Digital Foundry took a look at Returnal Is the first big PlayStation 5 exclusive since the launch of the console, which takes advantage of many of the device’s features.
DF was very impressed with working with particles – there are a lot of them and they are often interactive. One of the enemies, for example, crumbles into small pieces after death – they react to the movements of the heroine. This impressed the specialists.
The picture as a whole is very atmospheric and dynamic – something is constantly happening in the frame: leaves move, dust settles or something else. This creates a lively and organic image. In addition, ray tracing is used for lighting – but it seems only to speed up rendering.
The most interesting was the resolution – 1080p. Then, with the help of a temporary reconstruction, it is brought to 1440p and a checkerboard rendering is applied to bring it to 4K. A similar technology is used in Alan wake, Quantum Break and Control…
The method works great for static objects, however, you can already observe artifacts on dynamic ones – in DF, the resolution was determined during the movement of the heroine and vegetation.
But with performance everything is fine – the game most of the time without problems reaches stable 60 frames per second. However, in scenes with a huge number of enemies, special effects and the like, the frequency may still drop slightly.
Even in DF, instant downloads are noted – they do not exceed a second even when moving to new biomes or inside a location. The screen just darkens for a second and that’s it.
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