{"id":70,"date":"2022-02-09T14:53:56","date_gmt":"2022-02-09T14:53:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/engadget.vip\/?p=70"},"modified":"2022-02-09T14:53:56","modified_gmt":"2022-02-09T14:53:56","slug":"marvels-guardians-of-the-galaxy-tech-review-give-it-a-minute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/?p=70","title":{"rendered":"Marvel\u2019s Guardians of the Galaxy tech review \u2014 Give it a minute"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>

Marvel\u2019s Guardians of the Galaxy\u00a0<\/em>is finally out for everyone to blast their way through. The PC version has a fairly large install size and I had a couple of glaring problems with it, but I can\u2019t say this isn\u2019t a gorgeous game that usually\u00a0<\/em>runs well. The PC version made some pretty big headlines the other week when it announced that it was cutting its install size down from 120 GB to about 80 GB. When I first installed the game it was\u00a0<\/em>indeed about 120 GB. Now, though? It\u2019s 75 GB. That\u2019s a pretty successful optimization if I do say so myself.<\/p>\n

First up, let\u2019s take a look at the game\u2019s specs.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

MINIMUM<\/strong><\/p>\n

CPU: <\/strong>AMD Ryzen 5 1400 \/ Intel Core i5-4460
\nGPU: N<\/strong>VIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 \/ AMD Radeon RX 570
\nRAM: <\/strong>8 GB RAM<\/p>\n

RECOMMENDED<\/strong><\/p>\n

CPU: <\/strong>AMD Ryzen 5 1600 \/ Intel Core i7-4790
\nGPU:<\/strong> NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super \/ AMD Radeon RX 590
\nRAM: <\/strong>16 GB RAM<\/p>\n

REVIEWER<\/strong><\/p>\n

CPU: <\/strong>AMD Ryzen 5 2600x
\nGPU: <\/strong>AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
\nRAM: <\/strong>16 GB RAM<\/p>\n

To be clear here, those recommended specs are\u00a0not\u00a0<\/em>helpful or accurate. My rig is better than the recommended, but I didn\u2019t even get a constant 60 fps on mostly maxed settings. It was fine, but I dropped to the low 50s a lot. I even had one of the more intensive settings set to low. Granted, the game would occasionally go up to the 75-90 territory while playing, so it wasn\u2019t all bad. But, if you\u2019re using something similar to the recommended specs, you probably aren\u2019t going to be playing Marvel\u2019s Guardians of the Galaxy\u00a0<\/em>at 60 fps. I did play at 1440p, though, so your mileage may absolutely vary.<\/p>\n

My time with the game was pretty good, but I did have two rather large problems while playing. The most obnoxious of these is that, during cutscenes, audio would drop out. Attempting to pause the game would make it freeze for a minute or two. This happened time and time again, and I have no idea why. Additionally, with a DualShock 4, R2 worked perfectly fine for shooting but I wasn\u2019t able to scan items with it. Instead, I had to take my right hand off my controller and scan things using my mouse\u2019s left click. It wasn\u2019t a huge issue for me due to my specific setup, but if it happens to other folks, they\u2019re going to be in a spot of bother, as you need<\/em> to scan things. I couldn\u2019t find any way to fix either of these issues. Now, let\u2019s look at the display and graphics settings.<\/p>\n

\"20211026005549<\/p>\n

\"20211026005554<\/p>\n

As you can see, this comes with support for multiple refresh rates, dynamic resolution, CAS sharpening, and DLSS. I couldn\u2019t test the DLSS because I have an AMD card. It\u2019s also the bane of my existence, so there\u2019s that. I had the game set at 120 fps even though I never got anywhere near that. Probably should have gone for HDR instead. Oops. Also, the game pauses when you alt-tab. Not freezes, but it literally goes to the pause screen immediately. Here are the graphics options.<\/p>\n

\"20211026005602<\/p>\n

\"20211026005605<\/p>\n

For a AAA game, there was less here than I was expecting. Strangely, you can only change texture quality after a restart, so you can\u2019t tweak that on the fly and check the fps impact immediately. It\u2019s been a while since I\u2019ve seen a game do that. Anisotropic filtering ranges from x2 to x16, and the only ones of the usual suspects are texture quality, level of detail, and shadow quality. Ray tracing is in but, again, AMD card. The only other setting that\u2019ll impact fps is light scattering, maybe. I set that to low to get a few extra frames and I think<\/em> it helped, maybe? Here, look at these comparison shots.<\/p>\n

\"Level<\/p>\n

Level Of Detail High<\/p>\n

\"Level<\/p>\n

Level Of Detail Low<\/p>\n

\"Shadow<\/p>\n

Shadow Quality High<\/p>\n

\"Shadow<\/p>\n

Shadow Quality Low<\/p>\n

\"Anisotropic<\/p>\n

Anisotropic Off<\/p>\n

\"Anisotropic<\/p>\n

Anisotropic X16<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/p>\n

Screen Space Reflections On<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/p>\n

Screen Space Reflections Off<\/p>\n

\"Light<\/p>\n

Light Scattering High<\/p>\n

\"Light<\/p>\n

Light Scattering Low<\/p>\n

Another really good-lookin\u2019 game, no matter what you do to it. Well, not Star Lord\u2019s hair. That\u2019s just stupid. And this is coming from a bald guy. Now onto controls.<\/p>\n

\"20211026005705<\/p>\n

You can rebind all the keys on your keyboard and mouse. Standard, but appreciated. On controller you, uh, can\u2019t rebind anything. Also kind of standard, sadly. Especially given the above stated \u201ccan\u2019t scan with R2\u201d issue. Maybe my controller just sucks. Anyway, it\u2019s hard to say how good of a version this is until other PC players chime in and let us know if it happened to them too. Still, I was able to finish the game without issue, so at least there\u2019s that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marvel\u2019s Guardians of the Galaxy\u00a0is finally out for everyone to blast their way through. The PC version has a fairly large install size and I had a couple of glaring problems with it, but I can\u2019t say this isn\u2019t a gorgeous game that usually\u00a0runs well. The PC version made some pretty big headlines the other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":71,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[58,59,39],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/71"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}