Returnal’s been out for almost a year and a half now, and is currently out on PlayStation 5. Developed by Housemarque, the game has been pretty firmly available only as a PlayStation exclusive. Though, a PC version may be coming sooner than people give it credit for. Let’s break today's news down because it is quite a doozy.
The Icon-era forums are where this leak originates from, and when you visit the link, you’ll find that there indeed exists a PC version of the title. Not only that, but the leaked build also sports ray-tracing and various other graphics features like NVIDIA DLSS. The leaked gameplay footage has been recently taken down by Sony, but you can see screenshots by Videocardz worth highlighting below:
The video was extremely short, but it did what it was supposed to. Various optimizations exist inside, like image quality or performance, for instance. An unhooked framerate is also available. When it comes to DLSS, you can choose between Balanced, Performance, Quality, and Ultra variants of the latter two (with a DLSS Sharpness slider available).
AMD FSR features are also packaged in this supposed version of Returnal, with a similar set of available features. However, they lack the sharpness slider that NVIDIA’s DLSS features have. NVIDIA Image Scaling (NIS) is also within the game’s features, giving you multiple options to really support your graphics card if need be.
Outside of the leaked gameplay shown above, we can see a pattern. Sony has been sending some of their games over to PCs in the past few months, such as Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered (and later Spider-Man: Miles Morales). While a release date certainly has not been confirmed just yet for Returnal, the fact that a PC build is available for people to see may suggest it is coming soon.
Maybe it could happen at the next PlayStation State of Play, whenever that may be, but that’s just speculation. We’ll continue to update as more information on Returnal is released. Returnal is available now exclusively on PlayStation 5.