Spider-Man Remastered PS5 vs PS4 Pro + Performance Ray Tracing 60fps Mode Tested!

a lot has happened since spider-man made its debut on playstation 5 last month and it's time we check in firstly spider-man remastered has launched on the console bringing new visual features and a fresh coat of paint to the table this is the version we'll be focusing on primarily today beyond that miles morales and remastered have both received a new graphics mode performance rt basically a mode which combines real-time ray traced reflections with 60 frames per second gameplay thus today we'll take a look at the remastered version to see what's changed since the original on ps4 and discuss the sacrifices necessary to hit 60 frames per second with ray tracing in both remastered and miles morales so with that in mind let's get swinging while miles morales was the focus of the ps5 launch obviously spider-man remastered is a nice addition especially if you missed the game the first time around the idea is simple rather than simply upping the resolution and frame rate remastered offers a wide range of visual improvements new assets galore ray tracing and tweaked lighting all work in tandem to create an even more impressive looking game it's still clearly derived from playstation 4 of course but everything just feels more refined so what's going on well as with miles there are three modes now quality performance and performance rt the original ps4 pro version targets 30 frames per second with dynamic res scaling averaging around 1584p most of the time temporal injection is then used to deliver a clean image when played on a 4k display on ps5 the quality mode bumps this up to a full native 4k most of the time but drs is an effect and it can drop closer to the high end of the ps4 pro version in the worst case in performance mode the game targets a near 4k resolution with more aggressive drs that results in drops to 1440p the new race traced performance mode though this is where things get interesting this one tops out at 1440p but can drop as low as 1080p in the absolute worst situation this applies to both remastered and miles morales by the way like the other modes though the game generally maintains a resolution near the highest value as best as i can tell which is useful here as it makes for a nice comparison against playstation 4 pro you see from my comparison shots i'm using the raytraced performance mode on ps5 and in most cases image quality is nearly the same but of course this is at double the frame rate with real-time ray tracing so basically the default modes offer a much higher resolution than ps4 pro does while the raytraced performance mode is comparable though it can drop even lower so the resolution stuff is a little convoluted i suppose due to the extra modes but the key is that it looks really nice in each of these modes and highlights how impressive insomniac's temporal injection is this is especially important for the ray traced performance mode which we'll discuss in more detail shortly but first let's look at some comparisons between ps4 pro and ps5 using rt performance mode starting with the game's introduction this real-time sequence is rather useful for highlighting the attention to detail in building this remaster if we pause here for instance note the increase in texture detail and model complexity the web shooter for instance now has more triangles in it shadows are more refined and the lighting is improved now let's un-pause and continue moving ahead slightly note the increase in circuit board detail and the addition of half finished noodles on the right after this check out these glass jars on ps5 glass caustics have been added to the scene creating a more realistic image of light filtering through the glass and creating this effect on the table of course this is just an artistic trick though as simulating caustics in this way is extremely expensive but it does show the attention to detail this is really consistent with the rest of the scene but when we get to peter you'll notice the change in character model yes this has been discussed a lot on leading up to release but let's consider some of the technical improvements the strand system discussed in miles morales is present here in remastered as well you'll see this throughout the game when engaging with others and it simply allows for more realistic complex hair rendering characters also have improved skin shading and teeth and some of these enhancements are even applied during gameplay subsurface scattering for instance remains enabled during gameplay check out pete's ear in the scene now if we jump back to the intro check out the toaster in this sequence the circuit board has received a significant overhaul as has the toaster itself the material also showcases traced reflections revealing off-screen detail that you couldn't see before i think you kind of get the idea at this point though all the game's major cutscenes received a fresh coat of paint with the artists going in and touching up nearly everything that could have used a refresh and it looks really nice but once we enter the game world itself you may notice another change the lighting spider-man does not feature a real-time time of day system this is something that changes his set intervals according to the story for each of these instances however adjustments have been made this is evident right away from the very first scene where the shadow position has been adjusted and the lighting takes on a warmer hue on playstation 5. this is purely an artistic change rather than a technical one i'd imagine but what other things have been changed well at a glance it does look remarkably similar between the two and really highlights how impressive this was for ps4 pro but there are some changes distant details extended in two ways firstly additional meshes have been added to the scene at a distance look at the top of this building and you can see some extra detail here but also building normals are visible from across the world so this gives you the perception of additional detail rather than just a flat textured cube traffic can also be drawn further into the distance though it is kind of hard to spot and overall density is relatively comparable to what we saw on playstation 4. one of the most obvious things though that has received a boost is texture detail nearly every surface has been touched up from large areas such as this where the entire surface just exhibits