A Canon Setting

Sons of Sparta isn’t just a side experiment or a “what-if” spin-off, it’s a full on canon entry. The game frames its 2D action-platforming around Kratos’ youth in Sparta, depicting the brutal discipline of the Agoge and the formative years that shaped him into the warrior he becomes later. Crucially, it also brings Deimos into the spotlight, positioning Kratos’ bond with his brother as a key part of the narrative.

Smart Level Design and Fluid Movement

Levels are thoughtfully constructed, blending combat arenas with environmental puzzles that demand clever use of your abilities and equipment. Movement feels responsive and precise, and with smooth, expressive animations tying everything together, traversal and combat both carry a satisfying flow.

Combat

Combat is built around a spear and shield foundation, with a heavy emphasis on reading enemy patterns, timed parries, and smart positioning. You’re not meant to just mash through encounters; the flow pushes you to defend with purpose, punish openings, and evade cleanly when the safest option is to disengage.

Graphics Style

Visually, the game also leans hard into a distinct identity. Instead of chasing realism, it goes for hand-drawn pixel animation, giving characters and effects a striking level of detail and motion in 2D. The result is a style that feels both modern and a throwback to the retro days.

Deep Weapon Customization From the Start

Kratos begins his journey equipped with a Spartan spear and shield, but this isn’t a static loadout. The spear alone can be modified across three distinct components: tip, grip, and tail, each altering how you approach combat. Rather than simple stat boosts, these parts meaningfully shape your build, letting you lean into offense, control, or survivability depending on your preference.

Spear Parts Fundamentally Change Your Playstyle

Each spear component serves a specific purpose. Tips can enhance attacks directly, increasing critical potential, adding protective effects, or inflicting elemental status ailments like burn or poison. Grips alter the finisher of your base combo, adding aggressive enders such as lunging slashes or forceful bashes. Tails introduce entirely new moves, from rapid stabbing flurries to crowd-disrupting strikes. Since every attachment has its own upgrade path, experimentation isn’t just encouraged, it’s essential.

Buffs

As you progress through Laconia, Kratos gains access to buffs. These buffs  grant special and super attacks that consume magic and can drastically shift the tide of battle. Some are built for ranged dominance, letting you control space or hit multiple enemies at once, while others enhance close-quarters devastation with brutal melee combinations. Choosing which buffs to equip can dramatically alter your combat rhythm.

Three Resource Meters to Manage

Combat isn’t just about combos, it’s also about resource management. Kratos operates with three core meters: health, spirit, and magic. Spirit fuels enhanced abilities and certain combat actions, while magic powers the special attacks tied to the buffs. These meters can be replenished through orb pickups and permanently strengthened via equipment upgrades, adding a layer of progression beyond pure skill tree investment.

Defensive Builds Matter Just As Much

The shield isn’t just for blocking. Its rim can be swapped out to emphasize different defensive strengths. Some rims widen your parry window, making counterplay more forgiving, while others reward evasive maneuvers by increasing damage after dodges. Much like the spear system, shield upgrades deepen these specialties, meaning defensive focused players have just as many viable build options as aggressive ones.

Skill Trees And Inventory

Character progression runs deep. Kratos begins with two skill trees centered on offense and defense, and later unlocks a third focused on movement. Upgrades can only be applied at campsites, encouraging preparation between major encounters. On top of that, the inventory can be expanded to hold up to six accessories, which grant passive bonuses like damage reduction or enhanced weapon effects. Some of the strongest ones require tracking down mysterious enemies on a secluded island, meaning exploration plays a key role in building your strongest version of Kratos.

Boss Battles

Boss fights are a major pillar of Sons of Sparta, and the game doesn’t hold back on variety. Kratos will square off against a roster of threats, creatures like Cyclops, Ioke, Ponea, and several other formidable enemies, each designed to feel like a proper skill check rather than just a tougher regular mob. Now, because this isn’t a big-budget, full-scale AAA production, you shouldn’t expect epic scale here. But what it trades in sheer scale, it makes up for with style and presentation.

The Price

On the pricing front, Sons of Sparta is positioned as a budget-friendly release rather than a full $70 drop, and it’s being sold digitally on the PlayStation Store in two tiers. The Standard Edition is priced at $29.99 / €29.99 / £24.99 / ¥3480, while the Digital Deluxe Edition bumps that up to $39.99 / €39.99 / £32.99 / ¥4480, so you’re essentially paying a $10 premium if you want the added deluxe perks (which we will discuss shortly). Either way, the base entry point is refreshingly accessible for a new Sony release, and it makes the game an easier impulse-buy if you’ve been waiting for something more straightforward (and cheaper) than the big blockbuster stuff.

