, and from what I’ve heard, it’s been a lot of fun. I’ve been playing, though, on PC, where things aren’t quite as good.
It’s not a disaster; even on my average PC, I can run it perfectly at 4K and 60FPS, which is always nice, and it looks great most of the time. However, the game is full of annoying little stutters that aren’t bad enough to ruin the experience but are annoying enough to be a pain.
As is always the case when my PC isn’t running well, I wondered if it was just me or if other people were having the same problem. It turns out that many people have it. Like, pretty much everyone is affected.
Digital Foundry explains below that Unreal Engine 4’s shader compilation is to blame, which is a problem that seems to be getting worse with every game made with the engine these days. Since consoles are all built the same way, developers can precompile a game’s shaders, so anyone playing the game on PS5 won’t have this problem.
But because every PC is different, developers don’t have that luxury on the platform (with a few rare exceptions, like the recent Horizon port), so most games have to compile shaders on the fly.
Because of this, there is a constant stream of micro-stutters, which can get annoying after a few hours of playing. The video below, which gives some examples, goes into a lot of detail about this. I’ve set it to start playing at the part about PC performance, but if you want to see how the PS4 and PS5 versions did, you can see them earlier on as well.
