Since the beginning of this generation, Insomniac Games has stood as one of Sony’s strongest internal developers. Having shipped four games on PS5 thus far, the Calfornia-based company has been busy – but despite that, the studio has constantly looked to push their tech and support new features. After all, Insomniac was one of the first to embrace 40fps output for 120Hz screens and one of the first to go all-in on ray tracing (RT) at the launch of PS5. What I didn’t expect, however, was Insomniac going back and updating every one of their PS5 titles to properly support the new PlayStation 5 Pro. That’s exactly what they’ve done, so we’re going to lay out these changes starting with their most recent release: Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.
The gist is simple – Insomniac has implemented Sony’s new PSSR upscaling feature in addition to offering additional RT options that were not available on the base system. Combine this with the various frame-rate options and you have quite a wide range of choice on the Pro, including new performance and fidelity graphics modes that work differently to the base machine.
For starters, Insomniac’s excellent temporal injection has been replaced with PSSR. The internal resolution metrics are comparable, eg with performance mode at ~1440p internally, but PSSR allows much more detail to be resolved. That also applies in the fidelity mode, which has a near-4K internal resolution and a much sharper and more stable image with PSSR onboard. However, those sitting closer to larger TVs will notice the difference more readily than those with smaller TVs and higher average viewing distances.
There are other factors here as well – these resolution numbers are for the default 30fps and 60fps modes, but if you have a 120Hz display with VRR, you gain access to additional options. As with the base PS5 version, there is a 40fps mode and uncapped options for both modes. What I’ve found is that this can influence average resolution figures slightly but, with PSSR, the difference here is less noticeable than with the base PS5. The other RT settings, when combined with the uncapped fidelity mode, can exert a slightly stronger influence on dynamic resolution, but it’s largely negligible.
I’ll get to performance numbers later but let’s first tackle this: what sort of changes exist between performance pro and fidelity pro modes? We know that additional RT features are available, but what else changes?
The answer is surprisingly comprehensive. First, elements such as draw distance, distant reflections, increased detail at proximity and additional lights are all present here. Traffic lights become more detailed at a distance, as do trees and buildings, and you can even see building reflections from across the map. The actual RT features are trickier to show off, but thankfully the game allows you to flip back and forth between the two modes without restarting the game to see how a scene changes between modes.
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The first RT feature is called RT key light shadows, which refers to distant shadows cast by buildings and other large structures. Doing this at scale isn’t easy, however, but RT enables distant shadows that otherwise weren’t displayed. You can see the shadows between buildings if you look closely, and makes the world look less flat overall. If you’re using fidelity mode, I recommend enabling it.