Digital Deluxe Edition Contents

If you’re considering the Digital Deluxe Edition, it sweetens the deal with a handful of extras beyond the base game. You’ll get access to a Digital Soundtrack, which offer a deeper look at the game’s musical themes. On top of that, there’s a PlayStation Network avatar featuring the protagonist. In terms of in-game bonuses, the Deluxe Edition includes the Arrow of Virtue (a spear tip attachment), the Unstable Gemstone (a belt attachment), Rusty Scrap as an enhancement material, and a bundle of Blood Orbs to boost your early progression. Just note that some items are unlocked through story progress, so you won’t have everything available immediately from the start.

How Long To Beat

Expect a proper, full-length campaign, not a bite-sized spin-off. On a straightforward story run, you’re looking at roughly 9–11 hours, which puts it right in the same ballpark as the original, meaning it doesn’t feel like a “weekend demo” stretched into a release. And for the asking price we discussed, that runtime lands in a sweet spot: long enough to feel substantial, but still tight enough to keep the pacing moving. If you’re going in assuming this will be over in a few hours, it really isn’t, there’s enough mainline content here that you’ll get a satisfying arc before the credits roll.

Excellent Performance

We played on PS5 Pro, the game ran flawlessly from start to finish. There was no noticeable performance hiccups and it delivered consistently smooth gameplay throughout.

Despite the many improvements this version brings when compared to the original incarnation, The Last of Us Part 1 finds itself in a rock and a hard place as far as gameplay improvements are concerned. In addition to the improvements on the graphical front, there are some subtle improvements on the gameplay side of things as well – though that doesn’t amount to much when looking at the whole picture. But in this feature, we will be focusing on the graphical end of the game and comparing it with the remastered version on the PS4 in an effort to see what improvements this version is bringing to the table.

As you can easily gauge from a brief look at the two versions of The Last of Us, the PS5 version looks a lot darker than the PS4 remaster when it comes to the choice of colours. The Last of Us Remastered doesn’t shy away from using macabre colours like brown and grey but that is balanced out with the abundant use of green for the overgrowing foliage in the environments. The PS5 version ends up being really conservative with its colour palette, and the colours are a lot more muted which makes the environments feel drab, dreary, and more hostile than before. Of course, this is an artistic change that’s not reflective of the game being downgraded in any sense.

Putting The Last of Us Remastered and The Last of Us Part 1’s environments side by side, we can see that most of the level geometry and props are the same – but the actual assets have been re-built with higher quality textures which results in a more cleaned up look than the original. That said, because the geometry of the levels have remained the same – they can still end up feeling a bit unpolished and crude at times with some rough edges sticking out from places. It might not be immediately notiscale, but it’s a difference that one can notice when pitting the games side-by-side.

Then there are the character models, which have gotten a significant facelift in the PS5 version when compared to the PS4 remaster. The character models now boast markedly more detail than the original counterpart, which also has a downside in that some characters now look a lot older than before. Joel now has more visible wrinkles in his face, and the same can be said about Tess. On the flipside though, Bill seems a lot younger in this new rendition. Ellie’s character model has also been updated to retain similarity with the original. Poly-counts for these character models are incredibly high with highly detailed facial hair and skin meshes, and they all look spectacular in this new format.

The Last of Us Remastered uses a mixture of precalculated ambient lighting data along with sparse use of directional lights and shadows for most of its environmental lighting. The remake also seems to be utilizing the same lighting techniques, and the quality of lighting is in line with what one can expect from a modern game – complete with the additional cinematic lights that serve the purpose of adding more depth and definition to the character models during cutscenes. That said though, the cinematic lights in the remake seem to be softer in nature.

There are some more improvements with respect to lighting and reflections as well. Surfaces such as roads and the sides of buildings now reflect nearby environmental light sources like police sirens and rising flames with varying intensities depending on their reflective properties, which culminates in a more realistic feel when compared to the Remastered release. There’s no evidence of ray-tracing in reflections and shadow maps, but because the game’s environment’s lighting doesn’t dynamically change all that much – the lack of ray-tracing doesn’t really have any impact on the end result and the game still looks great nevertheless.

Particle effects have also seen a massive improvement with the remake, with a lot more alpha particles per explosion. The flames also look far more realistic than the original, and the volumetric smoke that surrounds the flames is also thick and diffuses light from its surroundings.

As for anti-aliasing, The Last of Us Remastered used Naughty Dog’s signature TAA implementation that worked to great effect in smoothing out the image quality without showing visible signs of artifacts during gameplay. Unsurprisingly, the developer has stuck to its roots for the remake and seems to have used the same TAA implementation along with the natural improvements that the Naughty Dog engine has seen over the course of almost a decade. That said, the game does looks sharper which is most likely a result of the higher base resolution on which the TAA pass is performed.

