Death Stranding runs on DirectX 12 on PC, was built for 60FPS

Kojima Productions built Death Stranding specifically for 60FPS, but had to dial things back on PS4. The PC version is the way the game was meant to be played.

In a recent interview with Digital Foundry, Kojima Productions' technical director Akio Sakamoto confirms the game was always built to run at 60FPS. Of course KojiPro had to scale things down to 30FPS on the PS4 and PS4 Pro. The PC port is the purest form of Kojima's original vision. We know Death Stranding exceeds 60FPS (more on that in our review coming soon) and is fully optimized for both AMD and NVIDIA cards, complete with DLSS 2.0 tech on RTX cards, but an interesting surprise is how the game was tweaked to run on DirectX 12.

Remember that development of the PC version started alongside the console game years ago. KojiPro used Guerrilla Games' Decima Engine to make Death Stranding, which was also used for Horizon Zero Dawn. But for the PC version, KojiPro used a DirectX 12 version of Decima. The upcoming Horizon Zero Dawn PC port will also use DX12.

"Firstly, our goal from a developer standpoint was that we didn't want to do anything technically lower than what we accomplished on PS4. So, when we looked at the PS4-dedicated API and thought about how to bring it to PC, we realized that it would be very difficult to maintain the same quality if we worked with DirectX 11."

"Because of this, the next step was to think about DirectX 12 or Vulkan. We started to discuss these technical issues with our partners NVIDIA and AMD, while also looking into information from various other sources. We of course looked at the market at that time (how many people are using Windows 10 in the market, or information on DX12 etc) and also knew we needed to consider the timing of the PC version release. The result of all this discussion and debate was that we decided to go with DX12. I could also mention that not much information on Vulkan was available at the time either."

"We already had the PC version of Decima as a development tool. But concerning the graphics side, to have the performance running as good as on the PS4, we needed to develop in a way that we could utilize the most out of DirectX 12. At that time, not much information was available for DirectX 12, so this was the most difficult part."

Digital Foundry also notes that some DirectX 12 video cards can't run Death Stranding, particularly first-gen GCN 1.0 architecture cards like the AMD Radeon R9 270X.

Keep an eye out for our feature-length Death Stranding PC review coming tomorrow.