Port Authority: Dead Space 3

It's here: Dead Space 3 has arrived on PC, day and date with its console brethren. We've heard some disappointing, scary-sounding stuff about this port leading up to release, but is it really as dire a situation as that? Time to dig through the technical details to find out just what kind of PC version EA has delivered to us.

System Requirements

CPU: 2.8GHz processor or equivalent
RAM: 1GB (XP) or 2GB (Vista or Windows 7)
Videocard: GeForce 6800 / ATI X1600 Pro or better
Hard Drive: 10GB

DRM

Like pretty much everything from EA these days, Dead Space 3 requires that you install Origin to play, and it will launch every time you want to run your game. After the initial online activation, I was able to successfully start it up and play in offline mode. For what it's worth, I haven't had any problems with it yet.

Graphics Settings


For all the crap it's gotten for being a bare-bones port, Dead Space 3's PC graphics options aren't that terrible. In fact, if not for the lack of a texture-quality selection this would actually be a reasonably good list of options:

Vsync (on/off), bloom (on/off), glow (on/off), depth of field (on/off), SSAO (on/off), screen space reflections (on/off), blur (on/off), post processing (on/off), motion blur (on/off), flares (on/off), distortion (on/off), light quality (two options), light accumulation (two options), decals (on/off), anti-aliasing (five options), shader quality (three options), shadow quality (six options), anisotropic filtering (up to 16x).

We're notably missing a field-of-view adjustment, but since this is a third-person shooter, that's not as big of a deal as it would've been with a first-person game. As a welcome surprise, it does offer a borderless full-screen windowed mode for super-smooth alt-tabbing -- I wish more games would do this. And of course, there are full resolution options.

Quality Comparisons

And aside from the muddy texture quality, Dead Space 3 doesn't look bad in action. Most of the differences between quality settings we're seeing here are lighting and shadows, which in a dark game like this make a huge difference.

Mouse over to compare settings.

Quality: Low

Quality: Medium

Quality: Very High

Mouse over to compare settings.

Quality: Low

Quality: Medium

Quality: Very High

Audio Options


Audio is stereo or 5.1 surround -- gotta have that for a creepy game in which aliens like to sneak up behind you. The rest is music, voice, and SFX mixers, plus a subtitle option.

Control Settings



Keys are fully customizable, with only a few exceptions (such as the tilde key). All mouse buttons are recognized. Plus there are standard options to invert the X or Y axis, and adjust the sensitivity, though there is no mouse acceleration toggle. DS3 will auto-detect when a gamepad is plugged in and change the on-screen prompts on the fly, so you don't have to go into the menu to change a setting.

Menus

Not bad. Everything's clickable with no problems, and the in-screen holographic menus that Dead Space is famous for work as well here as they ever have. However, I'm unable to skip some cutscenes, which is some powerful stupid in a game with checkpoint saves.

Performance

There's definitely no framerate cap in effect here. Running on my Core i7 CPU and GeForce GTX 570 videocard, FRAPS reported my framerate at over 100 at maxed-out settings during my first hour of play. You aren't likely going to have any trouble running Dead Space 3, especially if you've played the previous two.

Multiplayer

The two-player co-op is all run through Origin, which believe it or not, is actually a fairly smooth system for inviting friends to play. There's even a quick-match button that allows you to filter out random games by various criteria, including story location and difficulty level.

Saves


Dead Space 3 gives us five save slots for its checkpoint-only save system, and save files are stored in the My Documents\EA Games\Dead Space 3 folder if you want to manually back them up or swap them. Plus Origin automatically syncs those saves to the cloud.

Conclusion

It's not as bad as we'd feared. Dead Space 3 is at least as good a port as the previous two -- maybe a bit better, even. However, as in those cases the lack of high-quality textures is a major oversight that turns what could've been a really sharp-looking game into something that looks dated fresh out of the box. (Fortunately most of the time it's so dark you probably won't notice as much.) This is a serviceable port that works as you'd expect, with few surprises.

Port Grade: C+