Briefly touching upon the animations, the cinematics animation data in The Last of Us Part 1 seem to be a one-to-one replica of that in The Last of Us Remastered, albeit with an added element of camera shakes. Character movement in cutscenes is the same, which isn’t a surprise since no motion captures were redone for this project. But there are major improvements in the facial animations which add more emotional weight. On the gameplay front, we now get the spectacular motion-matching technique which makes for seamless animations that blend well into one another. This improvement is more pronounced in sections featuring Ellie, though you can also spot some differences with the way how Joel now goes about things as well.

On that note, we should also talk about the performance. The Last of Us Part 1 is an interesting candidate from Naughty Dog because it’s the developer’s first release from the ground up in many years to have launched with support for 60fps gameplay. The game features two graphical modes – a Fidelity mode and a Graphics mode. The Fidelity Mode bumps the image resolution to 4K and locks the frame-rate to 30fps while Performance Mode knocks down the resolution to dynamic 4K and bumps the frame rate over to 60fps.

In addition to this, you can also adjust a couple of sliders such as motion blur, camera shake intensity, and film grain to get a better personalised experience for your playthrough. It’s all basic stuff, but appreciable nevertheless. The game performs well for the most part in both modes, which shouldn’t come as a surprise considering that the PS5 is much more powerful than the PS4 and the improvements featured in the remake are iterative rather than radical.

In conclusion, The Last of Us Part 1 is a faithful remake of the original – and the many improvements on the visual and gameplay front have been done in an effort to make the game fall in line with current gen standards.

An important point to note here is that this release isn’t a port of the 2018 PS4 release. Instead, it’s a port of the Remastered version that released for the PS5 in 2020 with a few new graphical bells and whistles. Our PC test bench consists of a Ryzen 9 5900X, 32 GB of RAM, and an RTX 3080 Ti – all running at stock speeds while the PS5 version that we will be comparing it to runs on Fidelity mode which obviously prioritizes graphics quality at a frame rate cap of 30fps.

With that out of the way, let’s begin:

PC Settings and Requirements

Nixxes Software and Insomniac Games recommends players to have at least an i3 4160, 8 GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GTX 950 to run Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered on their rigs, but don’t expect to turn the settings up too much. By our guesses, you should be aiming for a 30fps cap at 900p while having a mixture of low and medium settings on such a setup. Over on the recommended tab, you should have an i5 4670, 16 GB RAM, and GTX 1060 6GB to enjoy the game at presumably, 1080p and 60fps.

The PC version comes with a whole host of sliders that allow you to find the perfect balance between graphics and performance. This isn’t all that surprising considering that Nixxes, a studio known for its quality ports, is helping out Insomniac Games with this translation. You can adjust texture quality, texturing filtering, level of detail, weather particle quality, and shadow quality alongside the ability to turn off depth of field, bloom, lens flares, chromatic aberration, and the like.

Furthermore, you can also cap your frame rate or leave V-Sync off to let the frames roll should your rig be able to handle it, of course. We also have a proper DLSS implementation in this port, and you can also choose the extent of DSR to get the perfect balance between performance and graphics quality. Anti-aliasing gets locked to DLAA when DLSS is in use, but you can turn that off and select from TAA and SMAA as well should you choose.

PC version improvements over the PS5 version – Ray-Tracing Implementation, Draw Distance, Character Models And More

As mentioned before, we are pitting the PS5 Fidelity version against the PC’s maxed-out settings. Both versions are pretty similar to each other in their presentation, but the PC version does have some subtle upgrades with respect to graphics quality. The biggest is definitely shadows, which has more depth than the PS5 version. Areas in shadow tend to be darker while the ones in direct light are more pronounced than the console counterpart, and that contributes to a more realistic feel, especially in cinematics where the characters are the primary focus.

These are all very subtle changes, and the PS5 version stacks pretty well against the PC version. But then, of course, you have the option to swing around these picturesque skylines at 60fps or more with all these graphical bells and whistles turned to the max on PC while on the console end of things, you have to sacrifice performance for graphics and vice-versa.

As mentioned previously, Marvel’s Spider-Man’s PC port also features a couple of options for ray-tracing. You can choose between low, medium, high, and ultra on the PC front while you are stuck to RT and RT+Performance modes on the PS5. In Fidelity mode, the console version seems to be set to high quality ray-traced reflections which look a bit blurrier in comparison to our crisp PC reflections which are set to ultra preset.

Coming to character models, while not a lot has changed – the hair looks to be of noticeably sharper quality, though that could be a direct result of the noticeably better lighting. Then there’s the draw distance, which seems to be identical to the PS5 version. Suffice to say, the draw distance is remarkable on both platforms and you wouldn’t find any signs of pop-in or shoddy LoD swapping that can distract from the experience. Everything loads in smoothly without any jitter and stutters, so no harm and no foul here.

