Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered: Substantial improvements over PS4 Pro

While Spider-Man: Miles Morales was a major launch title for PlayStation 5, the next-gen remaster of the web sling’s first appearance is worth checking out. This isn’t just the PS4 Pro version that runs at a higher resolution: there are a ton of visual enhancements through new means, refined lighting, and of course the addition of hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Indeed, a recent patch added support for RT at 60 frames per second – an improvement present on both Spider-Man titles available for PS5. Developer Insomniac has also resolved the issue of transferring save data from the original PS4 game, making this a great way to continue the story if you never finished the game.

Despite its last-generation fundamentals, PlayStation 5’s boosts are impressive. The original PS4 Pro version is aiming for 30 frames per second with a dynamic resolution scaling averaging around 1584p usually – temporary injection is then used to deliver a crisp image when viewed on a 4K screen. On the PS5 there are three different visual presentations: Quality mode usually ups this to a full native 4K output, although dynamic resolution scaling is in effect and in the worst case it can drop to nearly 1512p levels. In performance mode, the game is aiming for near 4K resolution, but with more aggressive DRS, resulting in drops to 1440p. However, the quality holds up, not least thanks to the same temporary injection technology that worked so well on the latest generation systems.

All this makes the new performance mode with ray tracing even more interesting. How much of a hit does it take to deliver hardware RT at 60 frames per second? Well, it’s about more than just a reduction in resolution, suffice it to say the DRS window has been adjusted down – lower limits can hit a 1080p minimum, but the vast majority of the experience takes place in the upper limits of 1440p. It’s also worth pointing out that the same stats are in play for Miles Morales, who also gets the same three presentation modes. In fact, the PS5 effect is quite remarkable: compared to PS4 Pro, you get twice the frame rate, plus hardware ray tracing with just a small haircut for resolution.

Those are the main stats, but what I also liked about the remaster is the care and attention that went into the little things as well. The introductory series alone shows additional details added to Peter Parker’s apartment, right down to extra noodles added to his tossed takeaway. Textural details have been improved and even geometric details on his web photographers have been significantly improved, in addition to quality enhancements to a range of objects in the scene. Even simulated glass caustic products are added to jars. It’s the kind of embellishment you’ll only see in side-by-side against the PS4 Pro game, but it highlights some of the care and attention that went into the remaster. Enhanced resources are deployed throughout the game.

Then of course there is the new Peter Parker model. We will not dwell on the changes to the character itself, more that we will see technology being implemented in Miles Morales revert to the original game. The new game’s much improved hair rendering is present and correct on Spider-Man Remastered, and not just Peter Parker. Characters also have improved skin shade and teeth. Some of these enhancements are also applied to the characters in the game: for example, subsurface scattering remains enabled even during gameplay – it’s an effect usually only used in cutscenes.

Insomniac moved into town and made significant changes to the lighting, while increasing details in the distance, with longer towing distances on vehicles and pedestrians. One of the more obvious things is the constant boost of texture detail – almost every surface has been updated, with higher quality assets. What this does is significantly increase the perceptual detail, and the overall boost here extends from the environments to the NPCs as well. It’s interesting to compare and contrast with Miles Morales – there’s an evolution in the overall visual quality that moves from one game to another, but Spider-Man Remastered goes a long way to keep Peter Parker’s adventure almost on the same level. bring.

But it’s the addition of hardware-accelerated ray tracing – and the new 60 frames per second RT mode – that really sets this remaster apart from the original. Winding through the city next to so many glass buildings is radically improved thanks to the extra parallax enabled through real-time reflections, and Insomniac’s implementation here is fascinating. Rays are traced to the horizon, which means that everything logically visible within a reflection is displayed. To get this done, the game transitions into a slightly lower detail version of the city – so not every object is shown in full detail in the BVH structure. However, the effect of using real-time reflections cannot be underestimated. Only until now this was only available at 30 frames per second.

