Horizon Forbidden West - PS5 vs PS4 vs PS4 Pro - Can Cross-Gen Deliver For All Gamers?

we've already examined horizon forbidden west running at its best on playstation 5 but of course many people are wondering how does the game look and run on playstation 4 gorilla has teased the ps4 version in tweets but i think the difference can only be enjoyed and appreciated when you look a little bit closer which is exactly what we're going to do today and to do this i wanted to bring along richard ledbetter to discuss this with me because you've also sampled the game on both platforms absolutely and it's absolutely fascinating because here's the challenge right gorilla has to make this game an absolute showcase for playstation 5 but at the same time there's like over 120 million ps4 class systems out there and those guys need to have a good experience too right so to get that level of scalability that works on systems that are literally a generation apart and to have playstation 4 pro kind of sandwiched in the middle there the challenge is i don't know i mean we were talking about this earlier it's similar to what playground games had to do with forza horizon 5. yes it's very much that sort of situation where you have a good nice looking experience on the last gen machines but when you bring it over to the new systems there's just this extra layer of detail that's brought into the picture and we're going to talk about all that because i have a ton of comparison shots to share today but first let's talk about the the basics people are going to want to know what's the resolution situation like on these systems so obviously in that original video i noted ps5 has two targets there's the native 4k30 mode which is what we're going to use for comparison here as well as the 1800p 60fps mode that uses checkerboard rendering uh as you might expect ps4 pro is also 1800p with checkerboard rendering but targeting 30 frames per second and it does use dynamic resolution scaling which does seem to kick in more than anything i saw on the ps5 right yeah absolutely and yeah this is an interesting one right because the um terror flop differential between the pro and the playstation 5 it's something like just over two point something x higher on the playstation five but you're getting much more than twice the level of detail here plus twice the frame rate so this is an example of how gorilla games have actually you know really tapped into the playstation 5 to get much more out of it than simply scaling up an existing older gen project absolutely uh it is quite amazing to see that and of course we can't leave out the base playstation 4 can we that old 2013 unit is still cranking along and this one also uh like horizon one runs at 1080p at 30 frames per second but this time there is dynamic resolution scaling as well yeah and i actually played through quite a lot of this yesterday and i've got to say i was hugely impressed by really good stuff i agree but here's here's where things get even more interesting uh to further improve performance the playstation 4 versions of the game specifically seem to use a tier one vrs or variable rate shading solution done in software no less to handle especially like vegetation in motion and you can definitely see some of those artifacts especially with motion blur disabled where it does sort of chunk up a little bit i think it's that mix of checkerboard rendering plus vrs you definitely lose a lot of the granular detail that is not lost on ps5 which does not use vrs at all right okay so just a sort of primer here variable rate shading it's where essentially instead of putting all shading resources into one pixel it kind of simplifies it into larger blocks right yeah and um yeah that's how it works here so you can kind of see it in the foliage and it is only the foliage as far as we know but um it's actually quite difficult to pick up with motion blur enabled you kind of have to disable it and then zero in on it in motion to actually see the uh to see the artifacts there so it's a really interesting optimization there that is not present on playstation five even though the developer could have done that it is software based after all they went full resolution for that yeah it's interesting so let's just yet another example of how they're essentially trying to squeeze more visual fidelity out of these old machines post horizon because it does retain a lot of the great stuff that i talked about in that other video that makes horizon 2 look significantly better than the original so that's good news but i think that's kind of what i want to get into now is talking about the visual changes here because there are a lot and the one i want to start with first is actually kind of a funny one and it's videos okay so on ps5 everything is real time uh for instance this beautiful introduction sequence with the credits and everything everything here is rendered in real time it's super sharp it uses you know the super fast ssd to allow the game camera to essentially jump all over the world in real time uh when i first saw that i was wondering how the heck are they gonna do that on ps4 the answer is they save it as a video clip and uh they did this in several several big scenes throughout the game or just video clips on ps4 but are fully real-time on ps5 and i love that kind of stuff i think it's fascinating that that's essentially the approach they ended up taking because it shows that they didn't limit the scope of what these scenes could be uh you know what i mean absolutely yeah and um i think it actually pays off on the lower end platforms that where they would genuinely have struggled yeah i mean when you look at what um those sequences are doing particularly the cuts you know how you can move quickly from one scene