more fine green tea tale while smaller details such as this rubbish along the ledge is also of higher quality this is pretty consistent across the game i've found and really helps improve the perception of detail especially when playing at the native 4k mode there's plenty of other smaller details as well from more detailed pedestrians and npcs to various other tweaks throughout the game i will say though that flipping back to miles morales does demonstrate the evolution in terms of visual quality there it's certainly the better looking game of the two as you'd expect but remastered really brings the quality almost up to miles level the point is insomniac did a great job here and clearly put a lot of time and effort into enhancing and redefining the original experience so to quickly summarize what we've seen thus far you have improved character rendering across the board both in cutscenes and during gameplay you have an increase in distant detail higher resolution assets throughout the game and improved lighting but that's certainly not everything i still think the biggest feature here is of course real time ray tracing and this is where we can talk about the performance rt mode so what is this mode about and how does it look well let's quickly reiterate what ray tracing adds to the game as i discussed in the miles morales video ray tracing adds a new depth to the world of spider-man essentially this allows for real-time physically accurate reflections on appropriate materials swinging through the city alongside so many glass buildings is greatly enhanced thanks to the additional parallax made possible via these real-time reflections in this game razer traced out to the horizon meaning that anything logically visible within a reflection surface will be rendered in said reflection to pull this off however the game traces into a slightly lower detail version of the city so not every object is perfectly represented within the bvh structure but really this is only noticeable when looking at the reflections from close proximity the effect of using real-time reflections during normal gameplay really cannot be understated it's a huge upgrade over the cube maps previously used on playstation 4 pro and in the older performance mode the thing is if you wanted these reflections previously you had to settle for 30 frames per second and that's where rt performance mode comes in after the latest update both spiderman and miles morales have received this option and it basically increases performance from 30 to 60 frames per second while sacrificing resolution and some detail and offering real-time retraced reflections with just 16.7 milliseconds to construct each frame though the processing demands are increased dramatically and optimizations were no doubt necessary it's not just about the gpu either the bvh setup has its own significant cost that eats time on the cpu side which to me suggests that insomniac has made a lot of changes under the hood to better support this feature so much so that the original two modes performance and fidelity actually benefit with any moments of slowdown that i previously encountered no longer occurring but obviously some of the optimizations will be visible to the player firstly there's the resolution the resolution of ray trace reflections in this game scales according to the rendering resolution essentially when the game is displayed at 4k in fidelity mode reflections are quarter res or 1080p when the resolution is dropped to 1440p however reflections appear as just 720p instead which is why when looking closely at various reflective surfaces you will notice a diminished level of detail the thing is while you're actually playing the game it's a whole lot less noticeable and the effect is still very convincing but this isn't the only change another difference lies in shadow map quality this was already a very cool feature of the original version in that all shadow maps were displayed within the rt reflection this is really important for a large city such as spider-man as without shadows the city will appear overly bright thankfully buildings and some object shadows still exist but the resolution is greatly reduced while i noticed that pedestrians and other more dynamic objects now seem to lack shadows entirely or at least are too small to be resolved in the super low res shadow map it's a completely sensible change and it makes a lot of sense in this case it also seems like pedestrians are called from the bvh structure more aggressively especially those at a distance but in most cases i didn't find this especially noticeable many animations are also updated at a lower rate so they don't line up one to one with the actual 60 frames per second animation seen elsewhere even with these cutbacks however the reduction is still impressive and with the way the roughness cutoff is set in this game even rough materials still exhibit proper reflectivity the point is most of these changes only apply to the fidelity of the reflection itself and don't actually impact which surfaces the reflection can appear on and while we're here we should probably compare what the game looks like with rt reflections versus the game on ps4 pro not only are many of the materials improved but the reflectivity is also modified so that it can take full advantage of ray traced reflections the results are dramatic especially in some of these indoor areas but it's something you'll also notice as you just explore the world it's extremely obvious one of the more interesting locations i thought i might visit though is the construction site yes this is the infamous location at which puddle gate took place i explained back in my original spider-man video why it differed from the e3 build but thanks to ray trace reflections we no longer need to rely on manually placed box projected cube maps you know the cube maps that were removed from the e3 demo replaced instead with a more dynamic but less accurate solution thanks to ray tracing all reflections now line up perfectly with the scene geometry and it looks much better now it's like the revenge of the puddles if you will while we're doing comparisons here with earlier media how about this the screenshot it was released before the release of spider-man remastered i attempted to duplicate this somewhat in the game though the time of day was different it looks different as a result but really look closely at the trees here they didn't reflect quite