When PlayStation finally began to bring console exclusives to PC with games like God of War, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and The Last of Us Part I, the launch of the Gran Turismo series felt like a no-brainer decision, considering how popular racing games are on the platform. Unfortunately, no entry in the series has been ported to date, and with the company seeking to keep its most popular franchises exclusive to its console, chances of the series developed by Polyphony Digital ever hitting Steam or the Epic Games Store are very slim, even if Sony is still bringing multiplayer and live service games like Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls to the platform.
As such, it is not surprising to learn that the series’ debut on PC has arrived today with an unofficial PC port that follows ports like Bloodborne and God of War 3 Remastered, stripping PlayStation of yet another exclusive.
The next PlayStation 4 exclusive to hit PC is Gran Turismo Sport, whose unofficial port available on GitHub comes with some additional features intended to improve performance and deliver a better experience. These include tweaks meant to address shader stuttering with three different options for shader compilation:
Precompile on the splash screen: every shader the game has used before on your PC is built while the splash screen shows, with a progress bar, and the game waits until it is done. The first start after many new shaders can take a few minutes; later starts take seconds. In a test, 13,600 stored pipelines were built in about 25 seconds.
Pause while new shaders compile: a shader the game has never used now pauses the game (its clock too) until it is compiled, with “Compiling new shaders…” in the bottom left, instead of a stutter and objects popping in. Compiled shaders are kept and reused, so a track only does this the first time.
Compile batching: with pausing on, one pause can also compile the shaders the next moments need (Short, Medium or Long: up to 0.1, 0.3 or 1 s), for fewer but longer pauses. Off by default.
Shader compiles run on the CPU’s efficiency cores, so the game’s own threads keep the fast cores.
In addition, this Gran Turismo Sport unofficial port supports AMD FSR 3.1 frame generation, but with some issues. As the game provides no motion vectors, fast edges and the interface inevitably have ghosting issues, although the developer promises a good experience when the game runs at above 40 FPS.
While most would have been happier with a port of Gran Turismo 7, which may still make its way onto PC unofficially very soon with a port of the PlayStation 4 version, having Gran Turismo Sport on PC in some capacity is still remarkable for many reasons. Although there’s no shortage of racing games on PC, the Gran Turismo series remains a unique proposition that PC players who never had the chance to try it out will certainly appreciate.
About the author: Francesco De Meo has been covering video games and technology since 2012, starting his career at small outlets like Gamersyndrome and GeekSnack.
After joining Wccftech gaming section in 2015, he quickly expanded his video gaming coverage with in-depth reporting, interviews with iconic industry figures such as Grasshopper Manufacture founder and No More Heroes creator Goichi “Suda51” Suda, Resident Evil series creator Shinji Mikami, Team NINJA’s president and Nioh series director Fumihiko Yasuda, and Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama, reviews and on-the-ground coverage of major industry events such as Gamescom and E3.
When he’s not reporting or reviewing, Francesco can be found playing the genres he loves most, spending time with his six cats, reading, writing music, playing guitar and drumming for his progressive rock band.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.