to another no problem for playstation five it can stream in all of those assets like in super quick time and we'll talk a bit about loading later but on the old ps4 and ps4 pro straddled with those mechanical hard drives those scenes would be a disaster area both in terms of you know simply loading all of the assets in and then rendering them because the horsepower isn't really there the fact that you can do it on playstation 5 is is remarkable and the fact that you're still getting a pretty decent experience on the pro and the ps4 through the use of um uh basically pre-recorded video it's kind of like just a smart move really i agree i agree but they do actually kick off with real time on ps4 for the introduction which is a scene that does some pretty major camera cuts and this is one of my favorite comparisons i think so far uh just right from the start because like very first scene fox running through the woods you immediately see a difference right uh there's just less detail all around on ps4 pro here uh textures have loaded in slower and in fact they never actually load in some of these scenes right like you can tell it's trying to load these textures but they never appear so it's always low res like this and the intro has a ton of this stuff when you kind of go through it and you really start to appreciate those differences i think um and that extends further if you stop and look at for instance this scene here with eloy she looks great in both versions i think but you can see there's actually more geometric detail on ps5 more texture detail uh like the layer of sort of fuzz on her face is is pronounced and present on ps5 but not really on ps4 it's missing the extra hero light which i could see some cases being made for as a superior choice but i actually do think it looks a little better on ps5 in general as a result of this i mean it's just a bunch of subtle stuff like that at that at first glance you may not notice but when you start to break it down it's like oh yeah it is a lot more detailed on ps5 absolutely and actually that first cinematic on bass playstation 4 it actually kind of highlights the key sort of limitation of the bass system which is kind of like the graininess yeah exactly kind of reduced resolution the fact that they're pushing it so hard that something has to give but the overall effect is still remarkable i think yeah so then once you jump into the gameplay then some of the other things i i noticed straight away in that first stage is uh just the density and the fidelity of the assets firstly throughout the game the texture resolution seems to have taken a major hit on ps4 which given the memory and storage situation makes a ton of sense but textures in general seem to be half or even quarter res so you know you zoom into plants you just look at the ground even from normal gameplay angles and everything is just much lower res so that shows that they did at least create assets that could scale much higher on ps5 which i like uh another detail missing is the moss layer right you've noticed that right there's this granular like moss layer on ps5 that looks really good i think and that is pretty much omitted on ps4 there is sort of a similar fallback effect in some areas but in others it's just replaced with a flat texture yeah here's something else i noticed john which is that um this i mean i think you talk about it in your main video but the resolution of the assets and the amount of detail they're cramming in you kind of need a native 4k resolution or something very close to it to resolve all of that detail and it doesn't quite work in the performance mode at 1800p it's a lot noisier and that extends also to the base systems as well and um yeah so essentially that i mean this is one of those games similar to again to forza horizon 5 where you've got to think really carefully about whether you're going to be playing this at 16 30 or 30 and i think we both ended up playing at 30 just to appreciate these visuals and the density and what you're getting here yeah it's definitely a rare case where again like forza i do think the high resolution mode actually makes a big difference and the game itself is not so fast-paced that it needs 60 but i do appreciate that the option is there absolutely so some other other details i noticed that also involves resolution the cloud system uh the volumetric clouds they're much lower resolution on ps4 but they're also missing an entire layer of clouds like in the mountains here like during the scene when you're going down the cable car there's these extra volumetric clouds that sort of fill the valleys and they're kind of around the player a little bit more that is completely missing on playstation 4 so that's just you know knowing how expensive volumetric effects can be that makes a lot of sense uh you also will see when talking about the water the quality of the screen space reflections there they cut off much earlier into the surface it has a lower ray marching count i think so it's kind of noisier and chunkier looking and it's disabled when you swim underwater so you don't get so the the surface of the water just looks opaque on ps4 which can be a little bit strange in some scenes i suppose you know ssr has its own issues there as well but i do think it looks better on the ps5 absolutely yeah but there is an important point to raise here i think which is that um gorilla have obviously done a huge amount of water work so to speak in improving this particular system over its showing on the first horizon which was kind of lackluster it was and the point is that it's not just playstation 5 that's getting these enhanced systems you are getting those enhancements on the base ps4 and the pro which is not quite as spectacular looking as it is on the