God of War Ragnarök arrived on PC this week, offering a newly upgraded version of the PlayStation hit with a raft of graphical upgrades and new PC-specific features. To mark the occasion, Alex Battaglia spoke to Matt DeWald, lead producer at original developers Sony Santa Monica, and Steve Tolin, technical director of PC port developers Jetpack Interactive.
This far-ranging interview includes plenty of technical insight into the port, including how the game was designed to scale well beyond the console versions, while avoiding common PC bugbears like shader compilation stutter and inefficient usage of modern hybrid CPUs. As always, the interview below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
We’ll have the Digital Foundry breakdown of the PC port soon – look out for that early next week. Unfortunately, we didn’t quite have the time required with the review code to complete our coverage for the game’s launch – but what we can say is that Jetpack Interactive and Santa Monica Studio have delivered a strong port here. We’ll have more to say soon, along with those all-important optimised settings.
Digital Foundry: So when did the project to start porting God of War Ragnarok begin?
Matt DeWald: Yeah, so we’ve been working on it for about 18 to 24 months now. The majority of it before Ragnarok shipped was just getting the engine up to snuff on DX12. Once Ragnarok shipped fully, that’s when we were able to fully transition over and start the true porting process. Then when Valhalla finished, that’s when we were able to pull in all that content as well and wrap it up here. So a little bit between 18 to 24 months.
Digital Foundry: The first God of War game on PC was a DX11 port, while Ragnarök is DX12. What was it like porting everything you had to DX12?
Steve Tolin: We did DX11 for the first game because that gave us the results we needed at the time, but we knew in the background that moving to DX12 was what we needed to do, for all the performance gains that we wanted to achieve. Shader Model 6 and DX12 Ultimate kind of fulfilled the promise of what DX12 always could be, so that was the flip-over point where it became worth it.