Performance Analysis: Spider-Man Kills It on PS4 Pro

Spider-Man has an incredible gaming legacy. With Neversoft’s PS1 classic and Treyarch’s movie-influenced PS2 release under Spidey’s belt, any new game has an uphill battle against nostalgia. And with the miss-to-hit ratio being what it is for superhero games, Insomniac had its work cut out for it when it agreed to take on the latest open-world interpretation of Spider-Man.

Spider-Man achieved a Great score of 8.7/10 over at IGN – wfoojjaec’s sister site. Reviewer Jonathon Dornbush didn’t always love the side content, but the aesthetics, story, combat, and swinging were fabulous. And since that rating is within spitting distance of the most revered Spidey games of all time, anxious fans are breathing easy.

With nearly a hundred reviews making up the Metacritic average, 87/100 is the seemingly stable metascore. Outlets like The Guardian and Slant Magazine were put off a bit by the pacing and repetition, but the critical consensus is positive. Heck, there are even some perfect scores mixed in there.

Over at the Digital Foundry, they’ve gone to great lengths to explain the intricacies of Insomniac’s tech. And while the performance tests and pixel counting are still in there, much of their analysis is focused on taking down the numerous baseless complaints about a made-up downgrade to the shipping game’s visuals. The masses have gone puddle-mad here on the internet, and DF has done a fine job countering the false narrative.

The game hardly ever moves from the 30fps cap on either the standard PS4 or the Pro, and that’s partly thanks to the dynamic resolution. On the half-step console, DF has found that the native resolution ranges from 1944p down to 1368p. However, it seems that 1584p is a more typical result. The vanilla model mostly sits at 1080p, but it can scale down under heavy load. Considering that 1440p was the standard Pro resolution for pre-release builds, the “downgrade” fuss seems even sillier.

Insomniac Games is also using the temporal injection technique we saw in Ratchet & Clank, so aliasing isn’t much of a problem even when the resolution is at its worst. All in all, the fidelity on display is hard to argue with. Sure, there are some shortcuts and tricks being used here, but this dev team truly delivered the goods.

[Image credit: Sony/Marvel]

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