While this might not be a bespoke improvement over the PS5 version, Marvel’s Spider-Man on PC fully supports the PS5 DualSense controller. Simply plug in the controller via a USB cable or wirelessly through Bluetooth, and you should be able to enjoy the enhanced haptics and adaptive triggers on PC as well. Should you have the option to play through the game using a PS5 controller, it’s absolutely recommended that you do.

Performance

Insomniac Games has proven itself a master of Sony hardware as it pumps out quality titles with jaw-dropping visuals that are all rendered smoothly at target frame rates, but what about the PC version? Sony’s previous outings on the platform like Horizon Zero Dawn have struggled in this department, but I’m happy to report that Marvel’s Spider-Man mostly rights these wrongs.

During our experience, performance remained mostly consistent with over 60 fps at all times. This might not seem much given our test bench, but keep in mind this is all maxed-out at 4K with RTX on with DLSS. There were some dips here and there, but that shouldn’t detract from the smooth gameplay otherwise. Marvel’s Spider-Man on PC seems to be a rather optimized port from PlayStation 5, and the game should be enjoyable on a wide spectrum of hardware. The game is also Steam Deck Verified, though we haven’t actually tested the game on that particular hardware – so we can’t say much on that end.

Conclusion

Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered has a made a glorious jump to PC, and is a fully packed port with most of the options that one would want from a PC game. While there isn’t much of a difference in visuals when compared to the PS5, players do get the option of playing at higher frame rates and utlra wide resolutions, along with much better quality ray tracing. In its current state – Marvel’s Spider-Man on PC is a great way to experience this one hell of a game complete with all its DLC.

After a long and arduous wait, Gran Turismo 7 is finally here. And what an impressive game it is. Polyphony Digital has once again outdone itself in the visual department. From the pristine reflections to the immaculately detailed vehicles to the bevy of carefully curated tracks, there’s no shortage of impressive tech wizardry running under the hood. Gran Turismo 7 is also the first entry in the series to feature a cross-generation release, and as such – Polyphony Digital has done a ton of work on its engine to provide an experience that’s scalable and plays well to the respective systems.

On that note, we present our comprehensive technical analysis of Gran Turismo 7.

Improvements Over GT Sport – What’s New?

Polyphony Digital’s GT Sport still stands tall as one of the most visually impressive racers on the market, although it isn’t without noticeable flaws. In an effort to provide a 60fps experience, Polyphony Digital had to make some visual sacrifices and work with many design constraints. For instance, GT Sport doesn’t feature a dynamic time of day. Multiple times of day can be selected beforehand from the menus, but the position of the sun doesn’t change while racing. This is because GT Sport relies on pre-computed shadow map data for its tracks, which allows for high-resolution shadows to be displayed without requiring much compute power. That said, shadows cast from environmental objects such as trees are rendered in real-time which does add an element of dynamic behavior to the whole affair.

Similarly, understandable compromises were made in the reflections department which used some low-resolution cube mapping implementations. All cars on the track relied on the same cube map for reflections, which can cause some rather odd visual glitches. Again, these aren’t objectively bad by any means – but do leave a bit to be desired. The surrounding foliage and crowd polycounts were still pretty primitive, which can be off-putting if you zoom in on the details.

With Gran Turismo 7, Polyphony Digital seems to be building upon this mostly strong rendering pipeline with even sharper reflections, immaculately detailed vehicles, a dynamic day and night weather cycle, and a more sophisticated physics system governing all the simulation aspects of the experience. Ray-tracing is present in the game’s PS5 version, although it is limited only to replays and demo views of the vehicles, much like how is the case with last year’s Forza Horizon 5.

This is all on top of an impressive use of PS5’s Tempest audio engine and haptic feedback system. Once again, Gran Turismo 7 is aiming to provide this impressive visual presentation at a silky smooth 60fps. Also, the game seems to be utilizing TAA anti-aliasing which is usually accompanied by an overall mushy look, but the fact that the game is being rendered at native resolution helps combat that issue by a significant margin. There’s also a new implementation of motion-blur, which is now per-pixel as opposed to the per-object implementation seen in GT Sport.

Game Engine Details – Car Models, Reflections, Textures

As mentioned previously, a lot of iterative upgrades seem to have been to Polyphony’s in-house engine for Gran Turismo 7. The developer has always excelled in micro-level details, carefully recreating hundreds of vehicles from all car cultures around the world. The case remains the same with Gran Turismo 7, which features over 420 cars just at launch – which is a big step-up from GT Sport which featured only 168 cars when it launched in 2017.

Each car model is painstakingly created with a ton of geometric textures and physically-based materials. Polycounts for car surfaces are ridiculously high, and each component is built to perfect scale. Everything from the individual braking mechanisms inside the tires to the physically-based cloth interiors to the geometrically detailed car doors is all rendered with stunning attention to detail. That said, it seems to mostly be the same implementation as GT Sport – not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that.

