Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales - Digital Foundry Tech Review - Welcome To The Next Generation

[Music] released in 2018 Marvel Spider-Man stands as one of the most impressive games on PlayStation 4 with a huge detailed City gloriously detailed characters and top tier post effects Spider-Man demonstrates the true capabilities of Insomniac games and now Insomniac has returned with the followup to the 2018 game with Marvel Spider-Man Miles Morales but this time it's a launch title for PlayStation 5 Insomniac is no stranger to launching alongside a new console of course as resistance fall of Man demonstrated in 2006 but Miles Morales is slightly different it's a cross generation game designed to Showcase both the new PlayStation 5 while also offering PS4 players a new experience the question is to what extent does this new game demonstrate what the PS5 is capable of well the answers to this are exciting there's a lot going on here from real-time triangle based r tracing a boost in overall Fidelity and an ambitious performance mode Miles Morales is a real showpiece as the second PlayStation 5 video I've produced then I'd like to walk you through the new visual features while highlighting why I feel each one of them are so impressive while also taking a look at performance can Spider-Man finally reach 60 frames per second let's find [Music] out [Music] [Music] it begins with this the simple Act of launching the game it's just a taste of what high-speed Solid State Storage brings to the table from the home screen to the main menu to the game it's fast really fast in fact it's so fast that it Rivals any of the classic cartridge based systems we've had optical discs and spinning platter drives limiting the speed of consoles for more than two decades at this point but with the arrival of a fast SSD in the PS5 we're witnessing the end of waiting or at least that's the hope and Spider-Man Miles Morales highlights what's possible now on PlayStation 4 the original game takes dramatically longer to load it's perfectly reasonable for the hardware of course but this is a perfect showcase case of why these ssds are such a big deal then again it's not just the fact that it's an SSD the new decompression capabilities of PlayStation 5 also free up valuable CPU time aiding performance elsewhere so it's this combination of fast storage and decompression in conjunction with insomniac's own streaming technology developed for the game that helps make such fast loading possible but let's rewind back to that title screen this is our first glimpse of the game character rendering and it already highlights some key improvements before you even get into the game the level of detail on miles is eye-catching but you might wonder what's new well jumping to another scene the first thing that really sticks out to me is the new hair strand system not only is this system flexible enough to handle different types of hair but each representation is of exceedingly high quality the way light plays off the hair strands the way it moves around as characters emote it's it's a huge upgrade from the previous game and it helps give everything a more pre-rendered [Music] look but it doesn't stop there subsurface scattering is also greatly increased in quality to create more realistic depiction of skin translucency eyes and teeth are also more detailed while additional screen space Shadows bring finer close proximity detail to each model character rendering was already top-notch in the original game on PlayStation 4 but these changes really en enance the overall presentation the Cinematic quality is just topnotch here and the scene Direction is on par with the original but enhanced by these changes you also still have that same wonderful post effect Suite including the excellent motion blur with the perfect shutter speed at least in the quality mode now the in-game model is similarly detailed to what you see in cutscenes thanks to photo mode it's possible to bring the camera right up against the character and closely look at the det detail the resolution of the materials is absurdly high all the clothing with the different buckles zippers buttons and everything it's incredible to behold and facial detail is just exceptional bringing in the original PlayStation 4 game you can see that while it still looks great things like eyebrows Hair Skin and eyes received a massive boost in Fidelity for the new game as for Peter Parker's new face well I'll leave that one to you but it grew on me pretty quickly I I think it's also worth noting that the random pedestrians seen throughout the game are of remarkably high quality the materials quality is exceptionally High even up close for these characters that you're really never supposed to look that closely at obviously there is L management so they do lose detail as they move away from the camera but it's very effective overall but it's the game world that perhaps best showcases what the new console was capable of but before we dive into the world of R tracing arguably its most important feature it's worth discussing the other areas where the game is improved the primary boost lies in obvious things like the draw distance of vehicles and pedestrians is pushed out significantly compared to the original game the overall density of these crowds has also been increased this effectively means more activity down at street level resulting in a world that feels more like a bustling Metropolis in the original game you could very clearly see where the activity ended and while it did work okay given the hardware miles benefits a lot from this there's also the shift in weather conditions miles takes place during winter so things like trees are