God of War Ragnarok PC Performance Review

God of War Ragnarok is finally on PC — almost two years after it was initially launched on the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. This is another PlayStation-exclusive title that has made its way onto PC, after Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Ghost of Tsushima, The Last of Us Part 1, Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, and more. Santa Monica Studios and Jetpack Interactive have teamed up for yet another brilliant port, after the smooth performance of God of War (2018).

The Ragnarok port is well-optimised and offers a bunch of settings for PC gamers to tweak around. It also adds upscaling tech such as DLSS, FSR 3.1, and Intel XeSS. Moreover, there’s support for ultrawide monitors so that you can enjoy travelling to all the nine realms on a wider screen. Despite the crisp visuals that lie in the game, Ragnarok does not demand much in terms of raw power — what it does demand, though, is a lot of space on your SSD.

God Of War Ragnarok PC System Requirements

Unlike Star Wars Outlaws, Ragnarok is not really asking for a lot in terms of hardware. That’s good because this means it’s made for the masses. The game can run at “Medium” graphic settings even with the Ryzen 5 3600 with about 60 fps average. The memory requirements are also not very overwhelming, with even the highest settings requiring 16GB. That said, the game does ask you to clean up 190GB of space from your SSD.

God of War Ragnarok PC Minimum Requirements for Low Graphics (1080p at 30fps)

Processor Intel Core i5-4670K or AMD Ryzen 3 1200
RAM 8 GB
GPU Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD RX 5500XT
Storage 190 GB available storage
OS Windows 10, Windows 11

God of War Ragnarok PC Recommended Requirements for Medium Graphics (1080p at 60fps)

Processor Intel Core i5-8600 or AMD Ryzen 5 3600
RAM 16 GB
GPU Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super or AMD RX 5700
Storage 190 GB available storage
OS Windows 10, Windows 11

God Of War Ragnarok PC Recommended Requirements for High Graphics (1440p at 60fps)

Processor Intel Core i7-7700K or AMD Ryzen 7 2700X
RAM 16 GB
GPU Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 or AMD RX 6800
Storage 190 GB available storage
OS Windows 10, Windows 11

God of War Ragnarok PC Recommended Requirements for High Graphics (4K at 60fps)

Processor Intel Core i7-7700K or AMD Ryzen 7 2700X
RAM 16 GB
GPU Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080Ti or AMD RX 6900XT
Storage 190 GB available storage
OS Windows 10, Windows 11

God of War Ragnarok PC Recommended Requirements for Ultra Graphics (4K at 60fps)

Processor Intel Core i5-11600K or AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
RAM 16 GB
GPU Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070Ti or AMD RX 7900 XT
Storage 190 GB available storage
OS Windows 10, Windows 11

Our Test Bench

We tested God of War Ragnarok on the newly launched AMD Ryzen 7 9700X, which is built on the Zen 5 architecture and comes with 8 cores and 16 threads. The processor has a base clock speed of 3.8GHz and a boost of 5.5GHz. It also gets a 32MB L3 cache. This chip is cooled using the Antec Vortex 360 AIO.

The AMD Ryzen 7 9700X sits beneath the Antec 360 AIO Cooler

For this performance piece, the 9700X sits on the MSI X670E Gaming Plus WiFi which has a very unique finish that sets it apart from most of the other boards in the market. It comes with all the bells and whistles like an extended heatsink design, support for DDR5 memory, PCIe 5.0 slot, and a wide array of I/O ports, one of which also includes a USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 Type-C port.

Gigabyte’s GeForce RTX 4070 Windforce handles the graphics duties with 12GB VRAM, which is more than enough for Ragnarok. These were accompanied by Kingston’s Fury Renegade 48GB non-binary RAM sticks running at 5600MT/s.

Storage duties were handled by the WD Black SN850X, which is known to be one of the best gaming SSD options in the market. The game was run on the MSI G274F, a 180Hz 1080p gaming monitor. With all that out of the way, let’s take a look at how God of War Ragnarok performed on our rig.

God Of War Ragnarok PC Graphics Settings and Features

Ragnarok has a variety of settings to tweak around — it’s not as vast as Star Wars Outlaws, but it covers the basics well. You can manually set the motion blur and film grain from the settings, but what’s missing is an FOV slider. It’s not something that bugged me, but something that’s certainly worth mentioning. The game also requires you to sign into a valid PlayStation Network account.

Credit: Sony/Santa Monica Studios

Ragnarok has support for upscaling trickeries such as Nvidia DLSS 3.7, AMD FSR 3.1, Intel XeSS, and the usual temporal anti-aliasing (TAA). You also get frame generation on both Nvidia (provided you are on RTX 40 series) and AMD cards. Ragnarok does not require you to restart the game when trying out different graphics presets. It will also show you a preview of the settings in the background along with a VRAM usage monitor, which comes in handy. That said, the game does lack any kind of ray-tracing support.

You also get to enable Nvidia Reflex. Besides that, there’s support for Dualshock 4 and Dualsense. You also get full haptic support on the latter, which pretty much aligns with the experience you would get on a PS5. The game also utilises the touchpad on your Dualsense controller, which can be used by assigning a few shortcuts from the gameplay settings. Ragnarok also has support for 21:9 and 32:9 ultrawide monitors, which is good.

God Of War Ragnarok PC Performance

The game has been tested across all settings, ranging from Low, Medium, High, and Ultra. The tests were done with Nvidia Reflex enabled with boost. We have also toggled on Nvidia DLSS with the quality set to “Quality” and frame generation enabled. The table below will give you average fps, 0.2%, and 1% lows as well.

Preset Average fps Average 1% fps Average 0.2% fps
Low 308 fps 268 fps 256 fps
Medium 215 fps 182 fps 176 fps
High 194 fps 166 fps 159 fps
Ultra 174 fps 160 fps 149 fps

After the initial release, I noticed the game facing a couple of crashes. While this has been fixed after a few updates, it still blacks out after switching monitors from the settings, eventually requiring a force quit and restart.

Credit: Sony/Santa Monica Studios

Ragnarok has a stunning storytelling style, which is something only Santa Monica Studios can pull off. It’s a visual and cinematic experience that’s aided by its no-cut shots. This is portrayed well in the PC port. The game did not cause any issues when travelling through the nine realms or fighting against bosses like The Huntress, Bjorn, and Thor. This is evident with the average 1% lows. It does not falter when engaging with a lot of enemies and dealing damage with either the Blades of Chaos or the Leviathan Axe. The same consistency remains when you activate Spartan Rage.

Credit: Sony/Santa Monica Studios

Ragnarok remains very respectable about VRAM usage. It consumed about 4GB with the graphics set to “Low”. Take it up to “Ultra” and it takes up just about 7GB. If you have a powerful rig, you can also try playing the game with frame generation and DLSS disabled. This way, you don’t have to witness the unwelcome artefacts from the latter.

Should You Buy God Of War Ragnarok on PC?

God of War Ragnarok is available on Steam and Epic Games in two different editions. The base game will cost you Rs 3,999, while a Digital Deluxe Edition is priced at Rs 4,799.

Credit: Sony/Santa Monica Studios

This is by far one of the easiest game recommendations I will ever make. God of War Ragnarok is a masterpiece that gives the Norse era of Kratos and Atreus a perfect goodbye. The combat, story, direction, visuals, perk system, and the rest make this game a must-play.

What’s more commendable besides the storyline is the neatly optimised port that does not sideline gamers with older or not-so-powerful hardware.