Death Stranding 2: On the Beach has officially launched on PC, powered by the Decima engine, and early benchmarks are now evaluating its performance.

The tests were conducted on a high-end system featuring an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 (6000MHz), and a wide range of GPUs, including AMD’s Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 7900 XTX, RX 9070 XT, as well as NVIDIA’s RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 4090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090. The setup used Windows 10 (64-bit), GeForce 595.76 drivers, and Radeon Adrenalin Edition 26.3.1.

Figure 1. Death Stranding 2

The PC version offers extensive graphics customization, allowing players to tweak settings such as shadows, textures, terrain, and clouds. It also supports major upscaling technologies—including NVIDIA DLSS 4, AMD FSR 4.0, and Intel XeSS—and introduces ray tracing support for the first time in a Decima engine title. Figure 1 shows Death Stranding 2.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach does not include a built-in benchmark tool, so testing was conducted in a more demanding in-game area to better reflect real performance beyond the opening section. This analysis focuses on rasterized performance, with ray tracing and DLSS covered separately.

At 1080p with max settings, the top six GPUs consistently delivered over 60 FPS, while the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 also offered smooth gameplay, especially with a G-Sync display. At 1440p/max settings, the top five GPUs maintained strong performance [1]. For native 4K/max settings, only the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 sustained frame rates above 60 FPS consistently.

Visually, the game is highly impressive even without ray tracing, showcasing excellent lighting and detailed character models from Kojima Productions. Pop-in issues are minimal, especially compared to titles like Crimson Desert, making for a polished and immersive visual experience.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach delivers impressive visuals overall, though some areas feature lower-resolution textures that could benefit from a 4K texture pack. Even so, it stands out as one of the best-looking rasterized games, with ray tracing further enhancing its visual quality.

Performance is generally smooth, with no noticeable stuttering during gameplay or exploration. However, minor stuttering can occur during in-engine cinematics—an issue that Nixxes Software may need to address.

Overall, the game ranks among the most optimized PC titles of 2026, running well across a wide range of hardware while maintaining high visual fidelity. While it may not be the absolute best-looking PC game of the year, both Kojima Productions and Nixxes have delivered an excellent and well-optimized experience.

References:

1. https://www.dsogaming.com/pc-performance-analyses/death-stranding-2-pc-performance-analysis/

Cite this article:

Janani R (2025), PC Performance Breakdown of Death Stranding 2, AnaTechMaz, pp. 408