Bethesda has given PC users the tools to unlock The Evil Within's built-in 30fps cap, but we couldn't help but wonder - just how much computational power is required to double the game's frame-rate and produce a sustained, consistent 60fps experience at 1080p? It turns out that our PC test rig - fitted with a Core i7 3770K overclocked to 4.3GHz and matched with 16GB of DDR3 - couldn't handle it, not even when outfitted with the GeForce GTX 980, the fastest single-chip graphics card available on the market today.

What's curious is that despite The Evil Within's apparently mammoth system requirements for the best experience, what looks like a straight, under-optimised PC conversion works fairly well with entry-level enthusiast hardware. As we've seen in the past, a hard 30fps lock can give both CPU and GPU a lot of "wiggle room" - and in the case of The Evil Within, a lowly Core i3 4130 paired with a £100 GTX 750 Ti produces an experience very close indeed to the PS4 version. The problem is scalability - while it's relatively straightforward to maintain 30fps at higher resolutions with a good enthusiast card, locking to 60fps at 1080p just wasn't possible on any of the hardware configurations we tested.

In the video below, you'll find a broad overview of the components we tested and the results gained. In addition to the GTX 750 Ti, 760 and 980, we've also played the game on other enthusiast-level top-line GPUs, including the GTX 780 and the AMD Radeon R9 290X - and unfortunately none of them sustain anything approaching a flawlessly smooth 1080p60 update.

Right now, resolution seems to be the only dimension in scalability available - certainly in terms of quality presets, there's nothing here that significantly moves image quality beyond PlayStation 4 standard. And that's a real shame. There are three anti-aliasing settings - FXAA, MLAA and SMAA - but none of them do a particularly good job in tackling the myriad aliasing issues the game features. Forcing multi-sampling (MSAA) via the GPU control panel also fails to refine image quality to any noticeable extent, while Nvidia's built-in super-sampling technology - DSR - also seems non-functional on this particular title.

This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings The Evil Within tested across multiple CPUs and GPUs reveals a game that can hit PlayStation 4 standards relatively easily, but seems incapable of locking at 1080p60, no matter what hardware we threw at it.

Bethesda has warned of issues in utilising the built-in tools that allow PC users to dabble with the technical set-up of the game, but has made noises about getting the game to run at 60fps. Based on what we've been playing over the last couple of days, that is looking like a gargantuan optimisation effort. In the here and now, The Evil Within joins the ranks of a steadily growing number of disappointing PC conversions, where achieving console-style image quality and performance is relatively straightforward on mid-range gaming PCs, but scaling up beyond the 30fps console standard to a locked 60fps proves inordinately difficult.

In the case of The Evil Within, it's a little strange, bearing in mind that the id Tech 5 engine on which it is based was designed by John Carmack and his colleagues with 60fps gameplay in mind - to the point where Jens Matthies, Creative Director at Machine Games noted that the technology effectively forced them into running Wolfenstein: The New Order at 60fps.

What's clear is that the engine has been dramatically altered for this new game - The Evil Within's lighting system is quite unlike any other id Tech 5 title's - but regardless, the performance bottlenecks we encountered in the PC version are deeply disappointing. Our tests here continue, and we hope to post our full Xbox One/PS4/PC comparison in the next couple of days.