We've already covered Death Stranding: Director's Cut last September, when Hideo Kojima's unique epic received a range of tech and content upgrades for its PlayStation 5 debut. Chief amongst them was the ability to play the game at a targeted 60 frames per second - something that wasn't possible on the PS4 original, even though Kojima Productions originally designed the game for this performance target. The Director's Cut is now available on PC but the upgrade isn't quite so marked. After all, 60fps was on the table for PC users from day one, the port was exceptional and the DLSS implementation opened the door to great performance at high frame-rates.
Obviously, the content improvements of the Director's Cut make their way across, but is there anything new from a technical perspective? Well, the original Death Stranding port's 'default' graphics settings effectively delivered PS4 Pro quality to PC, with only limited upwards scalability. In the case of the Director's Cut, default now delivers the same improved visuals as PS5, which basically means that draw distance has been pushed out a touch while everything else remains much the same.
The Director's Cut also ships with a more refined version of DLSS - version 2.3.7, according to the files. This reduces and eliminates the occasional ghosting trails seen in the initial release. It's worth pointing out that DLSS .dll downloads are readily available for download, and there's nothing stopping you replacing the .dll in the original release for improved DLSS image quality. Eventually, the game will also have XeSS image reconstruction upscale, but we should not expect that until desktop Intel Arc GPUs arrive in the summer.