This highly geometrical and physically-based rendering of the cars truly shines in the game’s replays and other demo modes where ray-tracing is in full swing. Much like GT Sport before it, gearheads can spend hours and hours endlessly gawking at every single little detail of these vehicles and never really get tired of it. The glossy car paint reflects the surrounding environments as well as the car body itself in pristine detail – giving all the cars a really royal look as a result. The self-occlusion of the many car parts also helps in giving yet another layer of realism to the overall look, and so do the generous amount of light sources in the surrounding environment.

Now let’s talk about the lighting. As mentioned previously, GT Sport employs pre-calculated global illumination data to cast shadows on the game world while select objects such as the surrounding foliage use real-time shadows to make the environments look a bit more dynamic. With Gran Turismo 7 however, Polyphony Digital is going for a fully dynamic day-and-night weather cycle which is a big step-up. The clouds and sky will all shift as the race continues, and this will affect the lighting on the tracks and cars accordingly. So, it’s no surprise that the game’s PS5 version features real-time shadows for the tracks and the surrounding environment, and it all looks really high-resolution with little to no shimmering artifacts. Another neat little detail in this regard is that how the sun, clouds, and even the night sky stars change positions over the duration of races is specific to each track’s geographic location.

The foliage looks to be of markedly better quality than before, employing higher and denser resolution assets than before. The trees cast their own shadows with respect to the position of the sun and light can pass through the gaps in the trees as well. The crowd has also received a bump in pixel counts from its predecessor as one would expect.

Gran Turismo 7 also puts a lot of focus on the weather effects – which are simulated using high fidelity alpha particles. Bristles of dust and drops of water all seem to react accordingly to the environmental lighting – seating players further into the simulation experience. This simulation also extends to the long-term effects of these weather conditions such as specific parts of the track drying up first while puddles holding water for longer periods of time. It’s a neat little detail, although we are assuming its pre-calculated data per track which saves on precious CPU and GPU resources.

For fun, we compared the rain effects of DriveClub to those found in Gran Turismo 7. Much to our surprise, DriveClub still takes the lead here but the way rain impacts gameplay in GT7 is way beyond any racing game so far. Still, it’s an intriguing case. DriveClub’s weather effects still stands out almost 8 years later but I guess this is a topic for another day.

When it comes to reflections, Gran Turismo 7 seems to be building yet again on what came before. Much like GT Sport before, a static cube-map of the surroundings seems to have been plastered on the car body at lower resolutions. Some car components don’t seem to reflect on the car body in a proper way. For instance, a sleek sports car wouldn’t reflect its tires on the sides of the car body. Similarly, some other sports cars don’t seem to reflect their spoilers properly. On the other hand, however, some of the vintage cars do have proper reflections for the rearview mirrors on their glossy car sides. What’s here is certainly fantastic, although omissions such as these are noticeable considering that Polyphony is working with 10 TFLOPs of GPU power this time around.

Now, let’s also talk about ray-tracing. It’s limited to non-racing sequences such as the GT Café, the Scape views, and race replays – but it instantly makes a difference. Resolution of reflections immediately takes a bump, and they are markedly more accurate than before. Car components reflect themselves properly, and shadows are also cast with a lot more precision than before. These might seem like subtle differences, but they quickly add up to create an almost photorealistic look that’s an absolute treat for the eyes.

Physics

While jaw-dropping visuals have been at the forefront of Gran Turismo games since its beginnings, Polyphony has equally paid a ton of attention and care to the simulation aspect of the game as well. A sophisticated physics system comprising a ton of variables including the likes of engine strength, torque, understeer, and what have you determine the overall speed and stability of the vehicle. Much like previous entries, players are free to change these variables to optimize performance. Gran Turismo 7 features approximately 60 performance parts per car, which should be more than enough for even the most veteran of tinkerers. As you’d expect, everything from a tire change to a tuning reconfiguration to track conditions will affect the performance of a car. For instance, if it rains – your car is likely to slip off-track should you not maintain balance at all times. In a similar vein, you might need to make some car configuration changes for when you are racing in a Derby course. It’s a really superb simulation system that’s a worthy successor to the Gran Turismo franchise.

Damage hasn’t been a strong suit of GT for the longest of times, and that hasn’t unfortunately changed with Gran Turismo 7 as well. Much like GT Sport before it, damage is only limited to static scratches on the glasses and the sides of a car. There’s no impact on the performance, and there’s no variable damage depending on where you hit and how fast you were when you hit. It’s essentially a static texture that’s mapped onto the car body. If you crash into the many tire stacks on the sides of a track, they seem to be their own physics objects – which is the same implementation of the system from GT Sport.

