Digital Foundry reviewed the release PS5 Of God of War Ragnarok from the technical point of viewto understand the progress made compared to the first episode, dating back to 2018, and to analyze the various graphic modes.
The result speaks of a graphically excellent work, despite being essentially a title designed for PS4, technologically speaking. Many interesting points touched by the review. Let’s see the main ones.
The 3D model of Kratos it is very rich from a polygonal point of view. In general, all the main characters have been created by scanning the actors in high resolution and capturing their performances in the studio, a practice that is now quite obvious for a production of this level.
The indirect lighting is pre-calculated but of a very high quality, superior to that of the first God of War. Textures are more detailed and there are fewer glitches in the light. Terrain and snow deformations use tessellation to appear more realistic. In quality mode there is no ray tracing, but dynamic cube maps are used. The performance mode loses detail, but generally offers a good compromise compared to the other, from a visual point of view.
Interestingly, the distance between the PS4 and PS5 versions is defined as lower than that seen in Horizon Forbidden West. The topic will be touched upon in a dedicated video, but the hint confirms the fact that God of War Ragnarok is a game essentially conceived for Sony’s old-generation console and then ported to PS5.
The graphics modes there are four: performance, with 60fps, a dynamic resolution that oscillates between 1440 and 2160p, with an average of 1872p and a generally lower but acceptable visual quality; the quality mode instead goes to 30pfps for a fixed 2160p resolution, obviously the graphic detail is much higher; the 40hz mode, with dynamic resolution that oscillates between 1800 and 2160p and a visual quality comparable to that of the quality mode, of which it also maintains 30fps; finally the high frame rate mode, with a fixed resolution at 1440p, a visual quality equal to that of the performance mode and a framerate that oscillates between 80-90fps, with peaks of 120fps.
THE loading times on PS5 they are 10-20 seconds faster than on PS4.
Digital Foundry concludes by talking about an essentially cross-gen title. For more details on the game, we invite you to read our review of God of War Ragnarok.