playstation 5 which is kind of the way it should be right yeah i agree and that is absolutely key these effects still look much better than horizon 1. they just don't benefit from that extra fidelity you get on ps5 um then another thing to discuss another effect then things like depth of field you get a nice bokeh depth of field on ps5 that is absent on ps4 it looks like a more standard gaussian blur so you lose a little bit of that um another thing though that's that really sticks out i guess relates to pop in and this is probably the area where i think people will notice the most limitations both poppin and distant detail right so when you're when you look at the world you'll when you're running around you actually see so many more objects like grass trees bushes you know structures sort of pop into view as you're running leading to a less stable looking image like uh this scene here at the beginning you just look at that sort of bridge section it's fully formed here in ps5 but on ps4 it looks more limited but as you walk closer to it you actually see it does pop into the higher detail model and it's pretty much like this everywhere um and i do think the pop-in is more serious than it was in horizon one because they are attempting to throw around just more detail in general so i do think you will notice it because there is actually still pop in on ps5 even it's just much less pronounced but on the ps4 you know you look out into the distance and the hills will just be sort of these flat or like open areas with nothing and then you get closer in the details there and you can also kind of see if you look at the mountains and the distant stuff here the textures like the distant rendering uh it's much lower fidelity on on ps4 again where just it just ends up looking kind of blurry and almost like it's not fully loaded but it is you know yeah i get what you mean yeah uh-huh for me the the point is that um it's kind of like what you notice and what you kind of take for granted right so um far off detail it's it's extraordinarily more uh fleshed out on playstation 5. on the pro and the base ps4 um it's not but you don't really notice it because that's the way the scene's set up right and you'd only really notice if you moved on to playstation 5 and did the side by side so it's kind of a coherent look but where the coherency is nowhere near as good as as playstation 5 is in the pop-in which is quite aggressive and you can't help but notice it do you see what i mean yeah you're right when you're just looking at a still scene it still looks great but when you actually start moving through the world you definitely notice the detail popping in around you and it just creates this greater sense of instability i mean it's kind of what we expect from those last gen machines pop in was kind of a normal thing but um here with the density of the scene they're trying to preserve as much detail as they can but they can't display it out into the distance and this is kind of the net result of that um well let's see what else uh you know other resolution things particles are lower res like you can see here if you look around the water wheel this applies to pretty much all particles they're full res on ps5 volumetrics or lower res you know i i feel like we could go on and on on this but i i feel like people have should get the picture by now that it's just all these little things you know that stack up over time to create a richer looking image in the ps5 version but it still looks good enough on ps4 so it's a it's a very careful balancing act and i have to say it's pretty impressive to see because it feels like they have successfully served both user bases here right right yeah i mean for me it's kind of like um the difference between pc low and pc ultra but yeah if but what if pc low is actually a carefully curated experience not just lopping stuff off but still you know designed to look good if you see what i mean i think that was kind of why uh the same kind of strategy worked on forza horizon 5 and why it works here because these are still do i say bespoke experiences that you're getting on the lower end machines but they have been carefully attended to to look good on that level of hardware but again i mean i mean you're side by sides here kind of revelatory really aren't they bearing in mind just how much more you're getting on the playstation 5 and it is to the point where this you know there's so much detail here that youtube can't render it because of the it's true yeah if the compression level of the footage is such that it just um takes an axe to a lot of the really fine grain detail there so it is a sort of situation where you kind of have to see it you kind of have to play it and experience it on ps5 just to appreciate it i gotta say though i've actually had a lot of fun with these comparisons which is something that comparisons have become stale for me as of late because generally the differences are so minor absolutely yeah and even though i've i've had my issues with cross-generation games it is fertile ground for these more interesting comparisons to see where developers have to make cuts uh so that's that's a fun thing from our perspective uh but another thing i guess we should discuss then and this one is perhaps less of an interesting story it's the performance um and when i say that that's a good thing right because i find that on every single platform here in every mode of ps5 is two modes the gameplay frame rate is extremely stable the target frame rate is reached with relative ease from what i can tell i found it difficult to actually encounter any sort of serious drops now keep in mind i haven't played as far on ps4 and you cannot share saves between them so you you can make this life a lot more difficult yeah it