While it’s true that GT7 doesn’t have solid destruction mechanics like that of Burnout or F1 – but that might just boil down to the fact that car companies who license their designs to Polyphony wouldn’t want their magnum opuses to be seen in a dilapidated state in a video game. Or maybe Polyphony doesn’t just have the time or CPU overhead needed to implement a sophisticated destruction mechanic. Of course, these are just fan speculations and we have no way of knowing for sure why that’s the case. It’s still a bummer, though.

Sounds and Feedback

Gran Turismo 7 might not have the edge in terms of destruction, but it certainly makes a ton of right moves in the sound department. Polyphony’s latest might just have the best implementation of Sony’s 3D Audio tech, and as a result – GT7 sounds absolutely breathtaking. There are a ton of independent sound sources emitting vibrations at any given time, and while there are no ray-traced sound reflections as we know – the end result is pretty realistic nevertheless. And we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the Music Rally mode, which is a time trial set against the sounds of popular music tracks, and players have to make their way to the end of a race before beats in the track run out.

Much like sounds, Gran Turismo 7 also puts a ton of detail in haptic feedback via the DualSense controller. Polyphony has created a whole host of different vibrations that all serve to simulate a close approximation of driving a sports car. As you apply the brakes, you will feel the tires slipping. You will also feel subtle differences in feedback depending on the surfaces you are racing on, and in a similar vein, you will feel the resonance emitted from the car body itself. It’s an ambitious feedback pipeline, which serves to accentuate the playing experience to a higher degree than before.

PS5 Graphical Modes and Comparison With PS4 Pro

Unsurprisingly, Polyphony Digital has once again gone with multiple graphics modes on the PS5, a Prioritize Frame Rate Mode and a Prioritize Ray Tracing Mode. Both modes seem to target a native 4K resolution of 3840×2160, with a frame-cap of 60 fps. In our experience, the only noticeable difference between the two modes is that Ray Tracing mode only enables the effect during replays, garage, scapes and some other places. Both the modes feature pristine image quality, that’s then passed through a TAA anti-aliasing solution to soften out any jagged edges. It’s clear that Polyphony Digital wants to focus on delivering a consistent framerate, and Gran Turismo 7 checks out in this regard.

The frame-rate sticks very closely to its target, rarely if ever dropping any frames. That said, it’s a shame there’s no 120fps mode, which should be possible given how powerful the PS5’s CPU is when compared against the PS4. Series producer Kazunori Yamauchi has clarified that there are no plans of adding 120 Hz support in the foreseeable future.

The PS4 Pro version, on the other hand, seems to be running at a resolution of 1800p. The frame-rate target is still 60fps, which speaks volumes about Polyphony’s vision for Gran Turismo 7 and its knowledge of Sony’s last-gen system. Other noticeable differences come in the form of reduced lighting effects, shadow quality and reflections.

Load times on the PS5 version are almost instantaneous, thanks to its ultra-fast SSD. The PS4 Pro version, on the other hand, takes several seconds to get into a race.

Conclusion

Gran Turismo 7 is, unsurprisingly, a looker in every regard. From the immaculately detailed car bodies that are a sight to behold to the impressive sky rendering to the complex simulation to the robust feedback pipeline, there’s no shortage of impressive tech in Polyphony’s latest title. It’s a worthy sequel to this prestigious IP, and it will be only be growing stronger from here on out via updates.

This theme of improving over great beginnings continues in the technical department as well, with Horizon Forbidden West seemingly taking full advantage of both Sony’s current-gen machine the PS5 as well as its previous-gen machine the PS4 Pro. To make the game run as smoothly as possible on the two machines which have vastly different compute horsepower, the studio’s in-house Decima Engine has also seemingly received a ton of internal updates to its rendering pipeline to make the game both scale well across both platforms – all while delivering a markedly better experience on the lowest target platform.

To that effect, we present a complete technical analysis of Horizon Forbidden West and all of the improvements that it has over the original. Let’s begin!

The Rendering Pipeline

Guerrilla Games excellently adapted its Decima engine for Horizon Zero Dawn to seamlessly render a large open world that boasts a grand sense of scale alongside proper attention to microscopic detail. In addition to high polycount in character models, physically-based materials, and dense foliage, the Decima Engine boasts a robust post-processing pipeline with generous use of computationally taxing effects such as volumetric fog, high-range anisotropic filtering, screen-space reflections, and so much more. All of this impressive visual presentation was then capped off with MSAA.

Of course, that’s not to say that Horizon Zero Dawn didn’t make any sacrifices in achieving this level of detail for its post-apocalyptic world. Shadow maps can have a noticeably blurred appearance for objects that aren’t in the immediate vicinity of the player. There’s also no global illumination system in place, and reflections mostly utilize cube-mapping instead of the more accurate and computationally taxing screen space reflections that we saw many games using towards the tail end of the last generation.

