With Resident Evil Village releasing tomorrow and early reviews skewing positive, we take a look at the PS5 and PS4 Pro release builds up-close. A few days ago we compared the Gameplay Demo of both and saw PS4 Pro put up a good fight.
The two demos afforded us limited opportunities to line up pixel perfect shots to pore over but we did notice higher-quality textures, a greater depth in shadows, a cleaner image and differences in ‘level of detail’. Our release build run-throughs gave us plenty of chances to get like-for-like shots to shed more light on the step up to PS5 from PS4.
PlayStation 5 shots are on the left throughout this piece while PS4 Pro are on the right.
Our images were captured at 4K then downscaled to 1080p using the same process. Both are in their respective ‘fidelity’ modes – PS5 has ray tracing enabled while PS4 Pro runs in ‘Prioritise Resolution’ mode.
PS5 – The New Normal
Resident Evil Village runs on a reworked 8th gen. engine with 9th gen. features added on so huge discrepancies were never on the cards but there are still significant differences to be found. Just like in the demo, PS5 images, in general, seem to have more depth – between better shadowing and displacement mapping and ray-traced diffuse lighting.
PlayStation 5’s ‘RT on’ mode runs uncapped up to 60 frames per second. According to Capcom’s promo material, it’s a 4K/45fps output but it’s closer to 60 most of the time. Intermittent drops to 50-odd frames per second are common with the lake scene standing out as juddery where the rest of the game is passably smooth.
PS4 Pro’s Cons
PS4 Pro struggles with 4K at 30 frames per second despite some aggressive resolution scaling and aforementioned hits to graphic and image quality. In tight spaces, the PS4 Pro struggles to load in its best textures and we often see basic textures for a few seconds.
Loading times on PS4 Pro aren’t bad for an 8th gen. console but are about ten times as long as on PS5. PS4 Pro takes around 30 seconds to get from menu to game while PS5 does so in a blistering 3 seconds.
There is also one very bizarre change to level geometry with a fence at the top of ‘Fallow Fields’ existing on PS4 (below) where there is none on PS5.
Diffusing the Situation
Ray tracing is used for a few elements of PS5’s Resident Evil Village graphical output. There are some ray-traced reflective elements but it’s utilised more often to blend a scene and to create depth. Ambient occlusion, softer shadows and diffusion create a more life-like image than is possible without RT.
Previous ray-traced PS5 titles tended to use it solely for reflections while using single-pass lighting along with simple shadows. As a result, Resident Evil Village‘s ray-traced reflections seem very low-res next to earlier efforts.
Games like Marvel’s Spider-Man Miles Morales and Control: Ultimate Edition could afford to dedicate more resources to higher-resolution ray-traced reflections. Reflective objects were also thematically far more appropriate for their respective settings. Morales swings around a glassy urban Manhattan while Control‘s office full of marblelite and interior windows is a smothering tribute to workspace architectural trends of the 1970s.
Is it worth the upgrade or is Resident Evil Village PS5 vs. PS4 Pro too close to call? Does ray tracing live up to its promise or would you have preferred a shinier experience? If you feel you need a review to help you decide to take the plunge, we have one here
