Metal Gear Solid Delta: A Comprehensive Performance and Graphics Overview

It's been such a long time coming that we almost forgot Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater would even release this year! But, thankfully it's now out-and-about, and we can offer you first-hand experience with the special Deluxe Edition build, granting us a few days' worth of early access to the game. You can grab one of those, too, by using this link! There's a neat little early bird 20% discount in place, if you're quick about it!

Setting that aside for a bit, it's time to talk hard facts and verifiable information, and boy howdy have we got a lot of those. Metal Gear Solid Delta is ostensibly the same kind of game as the Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered from earlier this year. This is the same exact tech-stack as the original title had back in the day, except with a host of gameplay updates thrown in for good measure. Further, Unreal Engine 5 now handles the graphics side of things, affording the classic a fancy new lick of paint.

It's this Unreal Engine 5 lick of paint that we're going to discuss here today: specifically how (well or unwell) it runs on a variety of PCs and the Steam Deck, as well as its stability and overall presentation. On all of these fronts, we've got news both good and bad, so bear with us as we go over it all in short order.

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Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater Performance Review - All You Need to Know

Here's the short of it, before the long of it: Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is a generally fine visual update for a beloved classic, and it looks the part. If you've got a reasonably fast PC, it's going to run just fine at a stable 60 FPS. If you've got a non-standard display or want to go over the 60 FPS cap, though, that's where we run into problems.

That's right, folks: the Snake Eater remake behaves almost like it's been developed by FromSoftware. There's no support for non-standard display aspect ratios, so you're stuck with a 16:9 image with black bars, and there's no in-game way to get more than 60 frames-per-second either. Solutions for both of these problems will spring up in due time, as they usually do, but we'd be lying if we said this wasn't a disappointment.

Setting that aside, we are happy to report that this is one of the treasured few Unreal Engine 5 projects that doesn't suffer from excessive performance issues and traversal stutters. Indeed, for all its problems, MGS Delta actually runs very well at top-tier settings, even on a middle-of-the-road PC. It even comes with support for all the modern upscaling options, giving most PC players a way to scale the experience up and down until they hit the 60 FPS cap 99% of the time.

The game asks you on first boot what kind of visual experience you're aiming for, allowing you to choose between a more performant, more visually impressive, or balanced experience. It's a fine enough starter, but we're obviously interested in the nitty-gritty of actual granular graphics settings, and they are as follows:

It's not a massive list, granted, but it gives you more than enough to fiddle about with. For the most part, we recommend going with TSR if you can't choose DLSS, and the 'Quality' mode preset. If you're on DLSS, we've seen a substantial uplift in 'Native' (DLAA) upscaling through the use of the DLSS Swapper utility. Something to keep in mind if you're technically-minded.

Otherwise, if Ultra can't keep you at 60 FPS, simply lower the 'Graphics Quality' option down a notch or two. Both Medium and High still look plenty good, and they'll allow you to get more performance out of your rig if the going gets tough.

A thing to note here is that the Global Illumination implementation hammers your system hard indoors, so that's where the most prominent performance drops will show up. Use indoor sequences to stress-test your system and see how well it actually does in real-world gameplay.

Can you play Metal Gear Solid Delta on the Steam Deck?

Well... yes and no. We wouldn't recommend it, if there's a different option on the table for you. In-home streaming from a more powerful piece of hardware would be ideal, because even though you can get a stable-ish 30 FPS on the Steam Deck, it necessitates compromising image quality to a frankly ridiculous degree.

You will absolutely have to settle for a crummy 25-30 FPS performance target with the Deck going full-tilt from the word go. Crucially, you'll also have to settle for the lowest possible settings with upscaling active, and the best image quality option you'll have at your disposal is the 'TSR Balanced' scaler. In other words, the Snake Eater Remake runs excruciatingly poorly on the Steam Deck, and it looks very bad to boot. It's not an experience we recommend you go for, all in all.

Summarizing It All

In a broad sense, then, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is a fairly decent showing. It works without many faults, and even though it's not a good fit for our baseline PC gaming handheld, the Steam Deck, it scales reasonably well if you've got a reasonably decent machine. Anything beyond the Ryzen 5 3600 and the RTX 2070 should be able to get a stable 60 FPS at Medium settings, from what our testing has shown so far!

All that being said, there's much to be disappointed about here, too. With no support for arbitrary aspect ratios and a frankly mind-boggling 60 FPS cap, the game feels outdated in some way out-of-the-box. Having to rely on third-party utilities such as Lossless Scaling for a proper performance uplift is not a great showing, and it mars an otherwise stellar gameplay experience.

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Deathly serious stuff.