Sucker Punch and Ghost of Yotei are using the PS5 Pro’s newer hardware not for flashy mirror shots but for lighting that shapes every scene. Adrian Bentley, director of programming at the studio, revealed in a PlayStation Blog article that the team paired a more automated, higher-quality baked lighting model with short-range ray-traced global illumination (RTGI). To make that viable in gameplay, they reworked mesh streaming so the engine can dynamically decompress ray-tracing acceleration data, and on PS5 Pro the RT hardware is efficient enough that RTGI can be enabled while targeting 60 fps.
“By using the PS5 Pro’s more efficient ray tracing hardware, players can enable RTGI targeting 60 frames per second on Pro consoles,” he stated.
On the image-quality side, Ghost of Yōtei rebuilds the frame around a general dynamic-resolution pipeline to leverage PSSR. Compared to the studio’s older upsampler, PSSR needs fewer authoring hints and, with tweaks like conservative rasterization for tiny particles, reconstructs fine foliage and architectural detail more cleanly while staying more stable during fast camera motion.
Loading is engineered, world data is preprocessed so each location or terrain tile needs only a small number of SSD reads with minimal patching. At load, the engine fetches just the texture mips and mesh LODs required for the first visible frame (typically one read per element) before streaming in the rest. Sucker Punch also “dog-foods” this shipping path throughout development (where everyone builds and tests against the real loader) to keep fast travel and boot flows honest.
For more on Ghost of Yotei visuals check out our complete graphical overview on it over here.
