With some surprise, i just took note of the start of the game.

I found myself both charmed with the graphics and a bit puzzled when i tried to place the starting cinematic with the scrumble of information hidden inside my brain.

A nice surprise was to find out that with the highest settings and dlss - balanced, powerdraw flowed around the 250 and 300 watt numbers. Another surprise was for the fact that i was not able to hit 144 fps which equals the refresh rate of my 2k monitor. Numbers dropped as low as 118 fps when in motion! The stationary number can be found in the attached screenshots (picture gollum 1) together with some other data taken by the nvdia OSD.

The last surprise was me noticing that sadly i was not able to write a complete review based on the first minutes of gameplay.

I am looking forward to another adventure in the Lord of the Rings spirit. And that was maybe my last surprise.

I only played the first two levels, but my performance was very "ok to great" right out the gate. I have an intel 10900k paired with a RTX 3080, 32 GB of DDR4 3200mhz, and a 2TB NVmE SSD.
As we all know, the recommended and minimum specs were just all over the place and made no sense whatsoever.
Needless to say, I decided to use Epic settings, V-sync, RT, Gollum hair whatever option on, and DLSS Quality at 1440p. I was keeping an almost locked 100fps at most points with the FPS going as low as 70 in the exact same spots regardless of graphics settings used. The limiting factor is VRAM. I was using almost 8.5 GB of it in the opening tutorial and can only assume that later, this will be an issue forcing me to either lower settings, or cap to 60 fps.
The loading stutters are really the only performance issues I noticed. Well, aside from the fact that with RT on, my card was running at 73 C....and that's with generous air circulation and a liquid cooled CPU.

After reading the pc gamer review today, i decided on waiting a bit before i continue. It seems that especially the PS5 crowd was experiencing major technical issues. It was nice for a change to discover that the pc crowd for once didn't pull the shortest stick. I do hope they manage to avoid a similar path that cyberpunk 2077 had. Being pulled from the PS5 store etc.

Oh also a 10900k present, and 32 gb's or ram and coincedental.. a 2 Tb nvme.

I'll probably go forth with Tomb Raider hair for now and hopefully after finishing the trilogy Gollum has become a sweet little gem of a game