Insomniac Games has been pumping out hit after hit for the last several years, and Marvels Spider-Man 2, released in 2023, was the developers magnum opus. It took what worked in the original game and crafted a wider web of ideas with a better open world to create something that was above and beyond special.After a fair bit of waiting, Marvels Spider-Man 2 has finally made its way to the PC platform with support from Nixxes Software. But how does it compare to the original release, what are the enhancements on offer, and most importantly how does it performance compare against the PS5 version? Without further delay, lets just jump right in and find out.Whats New?Nixxes Software has proven itself to be a more than capable developer when it comes to porting PlayStation games on the PC platform. Insomniacs in-house engine has already been ported to the PC multiple times, in the form of Marvels Spider-Man, Miles Morales and Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart, and despite the sheer fluidity all of those games displayed on the PS5, they have largely been excellent PC ports.Spider-Man 2 on the PC platform is all about pushing the limits of what was possible on the PS5, and Insomniac has given quite a few options to enhance the image quality by a further margin. Chief among these options is the flexibility that comes with ray tracing, ranging from options such as DLSS ray reconstruction to modifying the draw distance for ray tracing and more.Of course, you also get the flexibility to play in ultrawide resolution alongside options for DLSS 4.5, AMDs FSR, and Intel XeSS to upscale the image. In addition to this, theres also support for DLSS frame-generation which should help to create a smoother experience for a wide range of PC gaming hardware.In broad strokes, the visual presentation hasnt changed all that much from what we saw in the PlayStation 5 release. Its an iterative upgrade after all, but that doesnt make these updates any less important. Despite a few major fumbles, that we will later discuss in later sections, Marvels Spider-Man 2 on PC is a mostly feature-rich rendition of the PlayStation 5 release.Test Bench Specs And PC Graphical SettingsMarvels Spider-Man 2 features a plethora of graphics sliders and quality control options that allow users to find the perfect balance between fidelity and performance. As previously mentioned, you can control everything from texture quality to ray tracing distance to upscaling options and much more. Helpful texts appear as you click on any setting which can guide you on what toggle or slider impacts what part of the visual presentation, however, having distinct meters for VRAM usage alongside screenshots would have made for a much smoother experience for tinkerers such as myself.For our test purposes, we ran the game on a system comprising AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti, 64 GB of RAM, and a PCI-e 4.0 NvME SSD to closely match the disk read-write speeds of the PS5. To put things into perspective, Insomniac Games recommends players have an AMD Ryzen 5 5600, 16 GB RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 to play the game at high settings at 1440p and 60fps.Unsurprisingly, Marvels Spider-Man 2 can be a highly demanding game for the PC audience, which has been the case, well, for almost all major AAA games for years. Marvels Spider-Man 2 flaunts a large and detailed open world with stunning character models and textures. It was a visual stunner on the PS5 so there will always be a concern about whether it can run at stable performance on the PC.Either way, our PC rig satisfies the recommended requirements so we went ahead and tested the game on mostly maxed-out settings with ray tracing switched on and set to very high. We were running the game at a resolution of 4K, with DLSS upscaling turned to Quality mode.Comparison With PS5We compared some sequences on the PC at the aforementioned settings against the PS5s Quality mode, and the results are, well, as expected. The first boot of the game takes some time to load which is most likely due to compiling shaders to optimize performance for further runs.Once you get into the game, some improvements are immediately noticeable over the PS5s Quality mode. Textures are a bit crisper which is most likely a direct result of better upscaling thanks to DLSS 4.5. Character models and material quality seem to remain the same across the board.Coming to the ray tracing, reflections look better on the PC as compared to the PS5 Quality mode. Additional bounce lighting adds more depth to the scenes, and the difference is especially noticeable in cinematics where close-up lighting helps bring characters to life. Post-processing effects dont show much noticeable improvement over the PS5 quality mode.We turned ray tracing reflection distance to a higher setting, and that results in more detailed scenes with better attention to detail in faraway objects. Shadows are also similarly cast at far distances, giving scenes a lot more depth. World streaming works pretty well for the most part, but there are some pop-in issues that come in the way of moment-to-moment gameplay which can be a bit off putting since high-speed movement is such a big part of the Spider-Man 2 experience.PC PerformanceAs for the framerate, Marvels Spider-Man 2 on PC was running at 60fps during some sequences. That being said, there were plenty of dips during computationally demanding scenes which knocked the frame rate to the lower 30s and sometimes even to around 25fps. DLSS frame generation and upscaling do help with smoothing out those rough performance figures by some margin, but it wasnt a locked 60fps experience.The lack of a stable frame rate is a pretty big deal given that Spider-Man 2 is a fast-paced experience and the significant performance drops impact the moment-to-moment gameplay. Furthermore, we also noticed a few bugs and glitches during our tests, such as one during an initial scene where Normans eyes seemed a bit weird. These bugs and glitches are mostly visual and dont impact the gameplay all that much, but its still worth noting because these issues dont exist on the PS5 release. At the time of writing this analysis, there are a number of reports highlighting crashes and several other errors while running the game. In fact, its something we witnessed as well while reviewing the PC version. Suffice to say, Spider-Man 2 isnt exactly off to a stable start on PC.ConclusionMarvels Spider-Man 2 on PC can be a mixed bag. While it doesnt disappoint in terms of PC-exclusive features, it definitely leaves a sour taste in the mouth with performance and optimization issues across the board. Right from long shader compilation on the first boot to unstable performance and bugs, Spider-Man 2 on PC could greatly benefit from a post-launch patch that could fix such issues.Again, what makes the whole ordeal surprising is the fact that Nixxes Software has previously done similar ports with much better results. However, the silver lining to it all is that fans finally have a way to experience Spider-Man 2 on PC albeit with issues. Lets hope that all of those will be sorted out in the near future.