With the new RT performance mode, there is only 16.7 ms to build each frame, which means that processing requirements are drastically increased. It’s not all about the GPU either – the CPU time it takes to process the BVH structure also comes at a significant cost, suggesting that Insomniac has made a lot of changes under the hood to support this. In fact, it seems that the general optimization pressure to achieve this is affecting systems across all modes, meaning that some of the lag I saw in Miles Morales’ performance mode is now gone with the arrival of the new patch.

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However, it is clear that achieving 60fps with RT requires some strategic tradeoffs. First, the resolution of the RT reflections is scaled according to the display resolution. Essentially, reflections appear to be a quarter of a resolution of the main rendering resolution, so at 4K in fidelity mode, reflections are basically 1080p. However, when the resolution drops to 1440p, the reflections are only 720p instead. If you look closely you will notice less detail but during normal gameplay scenarios it is hard to complain as the effect is still very convincing.

Other changes include a reduction in the quality of the shadow map within the RT reflections – buildings and some objects still show shadows, but the resolution has been greatly reduced while pedestrians no longer have shadows – or they are reduced to the point where the very, very difficult to see them. A totally sensible change in this case. There’s also a decrease in the number of pedestrians visible from a distance, but it’s not super noticeable unless you carefully observe the reflections. However, even with these cuts, the presentation is still very impressive and the roughness limit is adjusted so that even raw materials show the correct reflectivity – and we can’t stress how computationally expensive this is.

In my original take on Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, I loved the increase in detail and the RT reflections that came in 4K fidelity mode – but it’s hard to pass up the chance to play the game at 60 frames per second. With that in mind, RT performance mode ticks the boxes to essentially deliver the best of both worlds. The increase in frame rate is welcome and, even with a drop in quality, ray-traced reflections add a lot to the experience. More importantly, I think this is a good sign of things to come for owners of all next-generation consoles. That Insomniac has been able to achieve this result in a launch title is really impressive and speaks volumes about their engineering team, but it also suggests there may be more ray tracing potential here than we initially thought. Whether this level of performance can be achieved with more complex games remains to be seen, of course, but I’m excited.

Obviously, we haven’t discussed performance yet and that’s important too. Based on my tests, the game mostly hits the target of 60 frames per second. The dips that occur are unusual and it feels extremely fluid to play. There are double frames on camera transitions in the real time cutscenes, occasional and mostly unnoticed frames lost during gameplay. Actually perceptible delay is hard to come by – especially while playing. Miles Morales appears to be the more complex game, but if you choose a mission rich in particles, volumetry and heavy effects later in the game, the RT performance mode will still work. All told, Insomniac did a great job of hitting and holding 60 frames per second with ray tracing enabled. It’s not flawless, but it’s remarkably close.

The other side of the performance worth noting with regard to Spider-Man Remastered is the tax – it benefits in exactly the same way as Miles Morales, because it’s basically instantaneous. Starting the game, traveling fast or loading a save is basically free of any meaningful pauses. However, now that we’ve moved away from launch and played more games on both PS5 and Xbox consoles, it’s clear that Insomniac is basically ahead of everyone else in this regard. If Insomniac’s work is any indication of how storage will be used in the next generation, then this is very, very exciting indeed.

I have also tested the PS4 to PS5 storage transfer function. It’s interesting because it works fine and even pulls out all of your trophies previously earned on PS4, but the actual process is somewhat complicated. Essentially, the PlayStation 4 version has been patched so that you can upload your current save status (not all of your manual save edits) to the cloud. Meanwhile, Spider-Man Remastered on PlayStation 5 has an option for importing data that takes your upload to the new game. It works, but it’s not really elegant. I understand this is more of a limitation of the PS5’s OS setup than anything else and Insomniac had to find a solution. In any case, the process only needs to be done once – but one thing to note is that the process is one-way, you can’t bring your PS5 progress back to PlayStation 4.

Ultimately, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Remastered for PlayStation 5 is really an excellent piece of work and comes highly recommended. About my only real criticism is that there is no physical release for a game that I would really like to add to my library of titles. Regardless, Insomniac’s efforts here are top-notch, and this remaster is well worth adding to your PS5 collection.