Make the Devil cry on your PC next week

Gaming on the PC has come a long way, it wasn’t long ago when you had to worry about whether or not the PC version of a game whose lead platform was a console was going to be broken or not. Thankfully, since the advent of Steam and the user-friendly effect it’s had on PC gaming as a whole, the case of the borked PC port is the exception rather than the rule. Case in point: Look at the difference in the quality between the ports of Resident Evil 4 and 5 – it’s night and day.

Next week, DMC: Devil May Cry  will be available on PC, one week later than its console counterparts. The minor delay was due to the logistics of the porting process; Capcom did not port the game in-house, they enlisted the services of QLOC, a European services company that handles the likes of QA, localization, and porting across almost every platform. If you are playing the game via Steam, you’ll enjoy features such as cloud saves, achievements, leaderboards, and community support. The game will also include controller support in addition to mouse and keyboard… but you’d be committing a sin if you played this game with anything other than a standard controller.

Reports from the handful of publications that have reviewed the game are reporting solid 60fps gameplay and stunning visuals at the higher resolutions. “Not only does it hold at 60 frames per second, but during initial testing it actually hovered around 100 FPS”, reports IGN in their review. The IGN editor doesn’t disclose the specs of the test system, and since QLOC reports that the game is optimized for AMD Crossfire technology, it’s very possible they could have playing with a beast of a machine.

Kotaku, on the other hand, goes more in-depth about the particulars of the PC port’s performance and shares with us his somewhat modest, medium range system specs. Sporting an Intel i5 processor and GeForce GTX 660 (this is the low end of the 600 series), Kotaku reports “a locked 60 frames-per-second with the settings turned up to Ultra and the HD effects on”.

From the looks of it, PC gamers have another excellent port job from Capcom to look forward to, although it doesn’t surprise me considering how impressive Resident Evil 5 was. If you didn’t play RE5, it ran smooth as butter and even featured DX10 effects that the console versions did not. I did notice that QLOC hasn’t specifically mentioned any DX10 or DX11 effects being added to DMC PC, and the recommended system requirements lists a DX9 card or greater. This leads me to believe that there will be no 10 or 11 effects, which is slightly disappointing.

All the same, with the very positive critical reception I’m super excited to jump back into the DMC universe and I hope many of you are too. If you haven’t already bought the game on 360 or PS3 and you have a decent PC, show Capcom you appreciate a good port and go with the PC version.