Horizon Forbidden West shows some immediate changes to this visual presentation, although as previously mentioned – they are mostly iterative but noticeable upgrades over the original. For starters, the game does seem to have indirect lighting, presumably through the use of screen space reflections. Reflections are also of a markedly higher quality than before, most likely due to higher quality cube maps. Additionally, the game’s skybox rendering has also received a much-appreciated upgrade, courtesy of the Decima’s Nubis system which allows for rendering animated volumetric clouds.

Other than these, there aren’t new notable technologies that Forbidden West seems to be utilizing in its rendering pipeline – although the ones that are there certainly make this post-apocalyptic world an absolute looker on both machines. Note that this is not a criticism, but this is just the way the developers would have chosen to work with Forbidden West given that the game is a cross generational release.

An In-Depth Look at Character Models

Horizon Zero Dawn featured impressive high-fidelity character models across the board, although the main cast had a lot more micro-detail than other NPCs. The game also employed a primitive crowd system for its settlements, which allows for multiple NPCs to co-exist within the same space all while having their own animation cycles and primitive AI routines.

Coming to protagonist Aloy’s character model in Zero Dawn, it features some rather impressive hair physics of her own with each hair lock reacting independently to the character’s movements. Animations also seamlessly blend into each other to give a smooth experience controlling the character at all times. Another impressive detail is how the character’s limbs react to terrain slopes, resulting in the player speed increasing or decreasing when going downhill or uphill respectively.

Horizon Forbidden West iterates on this excellent presentation with a few new upgrades to the existing tech. The characters have similarly high polycounts across the board, although the facial meshes are a lot more detailed than before which complement the much-needed additions of facial animations very well. The characters also look much better thanks to cinematic lights which apply additional shading to these models to give them depth, although it needs to be noted that while the PS5 version has them enabled at all times the PS4 version only uses it in cutscenes.

The clothes that characters don are also composed of physically-based materials and have many more high-quality textures and meshes than before, which combined with highly-detailed models themselves create a pristine look all around. Cloth physics are also seemingly present, as the fur on the clothing as well as the edges of clothing reacts to the environment and wind accordingly.

Horizon’s signature hair physics makes a return, although it still suffers from the same issue of Aloy’s hair clipping through her bow at times. I acknowledge this might be a nitpick, but it’s still something that I found to be slightly off putting when the game otherwise looks so graphically stunning.

Another noticeable improvement comes in the form of enhanced facial animations for both Aloy and NPCs. The original game was criticized for its underwhelming facial animation and it’s great to see this being improved noticeably in the sequel. The game’s new settlements boast impressive crowd density and players will be able to notice a lot of new NPC animations during their travels.

The World Tech

The post-apocalyptic world of Zero Dawn is just a sight to behold. From the frigid Frozen Wilds to the grassy plains to the treacherous Oseram deserts, the game’s world is both diverse in terrain and huge in scale. The world streaming technology is really efficient, and the engine renders huge chunks of the map without any hitches. The terrain is also filled with large structures from the Old Ones as well as dense foliage, culminating in one great visual presentation.

The Forbidden West is home to many such diverse areas, all sporting even more visual fidelity in the terrain as well as the surrounding environments. The foliage is composed of higher-fidelity meshes and some trees are destructible allowing bigger machines to  trample them down with relative ease, as seen with the Tremortusk blowing the palm trees to smithereens with its super strength.

Rendering huge amounts of complex terrain geometry has been one of Decima’s strongest suits (which might be part of the reason why Kojima Productions utilized it for Death Stranding). Aloy will be able to climb up a lot more surfaces than before in Horizon Forbidden West, which definitely adds some more complexity to the terrain geometry. Another notable point of improvement is the level of detail in shadow maps, which results in Forbidden West looking a lot sharper in faraway areas. The actual process of level of detail swapping also looks to be much smoother than in Zero Dawn, which contributes a lot to the game’s crisp and consistent visual presentation.

Horizon Forbidden West also features underwater exploration, and this new biome features a whole new set of flora and fauna. The water meshes look to be of extremely high quality, and ripples, waves, and bubbles in the water have impressive physics of their own – notably on the game’s PS5 version. Overall, the water seems to be a lot more detailed in Horizon Forbidden West than in Zero Dawn. Players can notice how the water trickles down the Tremortusk’s feet when it rises from the water, and also notice how individual water droplets are visible when Erend gets up after falling into a puddle of water.

Now, let’s get to the lighting. Much like Zero Dawn before it, volumetric light remains a strong element of the visual presentation for Horizon Forbidden West. The game extensively utilizes volumetric light shafts with light beams passing through the gaps in the treetops. In a similar vein, there’s also the use of fog to give a sense of scale to the game’s world, which also serves to mask low-level detail artifacts in the distance. As mentioned previously, the volumetric lights can also pass through gaps in the animated cloud meshes – thanks to Decima’s Nubis system.