right and this is something that alex brought up in his original video on this subject but in the current version of the game trees are handled differently in the raytraced reflections and now appear more accurate and less distracting it also seems as if the materials on the windows themselves have been changed some windows are still very glossy and mirror-like but others have obvious dirt and grime across the surface which is perhaps more realistic i suppose so when you consider the three modes available i believe that the performance rt mode is perhaps the best choice all around the increase in frame rate is hugely welcome and even with a reduction in quality raytraced reflections contribute greatly to the overall experience more importantly i feel this is a good sign of things to come for owners of next generation consoles that insomniac was able to achieve such results in a launch title is really impressive and speaks volumes about their engineering team but it also suggests that there is perhaps a little more headroom or ray tracing potential than perhaps we initially thought whether this level of performance can be achieved with a more complex game though kinda remains to be seen but i'm at least optimistic of course we haven't actually discussed the performance yet have we and this is also key based on my testing the game predominantly reaches its 60 frames per second target just as the prior performance mode did as well the dips that occur are uncommon and the game feels extremely fluid to play to really put this to the test though let's check out a couple different scenarios firstly we'll start with spider-man remastered specifically the introduction mission i noted three types of performance drops during this sequence occasional duplicate frames in the world actual drops mainly during cutscenes and duplicate frames on camera cuts specifically in cutscenes the initial swing to the first battle is all very smooth it runs at 60 frames per second and exhibits no issues but once we arrive and the cutscene begins you'll note the same issue i mentioned in the miles morales video where duplicate frames appear between camera cuts due to how these scenes are set up no doubt the actual battle then that follows this cutscene is predominantly stable with just a few missed frames here and there this scene represents the average level of performance you might see during normal gameplay i've found now jumping ahead to fisk tower the moment where you bust through the window via a cutscene is enough to trigger some actual minor drops in performance which is the third type of slowdown i mentioned earlier [Music] once inside and in combat though it's mostly smooth sailing once again aside from those occasional duplicate frames during combat like i said this is pretty much par for the course for this game and seems to be the consistent level of performance you can expect in missions beyond this that is it's very stable for the most part with just occasional duplicate frames and any slowdown that i did notice typically occurred in cutscenes but what about miles morales well i loaded up a later mission in the game specifically when harlem is under attack this is a great mission because there's a lot of particles around the scene volumetric fog is everywhere and all kinds of effects are just popping off all over the place along with the ray trace reflections and multiple types of enemies now the brief cutscene here exhibits those same duplicate frames between camera cuts [Music] but once you actually get into the game it's exactly like spider-man remastered that is i noticed occasional one or two frame drops here and there but by and large the frame rate hits the target consistently no matter what's happening as the scene is relatively heavy in terms of effects it feels like a pretty good indication of the general performance across the game so that's the logic behind selecting these scenes for testing now i haven't had a chance to play through the complete games with the performance rt mode it is possible that some other scene in the game may exhibit an issue or two but by and large i feel that it should be relatively stable but of course the other side of performance worth mentioning is loading now this benefits in exactly the same way as miles morales did in that it's instantaneous starting a game fast traveling loading to save all of it is basically loading time free now that we're removed from launch though and have played more games on both ps5 and the xbox consoles it's kind of obvious to me that insomniac is ahead of basically everyone else in terms of this sort of thing the loading is ridiculously fast and pretty much no other game released alongside these machines can touch it so well done engineering team as an aside i did test the save transfer feature this one is interesting in that it works just fine and even pops all of your trophies that were previously earned on playstation 4 the second you actually loaded but the actual process is a little convoluted you see remastered is technically a new game rather than a patched version of a prior release which makes things a little tricky i'd imagine but basically you have to first download the ps4 version then start the ps4 version upload your save from the main menu to the cloud and then start the game on ps5 where you can download the save to one of the save slots it works fine but it's not really elegant i gather that this is more limitation of the ps5 os setup than anything else and insomniac just had to find another way to work around it still overall both spider-man remastered and the rt performance mode are excellent and come highly recommended all around i do wish remastered were sold as a standalone disc based game to add to my collection of course but either way it's solid so yeah at this point it's safe to say that insomniac is off to a great start for this generation and i look forward to seeing what other games they deliver over the next few years obviously ratchet and clank is next up on the list and hopefully we'll see something like the rt performance mode in that game as well but seeing how much more demanding it looks on the surface at least that may be a tall order but we'll have to wait and see for now though that's gonna do it for this video so if you did enjoy it be sure to let us know like subscribe ring the notification bell find us on twitter all that good stuff and until next time this is jon signing off

