Fantastically detailed as usual
@Dictator.
So like most Sony ports -
relatively solid, but still needing some patches. As Alex mentioned, a lot of those are rather bizarre (especially when the PS4 version can look superior) and relegated to specific areas/configs, so I'm sure they're bugs. The devs have previously been responsive online so I'd expect most of them to be addressed.
Curious, but did you have a chance to match PS5's settings to see how it stacks up to a mid-range PC like one with a 3060/2070S? This game runs extremely well on PS5 and the performance bottoms out at 1440p I believe and never dips below 60. That a 4060 cannot maintain 60 even with DLSS Quality at 1440p (base 1080p) suggests that the PS5 runs the game much much better than PC equivalent parts.
Yeah, that's the kind of comparison I was expecting and was surprised to not see it. How a midrange PC stacks up like for like with the PS5 version in raw performance is a part of the ports quality, I think we all expect at this point for Sony studio games with custom engines to require more GPU grant than you would expect and frametime consistency is key, but the use of DLSS in the 4060 at 1440p would imply the PS5 version is running far, far better - at least in that config.
Here's a
4070 running the game at 4k DLAA Ultra for comparison:
Now the PS5's Quality mode has a 40fps option, with an 1800p to 2160p dynamic resolution window - and that 40fps is a solid lock from all reports I've seen. So yeah, very GPU demanding - from these numbers the PS5 Pro version will probably deliver better results than a 4070 super.
Not fantastic sure, but as I've always said with these demanding Sony ports I've far more concerned with frametime consistency - you can brute force/tweak your way with bottlenecks that are purely hardware but shader/traversal stutter, you're fucked. They got some areas to iron out (UW displays) sure, but overall I certainly prefer that focus.
On the issue of the cubemap reflections not matching the PS5's quality mode btw, perhaps one of the bottlenecks is they spent a bunch of time trying to get DXR to work but couldn't do it, so they're falling back to 'basic cube maps'. The intention may have been to replace the more accurate cubemaps Quality with just DXR, but the result of that failure also meant they didn't have to time to add in the more accurate cubemap version. There is still the possibility than DXR may come to the PC version later though:
From Eurogamer's interview:
Matt DeWald: For the cube map reflection stuff,
we tried to get DXR working properly with that, but we just weren't able to do it, so that's falling back to just basic cube maps in that area. What we realised is that due to the number of reflective surfaces and overall environment, ray tracing is most noticeable in the one scene that Stephen McAuley called out in his
GDC talk [around 23:00 in the Realm Between Realms.
Given the time of the project, we've pushed that to the side for now. We're hoping to get to that post-launch if we can get DXR working the want we want it to.