did so i wasn't able to test some of the later super demanding scenes that we saw on ps5 in the ps4 version but based on what we're seeing earlier on i do think they've done a good job um sort of sticking to this target i think it's dynamic resolution scaling that helps because it actually seems to run a little better than the original horizon even yeah that was my experience on the base playstation 4 where um essentially i i captured all the way up to the title card and beyond which is quite a hefty chunk of gameplay plus there's quite a lot of set-piece events in there which are really challenging and um aside from the the kind of dropped frames on scene cuts in the cut scenes um it's flat 30 which you know is better than horizon one which is quite quite a remarkable state of affairs but that's exactly what drs is there for right to give that level of stability and uh it works it does indeed so that that is something i can say with confidence is really solid in this version of the game but the other side of the performance coin and the one that's a lot more interesting in this case it's the loading right [Laughter] this is probably the thing that um might have the largest impact on the general experience um i guess it depends on how you decide to play it but essentially as i showed in the other video loading time on ps5 is very quick usually between five and eight seconds whether you're loading from the main menu or you're using a quick fast travel option it's super quick uh ps4 pro and base ps4 as you can see here they're much much much longer i will actually say it's a little bit better than the original horizon zero dawn which taking it takes over a minute to load from the main menu into the game okay it's exceptionally long so it does actually seem to have been improved which surprised me but it is a lot longer as you'd expect and that makes things like fast travel much less enjoyable to use yeah i think i've got two points to make on that the first one is that similar to a lot of the first party sony games is that in the actual flow of gameplay it's the background loading is indeed background loading you don't notice it it's a consistent experience with little in the way of pauses um but the other point i'd like to make is that we're kind of suggesting that the loading here is like for like because we're loading the same areas but remember but remember that the artwork on playstation 5 is like orders of magnitude better oh yeah so it's not it's not like for like as such because the asset quality that's being streamed in is far far far superior that's that's actually a really good point as well so there's not only is it loading much faster but it's loading significantly more data at any one point so it really shows the difference there and it's funny because i feel like again this is something that is consistent with uh playgrounds forza horizon 5 that we mentioned earlier it was the same kind of thing there where series x made all these uh jumps much more palatable whereas on the last gen machines you were waiting a lot that's absolutely pretty much the same kind of thing here where you know as long as you're just playing straight through it's smooth but if you actually want to load a different area fast travel something like that you're going to be waiting yeah yeah i just want to go back to a point that you were making earlier which is that um these games are very very different and i think we've still only brushed the surface of the differences here because the you know the golfing quality between the generations is is vast here i think we've ticked off the major points but um wow i mean what can i say it's a night and day difference in many ways i feel like that's that gives a pretty good idea of what you can expect between them um it's exactly as we've said it's good on all platforms but you definitely get a better experience on ps5 as you would hope and i do think that they've successfully served all users yeah i mean that was our worry wasn't it going into this generation that having to service this really old hardware would actually be to the detriment of the games and you know i think that developers like gorilla games and playground have done actually done a really good job in in kind of navigating that and making sure that all users get a great experience yeah not only that i mean it kind of sets these games up for potential pc ports in the future as well like they've basically done the work now to have a uh a great version on pc so that's also something to keep in mind absolutely so yeah gorilla games did a great job here horizon forbidden west is excellent on all platforms um and yeah so i guess that's going to wrap it up for this video so thanks for joining me rich yeah it's been a pleasure i just love these projects these sort of uh comparisons where there is actually a difference because you know by and large i think anybody can go out buy a console these days and get a great experience regardless and the difference is a kind of minutia whereas when you look at this this is like this is a proper generational leap here and it's great to be able to actually put it side by side simply to appreciate what the developer has done here especially with the conditions they've had to work in in recent times with the pandemic and whatnot so yeah well done gorilla and i think it's safe to say that you can buy horizon on any system and get you know really good game out of it absolutely but if you enjoyed this video as always be sure to like and subscribe and follow us on 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Channel: Digital Foundry

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Id: qVdxbaS1BiY

Length: 24min 27sec (1467 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 18 2022