rendered completely differently with Barren branches that kind of wind up looking more detailed and realistic to the eye there's snow now piled up around the world and a lot more reflectivity to the puddles in the ground Yes you heard right you remember puddlegate with Spider-Man in 2018 well Ray tracing solves this with a Vengeance there are puddles everywhere and they reflect everything there's also an increase in both the geometric complexity of scenery and props alongside a boost in overall density similar to cars and pedestrians so even during missions which don't necessarily take place out on the streets there's just more stuff placed in any single scene and a lot of that stuff reacts to your actions so it's interesting then the core of the city is very much derived from the previous game but the increased draw distance and object density really helps flesh it out further Beyond this many materials have been reworked or touched up with new higher resolution surfaces visible in many areas throughout the world I'd imagine a lot of this work was done both for Miles Morales but also for the Spider-Man remaster which we haven't had a chance to check out yet still use Photo mode and you can zoom in and look closely at many surfaces through the game and it reveals just how detailed everything really is it looks excellent so yeah in terms of General detail Insomniac done a great job building upon the original game's work it's still very much rooted in PlayStation 4 of course but these enhancements and improvements really go a long way towards spicing things up but now it's time to discuss perhaps the game's crowning feature real time Ray TRC Reflections this is the very first console game we've played with this feature and its arrival reveals many interesting things about the up coming generation I'd like to start by demonstrating what Ray Trace Reflections bring to the table for players and then attempt to explain how it was implemented in this game so first of all you've heard a lot about Ray tracing over the last two years we certainly haven't been shy in singing its Praises that's for sure it just so happens that Spider-Man is kind of a perfect game for this feature basically as with any modern city the world is packed full of shiny surfaces glass panels adorning large buildings reflective Vehicles everywhere polished metals and even the odd c t or two each of these materials enjoy realistic Reflections generated using Ray tracing the primary benefit during gameplay is the additional Parallax and sense of depth you get while exploring the world scaling the side of a building and seeing all that detail reflected across its surface is a true sight to behold they've even added in sort of the warping glass effect to give the impression of a not entirely flat surface It's very effective it also boosts the sense of scale and adds just that much more realism to the overall presentation now this has always been a difficult problem to solve in city-based games typically titles like Spider-Man on PlayStation 4 have relied on things like a combination of cube Maps generated from probes along with screen space Reflections the probe system is a good solution but has obvious limits in terms of what it can actually display the limitations are very obvious when staring directly into a building surface adorned with a simple Cube map it can look nice enough but it's static and fails to reflect the world around you screen space Reflections then rely on well information in screen space which means surfaces of an object that are not visible cannot be reflected back as the information just isn't there so the jump to Ray tracing makes navigation through the city feel much more natural and realistic you'll find evidence of Ray traced Reflections throughout the game around every corner and it's just beautiful to behold so what's the setup like you might be wondering can it stack up against Ray tracing in a PC game well that's what's fascinating here the approach taken delivers great results but there are a few compromises now first of all Reflections appear on both opaque and transparent geometry such as Windows so you can see your reflection while still peering through the glass itself the game uses St fantastic Ray tracing which requires more Rays to be fired but produces a more accurate result importantly rays will travel until it collides with either an object or when it reaches the edge of the world that is the sky clouds water and so on so Reflections can show arbitrarily distant objects there is no fallback using reflection probes either this means everything in the distance that you see in the reflection is generated using Ray tracing crucially the decision was made to include Shadows within the ray tracing structure ensuring that those cast by large buildings are present and correct within the reflections themselves this is something that's not always taken into account in games but by doing so the depth of the city remains intact while peering into reflective surfaces now if you look closely while it's a street level you might actually pick up on some of the limitations such as a lower Fidelity representation of the city within the reflection this is due to trace Rays into the simplified version of the city a technique which no doubt saves on performance it's not especially noticeable most of the time especially when above the streets but it is the reason you might pick up on a missing detail here or there furthermore SSR blending is used for certain objects such as the window frames on buildings impressively all Dynamic objects are factored into the bvh structure main characters and vehicles have their bvh refitted every single frame while pedestrians are updated