With PlayStation VR2 out later this month, one of its most impressive titles is cross-gen. Polyphony Digital’s Gran Turismo 7 was released last year for PS4 and PS5 and will be fully playable on the VR headset. Not only that, but it’s a free upgrade for current owners and features a VR Showroom to examine each vehicle closely.
GT Planet spoke to creator and series producer Kazunori Yamauchi who revealed that the game was developed with PlayStation VR2 in mind. “At the end of developing Gran Turismo Sport, we started on Gran Turismo 7, and our intent was that we would make the entire game playable in PS VR2. Gran Turismo 7 natively supports 4K/60, but when you set targets like that, you naturally also end up supporting things like VR, as well.”
Yamauchi assumed that while many titles would have a hard time adjusting to the platform, it was “very easy” for Polyphony. Gran Turismo 7 runs in re-projected 120 FPS on PlayStation VR2, and based on the footage shown thus far, it looks to be a smooth experience. However, Yamauchi didn’t reveal what had to be toned down to achieve this.
“In that respect, there hasn’t been anything done to cut anything down in any major way. We obviously have a huge focus on frame rate and resolution when we make Gran Turismo, and I think it was just a matter of really good timing because the power of the PS5 and the specs of the PSVR 2 really worked well together.”
As for foveated rendering, a major new feature with PlayStation VR2, he said that its implementation was done “really by the book. You have the resolution of the rendering at the center of your eyesight very high, as opposed to the peripheral area around the focus of vision, which is rendered at a slightly lower resolution.
“That’s not anything special for Gran Turismo 7. It’s kind of a textbook application of that feature. Of course, we didn’t think it would come out this naturally. We thought, the technique really works, we thought maybe if you kind of focused, you might be able to notice the lesser resolution around the outside, but you really can’t. That’s something we discovered while working on developing all of this.”
Gran Turismo 7 arrives on February 22nd for PlayStation VR2, along with several other launch titles like Horizon Call of the Mountain, Resident Evil Village VR, Moss and Moss: Book 2, and more. For more details about the game, check out our review of the base PS5 version here.
