Developer Shift Up’s debut title Stellar Blade has finally made its way to the PS5 and it plays just like a dream. The team has done a great job of crafting a compelling combat loop that emphasizes player freedom and player expression, and it looks really cool while flaunting those impressive mechanics.
One of the more interesting parts of Stellar Blade is the visuals, which look pretty crisp. It’s honestly a surprise that a team with such little experience in AAA development is able to create something so compelling, and to that end – we present a comprehensive graphics analysis of Stellar Blade.
Stellar Blade – Engine And Overview
Stellar Blade uses Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 to bring its imaginative fantasy world to life. One could be mistaken to think that the game is running off Unreal Engine 5 or some other proprietary current-gen tech, but that’s a testament to the quality work that the team was able to achieve with this release. Stellar Blade makes great use of the available features of the engine and paints a dystopian world that’s brimming with detail.
Perhaps one of its most surprisingly endearing elements is that it doesn’t make use of conventionally cutting-edge rendering techniques, but rather focuses on creating a familiar rendering pipeline with a quality implementation of last-gen techniques. We will be discussing more on that in further sections, but this is the primary reason why Stellar Blade can achieve such convincing performance numbers with this level of fidelity.
Character Models
Stellar Blade features some pretty good-looking character models that exhibit a high level of detail. Right from the skin meshes to the polycounts on each character, Stellar Blade doesn’t fail to impress with its character rendering pipeline. Skin meshes do generally look pretty smooth which lends a sense of artificiality to it all, but that is more of an artistic decision than a technical inefficiency.
Hair physics in particular looks pretty impressive despite the hair textures themselves showcasing signs of artifacts when you peep in too close. Given the high-intensity nature of the combat, it’s also paramount that hair movement should never feel too distracting – and Stellar Blade strikes a good balance in that regard.
Environment, Lighting And Reflections
Switching gears over to the environmental side of things, Stellar Blade features the use of some high-quality assets that are brimming with geometric complexity and detail. Be it the broken pieces of a bridge, blowing sand, or the inside of an alien spaceship – Stellar Blade’s textures look really gorgeous. A lot can also be attributed to the art direction here, but equal credit goes to the high resolution of the assets that are used here.
Texture swapping happens pretty smoothly with little to no visible signs of pop-in, and that lends a really crisp quality to the image itself. This also applies to the sprawling open environments where the world streaming system works without any hiccups. On that note, it’s also important to mention that the draw distance here is pretty high too. Stellar Blade has no shortage of graphically impressive vistas to gawk at, so players will find themselves soaking in the sunsets and smelling the roses at multiple points throughout the campaign.
As for the lighting, Stellar Blade doesn’t seem to be utilizing a ray tracing implementation – as can be deduced from how light bounces around the environments. Rather, it most likely uses some sort of screen space reflections that we are used to seeing in most eighth-gen games built on Unreal Engine 4. That being said, it definitely looks good thanks to the quality implementation and high-resolution reflections on display, and it seems to be using some pre-computed lighting data that can help the team save up on precious computing resources. The lack of ray tracing means indirect lighting isn’t the most realistic, but it looks pretty good regardless.
The shadow implementation here might be one of the weaker elements of the visual presentation since shadows can also exhibit artifacts along the edges – especially for finer textures like hair. But apart from that, it works well for its purposes since shadows are cast for distant objects, and self-shadowing also looks pretty good in action.
Post Processing
Much like other aspects of its presentation, Stellar Blade’s post-processing effects is generally the same that you would find in any Unreal Engine 4-based game. Motion blur and depth of field are used to great effect to give a cinematic quality to the presentation, and there are pretty much no quirks with shimmering artifacts or shutter speed for the same. Smoke volumes and light shafts can also be found throughout the world, and they react realistically with dynamic lights.
Finally, there are the particle effects and explosions. Particle effects are generously used in combat and even traversal since sparks do fly as you wall-run against a rough surface, and these effects flaunt some high-quality alpha particles. Explosions are also an important part of Stellar Balde’s visual makeup, and outbursts of fire in the environment are accompanied by generous heaping of dark smoke volumes.
Different Graphics Modes on PS5 And Performance Parameters
The PS5 version offers 3 distinct graphics modes to choose from – a Prioritize Resolution mode, a Prioritize Performance mode, and a Balanced mode. Starting things off with the Prioritize Resolution mode, it targets 30fps while targeting a native 4K resolution. Balanced mode on the other hand targets 60fps with dynamic 4K, which offers a good balance between fidelity and performance. Finally, there’s the Performance mode which offers a 1440p resolution with a performance target of 60fps.
The differences between the three modes aren’t as pronounced as one would expect since they share the same visual makeup in terms of rendering techniques. Prioritize Resolution mode preserves the best of graphical features, and marginal drops in fidelity can be experienced in Performance and Balanced modes in certain areas like draw distance or texture quality. Apart from that, Stellar Blade remains the same across all modes in broad strokes – and the temporal anti-aliasing pass does a good job of covering up low-resolution artifacts albeit with some smoothing that comes inherently with this particular solution.
As for the performance, all three graphical modes perform pretty well for the most part. During our experience, we did notice some occasional frame dips especially when the combat gets too busy- but that wasn’t much of a problem in the grand scheme of things. Regardless, Stellar Blade is best experienced in Balanced mode where you get the best of both worlds. Given the fast-paced nature of the combat, it doesn’t make much sense to compromise on the performance for a marginal increase in fidelity.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Stellar Blade is a technically sound game that makes good use of Unreal Engine 4’s visual features to paint a world that is brimming with detail. Despite not making use of cutting-edge technologies like ray tracing, developer Shift Up has delivered a quality experience through and through. The performance does exhibit occasional dips in the framerate department, but it generally does a good job of holding its targets – which rounds out this surprisingly polished experience from a previously unproven developer.
Share Your Thoughts Below (Always follow our comments policy!)