A game with impeccable polish and performance: The God of War Ragnarok Test for PS5 from Digital Foundry

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A game with impeccable polish and performance: The God of War Ragnarok Test for PS5 from Digital Foundry
Published by 07 Nov, 2022 0 likes

Digital Foundry has released a detailed technical analysis of God of War: Ragnarok for the PlayStation 5 console.

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Columnist John Linneman studied the game on the current generation of the Sony console and gave his verdict.

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Like the last part, God of War: Ragnarok is made in the technique of one continuous take, but now the game features several playable characters.

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The transition from Kratos to Atreus and back is implemented seamlessly and occurs through cutscenes. Lighting has undergone a significant update — especially indirect.

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It is still calculated in advance, but now it conveys the behavior of light much better.

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The resolution of pre-baked lighting has also been increased in Ragnarok, which significantly minimizes light leakage and is further enhanced by the addition of directional occlusion in the screen space, which first appeared in the PC version of the 2018 original.

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The game relies on exclusively individual assets created for each specific area of the world.

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The PlayStation 5 version offers improved tessellation, increasing the level of detail of the earth's surface, which, combined with more physically precise materials, gives a much more detailed result.

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This also applies to the deformation of snow, which has improved compared to the previous game. The weak point of God of War (2018) was reflections.

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Many areas relied solely on low-resolution cubic maps, and implementation in screen space felt inadequate, especially when it came to rendering water.

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God of War: Ragnarok still doesn't have real reflections with hardware acceleration of ray tracing, but it uses a solution similar to Mafia: Definitive Edition, and the implementation of reflections in screen space has significantly improved, which creates a much better result compared to the previous game.

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In general, visually Ragnarok feels like a natural evolution. As you progress, players will revisit some of the old locations where the difference can be noticed the best.

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The sequel has undoubtedly become more beautiful, but from the point of view of technology, everything looks very familiar.

The gap between the PS5 and PS4 versions is not as noticeable as it was in the case of Horizon: Forbidden West, however, the crossgen essence of the game has its advantages.

God of War: Ragnarok feels immaculately polished like no other release this year. There are practically no slowdowns, bugs, visual glitches or any other oddities.

The PS5 version has four graphics modes, two of which are tied to the display capabilities.

On conventional TVs with a frequency of 60 Hz, only high-quality mode and performance mode are available, but if the TV supports a frequency of 120 Hz, then the game also allows you to turn on the quality mode with 40 frames per second and ultra-high performance mode.

The default performance mode offers 60 frames per second and dynamic resolution ranging from 1440p to 2160p with an average of 1872p.

The quality mode, in turn, works in native 4K resolution at 30 FPS.

Using TAA anti-aliasing with upsampling allows you to display an image in 4K even with fewer pixels, as a result of which the picture quality becomes significantly better compared to the previous game.

Both modes look very close, but if you look closely, you can notice a few key differences. Firstly, these are completely different settings of the level of detail.

In the quality mode, individual elements have a higher level of detail, but the setup is done very competently, so it is unlikely to be possible to feel the difference without a direct comparison.

Additional improvements relate to fur rendering with higher quality, as well as shadows and lighting. Of these two modes, DF gives preference to the performance mode.

The improvements that the quality mode offers are incommensurable to a lower level of performance and overall image quality remains comparable.

At the same time, the frame rate in both cases is stable and does not sink.

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