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 558,292

Rating: 4.9251657 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: o2HrOxwH0_Q

Length: 19min 52sec (1192 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Same_Butterfly5162]

this is the best mode. and should be included in all games in the future if possible.

[u/1440PS5]

TL;DW

• Quality mode present targetting native 4K most of the time, but Dynamic Resolution is also present, dropping to 1800P in the worst case.

• Performance mode targets near 4k, with DRS lowest resolution being 1440P.

• Performance RT tops at 1440P, dropping to 1080P in the worst situation, this also applies to Miles Morales. The game usually stays at 1440P, which makes image quality similar to PS4 PRO version, of course with a higher frame rate, fidelity and ray tracing.

• Introductory sequence demonstrates the huge asset quality improvement, with texture, shadows and lighting remade.

• Strand system present in MM is also here, making a way more realistic hair rending possible.

• Characters with skin shading and teeth, some improvements are also enabled on during gameplay, like subsurface scattering.

• Position of sun and shadows changed in remaster, mainly an artistic change rather than a technical one.

• In some cases the remaster looks very similar to the original PS4 PRO game, which highlights what Insomniac did on the PS4.

• Distant details are improved, with additonal meshers and building normals are visible from across the world, giving better details.

• Traffic with a better draw distance, but no noticable improvement, the same with street density, all similar to PS4 PRO game(in RT PERFORMANCE)

• Texture details are way better, from streets to small enviroment details.

• Switching back to MM shows the graphical evolution between both games, but Insomniac did a great job in almost making the PS4 game similar to MM, refining a already great experience.

• Ray tracing explanation(y'all already know what it does)

• Implementing a ray tracing option in 60FPS is way harder, the bigger frame time increases the need for optimizations by a lot.

• Ray tracing resolution is scalled accordlngy to the native resolution. In the native 4K mode, reflection resolution is 1080P, in RT performance mode at 1440P, reflection resolutions are 720, or lower when the image resolution drops. You can see the decrease in detail when looking closely to resolutions, which is hardly the case when you are playing

• Shadow maps from buldings and static objects are still present, but dynamic objects like the player and cars are either removed or reduced, but is not a noticable change.

• Pedestrian and cars fades away in the reflections in a shorter distance, not a noticable change.

• Some animations in reflections are at lower frame rates so is not 1:1.

• Those cutbacks are impressive, since they only change the quality of the reflection, not the number of surfaces with reflections in the game, making all very acceptable reductions.

• Some places have the material changed in order to take advantage of Ray tracing, giving a huge boost in quality.

• Puddle gate REDEEMED, the infamous puddles in Fisk Construction site now shows proper reflections, not only similar but better and more accurate than E3's 2017 demo.

• Reflections details quality, such as trees, are improved compared to pre-release material.

• This is an impressive feat by Insmoniac, it doesn't guarantees anything since we don't know what will be the complexity of next-gen games, but it bodes well.

• Almost flawless 60FPS. Dips occurs in 3 situations. Cutscenes, when the scene becomes more demanding(like with explosions or a lot of particles), and duplicate frames, either in gameplay and in camera cuts, which is problem also present in Miles Morales.

• Both MM and Remastered have a very good frame rate in gameplay, with a frame here and there dropping(to 59~58).

• Loadings are instanteneous, Insomniac is currently at the top of the industry in this aspect.

• Save transfer is a little convoluted, you need to have the PS4 version in your system to transfer it, it works but it could be better.

Cred - uzupedro

[u/JPRSPalm]

So the consensus is that this is the best Graphics Mode to use?

[u/Raidertck]

I have said it before and I will say it again.

Insomniac have absolutely set the bar for this generation with this graphics setting. 1440p at 60FPS with RT on is absolutely phenomenal. This game looks and performs at a level that no other title is performing on consoles.

Ray tracing adds so much to immersion, same with 60FPS. Together this is magic. With both of these features in place this looks a LOT better than most native 4k games.

[u/RavenK92]

So TL;DR, Performance RT is 1080p-1440p (spends most time at higher ranges) with RT reflections at 720p, while performance is pretty much locked at 60fps except for a few slowdowns in cutscenes (worst slowdown was 55fps). It works beautifully and is John's recommended way to play

Most importantly: Revenge of the puddles

[u/reon_tigaldo]

Tried out the Performance Raytracing mode on SM Remastered last night after playing all of Miles Morales on Performance mode and have to say I think Performance Raytracing is easily the best mode for my eyes. The games looks even better and it runs at 60fps. Perfect. Oh how I wish GOW and Witcher 3 could get something like this.

[u/Waspy_Wasp]

This mode is a godsend for people sitting with 1080p TVs....

Now if I could get my hands on a PS5

[u/Win95_worm]

Awesome I've been waiting for this comparison.

[u/OrdinaryBlob]

Big ups to Insomniac for this addition. Remastered was my first PS5 game and I played through the main story at 30fps in Fidelity mode. But lately have made the switch to performance RT.

Only negative I have is that I feel like I’ve been encountering a bug or two since the update. Particularly I find sometimes the audio will shit the bed and straight up disappear sometimes.