Thick volumetric smoke can also be seen in explosions, such as when Aloy deploys a smoke bomb to hold off the machines from closing in. On the post-processing side of things, anisotropic filtering seems to be pretty much the same as before (most likely 8x or 16x) which does a great job of smoothing out far-away textures. Depth-of-field was used to focus on characters in cutscenes in Horizon Zero Dawn, and Horizon Forbidden West is no different in this regard. And much like Zero Dawn before, Forbidden West similarly uses both camera motion blur and per-object motion blur in its presentation.

The Machines

The machines have always been the star of the show for Horizon, and Forbidden West is unsurprisingly no different in this regard. These robotic creatures boasted impressive visual fidelity in Horizon Zero Dawn, with the machines boasting high polycounts coupled with complex geometry and physically-based materials. The machines that roam the Forbidden West are more dangerous, but share the same visual make-up as Zero Dawn.

A lot of what makes these machines look better than before can be attributed to the improved reflections and shadow tech of the world, which combines with self-occlusion to give the surfaces of the machines a better sense of depth and belonging to the world. That said, the evolved art direction also seems to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. For instance, notice how the cult tattoos on the Clawstriders and the Tremortusk contribute to an overall grittier look than before.

Another key improvement that fans might notice with regards to the Machines are the new animations, as they can now climb up surfaces and swim in the water to complement Aloy’s expanded moveset. Finally, Horizon: Zero Dawn’s systemic destruction of these machines makes a return in Forbidden West. Aloy can essentially target weak points of the machines using her Focus, and these parts will fall off the machines once enough damage is dealt. This forms an important part of the game’s combat system and an impressive showcase of the Decima’s physics systems.

PS5 Multiple Graphics Modes And How It Stacks Up Against the PS4 Pro Version

According to developer Guerrilla Games, Horizon Forbidden West is built with the PS4 as the target platform. As such, fans can expect the visual presentation to be mostly intact on the 8-year old machine. That said, PS5 is undoubtedly the best place to experience Horizon Forbidden West in all of its visual glory – thanks to the flexibility offered by multiple graphics modes along with the improvements that one can expect from the substantially more powerful machine.

Horizon Forbidden West on the PS5 offers two graphical modes – a resolution mode and a performance mode. The Quality mode targets a full 4K resolution and comes with all of the graphical bells and whistles included, with a target frame-cap of 30 fps. This allows the engine to produce a clean and crisp image, huge draw distances, 8x or 16x anisotropic filtering, high-fidelity reflections, and smooth LoD swapping and much more in this mode.

It’s all capped with what looks to be a multi-sampling anti-aliasing solution, most likely 4x.The performance mode will knock a few of these settings for a 60 fps performance and the resolution is most likely be dynamic in this mode or utilizing the same checkerboard rendering that Guerrilla Games used in the PS4 Pro version of Horizon Zero Dawn.

Coming to the PS4 Pro version, the game targets 30 frames per second. There are also some rather immediate visual downgrades to the experience. The PS5 version has an additional cinematic rig lighting for Aloy at all times, which is absent in the PS4 version. Aloy’s hair and her armor react more realistically on the PS5 than compared to the PS4 Pro version.  Water physics on the PS4 are confirmed to be not as sophisticated as the PS5, which isn’t surprising considering how weak last-gen CPU hardware is when compared to current-gen.

On the PS4, draw distance seems to be shorter which is masked with the fog, and artifacts of level of detail swapping for shadows are particularly visible at the peripheral edges of the frame. The MSAA seems to have been replaced with a TAA solution, which when combined with what looks to be an already upscaled image culminates in mushy visuals. Depth of field and motion blur are of markedly lower quality, and so is the case with the resolution of explosion effects.  The PS5 version suffers from minor pop in issues but it’s pretty bad on the PS4 Pro and it might be an immersion breaker for some players. Volumetric details are also toned down in the PS4 Pro version.

Load times are much faster on the PS5, thanks to its powerful SSD. On the PS4 Pro, as expected, the loading times are much longer. Load times to load the in-game work bench are also longer on the PS4 Pro although why this is the case is something beyond us.

Again, despite the many sacrifices with the PS4 Pro version – Horizon Forbidden West retains its look which is an impressive feat of its own. But if you can find a PS5, Horizon Forbidden West is best played on Sony’s latest machine.

Conclusion

Horizon Forbidden West marks a new era for developer Guerrilla Games, and its Decima Engine has certainly evolved for this generation. Horizon Forbidden West clearly builds upon the strengths of Zero Dawn. From the complex terrain to the striking art design of the machines to well-made character models, the game’s post-apocalyptic world looks stunning. But perhaps, what’s most impressive is how scalable the technology is – as even the almost  six year old PS4 Pro runs the game provided you can accept its shortcomings.

In conclusion, Horizon Forbidden West is a visual showcase for the power of PS5, and Guerrilla Games seems to have done a fantastic job with the game overall.