every other frame to save on resources this ensures that all action happening within the world appears correctly within the reflections naturally the roughness cut off is also adjusted to carefully maximize performance what I mean is there is a threshold in which the surface of a material such as stone is too rough to receive Reflections now technically this is possible and they do receive Reflections in the real world but the dispersal of rays across such a material inherently makes rough Reflections more demanding to render so in the case of Spider-Man a good compromise has been achieved there are of course near perfect mirrors but also somewhat rougher surfaces that showcase proper Reflections as well it is worth noting that currently there are no secondary Reflections what I mean is no reflection within a reflection now this is very expensive to render in most games instead fall back on Cube maps for the secondary reflection but in Spider-Man that is currently not the case so buildings reflected within other buildings lack any sort of approximation and just appear dark and opaque also the inverted depth technique used to give the impression of rooms within a building is not taken into account in the RT Reflections the only other limitation right now is that bodies of water such as those surrounding the city still utilize screen space Reflections on the surface as opposed to Ray tracing which of course means when the reflector is uded from view you lose the reflection information thankfully it's not that distracting since you don't spend that much time on the shore and if you're playing the game right you really shouldn't be swimming around in there anyways though you certainly can so hopefully this gives you some insight into the approach to R Trace Reflections in Spider-Man it's an exciting new technology in the console space and really this is just the beginning what Insomniac was able to achieve in such a short time gives me a lot of Hope for the future now early on it was mentioned that there was also some Ray traced ambient shadowing in this game but that does not seem to be the case in the final build it was likely decided to focus their resources elsewhere now I suppose at this point you might be wondering just what does this mean for rendering resolution rate tracing is a demanding feature after all well when utilizing the quality mode with Ray tracing the game delivers a full native 4K output at 30 frames per second we'll discuss the performance momentarily but the native 4K rendering is paired with insomniac's temporal upsample technique to produce a supremely crisp yet very clean image now you wouldn't necessarily think that you'd need to apply this to a native 4K image but the combination really works and helps eliminate most alosine there is a tangible boost and Clarity across the game when compared to PlayStation 4 I guess this brings us to the other major option offered in Miles Morales the performance mode how does it differ from the quality mode and how does it run well for starters we have the resolution naturally with a target of 60 frames per second the resolution does take a minor hit from my counts it seems to max out just shy of native 4K while dipping to similar pixel counts as the PS4 pro version of Spider-Man in fact I counted as low as 152p but it could potentially hit 1440 as well the thing is in this case it doesn't really matter that much because on average the image quality remains higher than what we got on PS4 Pro it's a perfect ill illustration of how pixel counts just don't matter that much these days the difference between quality and performance mode comes down to a slightly blurrier image in performance mode and that's about it from a normal viewing distance it's difficult to spot and they both look excellent now there are a few differences to the visuals themselves as well for instance the game strand system used for hair uses a lower L level in performance mode than in quality reducing the amount of test ation needed for hair rendering it's generally very subtle I think but it's interesting to note it also seems like details in the distance have been slightly pulled in but because of the random nature of traffic in pedestrians it's difficult to say for sure it still feels busier than the PS4 game at least but the real and most obvious difference here though stems from the lack of Ray traced Reflections so what does this mean for the player then well basically the game falls back on the systems featured in the original game that means Ray TRC Reflections are replaced with Cube Maps generated by probes while screen space Reflections add additional detail when possible the thing is the cube map solution device in the original is still really good yes the limitations are obvious as I demonstrated earlier in this video but it's about the best you could expect from an open world city environment such as this without relying on Ray Trace Reflections it's still a gorgeous world to explore and definitely benefits from the dramatic increase in frame rate everything else though is pretty much on par it works exceptionally well and it looks excellent which brings us to the real reason why you'd want to use this mode and as the name suggests it's performance now before we talk about this mode Let's talk about the quality again real quick when using the ray tracing mode the game targets 30 frames per second just like the original game on PlayStation 4 and for all intents and purposes it's locked the game hits its Target and it stays there now I did encounter a dip in one small area which I can't show in this video unfortunately but during gameplay it's extremely rare during cut scenes however while the rendering is smooth I did notice occasional duplicate frames between camera cuts which is something worth pointing out but still if you're playing in quality mode you can expect a very consistent experience just as is usually the case with games from Insomniac games but now now years after abandoning 60 frames per second it returns in full and the news is great you see in gameplay you can expect a near-perfect locked 60 frames per second that's right it's a full 60 frames per second not just an uncapped frame rate whether you're traversing the city at high speed or engaging enemies in combat the frame rate just doesn't seem to buckle now that's not to say dips aren't possible this is an open world game after all but I certainly did run across them during a normal run of play and really this feature more than any other really showcases what the extra power in PlayStation 5 can offer we saw performance modes in many last generation games and in most cases this just meant uncapped frame rates but the performance was usually still really unsteady so it wasn't great this is exactly what Miles Morales manages to avoid there are no issues with frame rate stability which is great news not just for Spider-Man but also for games in the future now while gamep play is pretty much perfect cutscenes still have a few minor issues well first we have the duplicate frame issue that occurred in the 30fps mode it's back but still minor enough that it didn't bother me in most cases but there's also occasional actual dips in performance that pop up during certain cutscenes That You Don't See in quality mode but again relatively minor and almost imperceptible which is why I'd say the overall performance here is a huge success we basically have either a locked 30fps mode with Ray tracing or a locked 60 frames per second mode which is better than just about any comparable performance modes on last generation consoles the thing is though it's kind of difficult to choose I love both options the ray Trace Reflections are a real game changer visually they look amazing but the smooth 60fps yeah it's also very appealing at least no matter which one you choose they deliver in full unfortunately one thing we couldn't test is the PlayStation 4 version of the game we tried various methods to download the game but were ultimately unsuccessful so we've only had a chance to play it on PlayStation 5 in this preview State and in fact it's also worth pointing out that we did not have the day one patch installed so the fact that it's this good without the day one patch is a good thing of course that's not to say it was 100% perfect I did encounter a couple of crashes but based on what we've heard these should be correct in the day one patch so is there anything else new Well audio is one thing the game takes advantage of the more advanced positional audio capabilities of the PS5 The Tempest engine to deliver a more immersive sound experience specifically when using headphones now I typically prefer to play using speakers myself and it does sound great there as well but I did enjoy the headphone experience in this game you really get that nice positional audio no matter how you're playing plus it seems like the overall sound quality is slightly higher and I love the new soundtrack this also extends to the controller which not only uses subtle sounds in an effective manner but also takes advantage of the Dual sense in other ways obviously you get the haptic Rumble feature which is very effective no doubt but it's the triggers that are perhaps the most enjoyable part basically the tension on the trigger pulls is adjusted in a way to better simulate the act of slinging your webs well at least that's how I'd imagine it as with astra's playroom it adds a surprising amount of depth to basic actions you'll be performing throughout the game so yeah the audio and the controller definitely help further Elevate the whole experience and that's not even getting into all the card related stuff tied to the front end which is also rather interesting and super fast to use as for the game itself well it's not necessarily a full-on sequel in the tradition sense but it almost feels like one the key here is that it definitely does not just feel like DLC it's very much its own game the new characters and atmosphere are completely different and each of the main missions is beautifully crafted just like the original plus there's none of the MJ stealth sequences not that I minded them that much to be honest there's plenty of stuff to do in the game alongside the main missions and I'd say overall it's most comparable to something like Uncharted the Lost Legacy which by the way is a good thing so yeah as the First full game that I've played through on PlayStation 5 it's one heck of a place to start it's every bit as good as the original Spider-Man released on PlayStation 4 but offers a fantastic new coat of paint alongside some cool extra features that we have such an ambitious example of Ray tracing right at launch is also a really good sign for the future things can only get better from here including insomniac's very own ratchet and L we'll just have to wait and see how that one turns out for now though that's going to do it for this video I hope you enjoyed the beginning of our PlayStation 5 coverage because it's going to continue for years to come if you did though be sure to let us know in the comments below and like subscribe and all that good stuff and you can also come find us over on Twitter we'll see you next time

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 775,314

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Id: mGTNTpuJspo

Length: 23min 23sec (1403 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020