Digital Foundry: Marvel's Spider-Man 2 - Digital Foundry Tech Review - The Next Big Leap For PS5?

TV doesn't support it unfortunately
When you do upgrade your PC, either next year or in 3 years, be sure to make it an LG OLED. They have better input lag than LCDs no matter what the reviewers will say and they have all the features you'd want from a high end TV. just beware that 30 fps on OLEDs will not feel as smooth in all games because of the instant pixel refresh rate. Some games feel better like FF16 but some games like horizon just felt off and required tinkering with settings. Still, the good outweigh the bad and with 40 fps becoming standard in most sony exclusives, its the best way to play games on an LG OLED.
 
Making fast travel gorgeous and speed up travelling is not what makes a game next gen. Same assets in the same place for third time in more than 5 year dev time in a row. Nothing more to say.
 
in uncharted 2. In uncharted Lost Legacy they made her ugly and gave her mom genes and a fat ass.

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I think counting pixels on 4k screenshot of spiderman 2 must have burn your eyes or something because Chloe has the most delicious ass in lost legacy. Maybe they went a bit too far with her nose/beak, but her ass in those jeans are a masterpiece. She's definitely a wilf (witch i'd like to fuck)
Miranda had the most beautiful ass of 2010 for sure, but Chloe had the best of 2017, and Nadine was nice too.
(Love your incel wojak Shepard tho)
 
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Making fast travel gorgeous and speed up travelling is not what makes a game next gen. Same assets in the same place for third time in more than 5 year dev time in a row. Nothing more to say.
While I dont condone Spiderman's liberal use of repeating assets especially after a 5 year gap, I think they have done a decent job upgrading some of them.

You can see the upgrades to the building textures as well as lighting when put side by side.



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Now I agree that its probably not a generational leap like the Matrix, and some of the buildings are definitely touched up instead of being rebuilt from the ground up, but they are one of the few studios who have taken the time to implement next gen stuff this gen. You have way better lighting, tech to improve fast traversal, and other neat effects that come from it, and traffic density simply not possible last gen. Compare it to other so called next gen games releasing this year like Dead Space, Star Wars, FF16, Starfield, and Forza, and it is obvious that they have done way more to make it next gen than those games. And aside from Dead Space, i think all of those games do several next gen things, so its not a knock against those games.... i love the FF16 setpieces and starfield's fantastically modeled interiors that i simply dont think are possible last gen, but spiderman 2 seems to be doing a lot more with its next gen tech.

They definitely shouldnt have made Miles and Ratchet though. Had they worked on this exclusively for 5 years, it wouldve looked a whole lot better with even more next gen features. This is kind of crazy for a game made in 2.5 years.

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Making fast travel gorgeous and speed up travelling is not what makes a game next gen. Same assets in the same place for third time in more than 5 year dev time in a row. Nothing more to say.
Some opinions stated as facts are just so wrong. Wonder where we could get a look at such a phenomenon.

Gus Sorola Rt Podcast GIF by Rooster Teeth


Probably just jealous game doesn't release on some persons box of choice.
 
Making fast travel gorgeous and speed up travelling is not what makes a game next gen. Same assets in the same place for third time in more than 5 year dev time in a row. Nothing more to say.
Half of the map is literally new. The other half has been revamped as well. Saying it's the same assets is a lie in many of those cases as well.
It's Spider-Man. It's New York city. What the hell did you expect?
 
No idea what people are complaining about. This definitely looks like a generational leap.

Apart from visual upgrades, on the left you clearly see a game, on the right you see a living world. That world comes at a cost, but there still are visual and performance upgrades and it's the kind of living world people have been asking for almost the entirety of last-gen.

Some people are never satisfied.
 
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No idea what people are complaining about. This definitely looks like a generational leap.

Apart from visual upgrades, on the left you clearly see a game, on the right you see a living world. That world comes at a cost, but there still are visual and performance upgrades and it's the kind of living world people have been asking for almost the entirety of last-gen.

Some people are never satisfied.
After watching the full video (which many haven't done), I can confirm it's a definite generational jump in more than just visuals.
 
in uncharted 2. In uncharted Lost Legacy they made her ugly and gave her mom genes and a fat ass.

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I may be alone in this but for me Lost Legacy made me go beyond the "all women are ugly in western games". In the beginning Chloe is wearing very covering clothes. But a some point she get stopped by soldiers and get groped a little. Naughty dogs are really good at making scenes look real and the bodies to be realistic, so they sold me that scene perfectly and I accepted that they could make her sexy if they wanted but choose not to. I moved on and since I don't really care unless the women is really ugly.
 
I may be alone in this but for me Lost Legacy made me go beyond the "all women are ugly in western games". In the beginning Chloe is wearing very covering clothes. But a some point she get stopped by soldiers and get groped a little. Naughty dogs are really good at making scenes look real and the bodies to be realistic, so they sold me that scene perfectly and I accepted that they could make her sexy if they wanted but choose not to. I moved on and since I don't really care unless the women is really ugly.
The issue I have with ND is that Chloe is SUPPOSED to be hot and sexy like a bond girl. She was created as a foil for Drake to create conflict with a more traditionally cute Elena. By taking away her sex appeal, they have taken away her core characteristics.

I also dont care for the hypocrisy. ND lead artist was a woman who once said on a panel that Drake is given a square jaw, unbuttoned shirt showing chest hair and a traditionally masculine face because the protagonist HAS to be attractive. Well, literally a year later, they decided to make their female protagonist more realistic and proportionate? Just be consistent.
 
Those interiors are just a 3d mesh, with low poly count to keep the performance.
Since those interiors have no reflections, there is nothing to used in a BVH. And according to DF, this gam only uses RT for reflections.
The exterior of the town has it's BVH, but it's probably doing it on a lower quality LoD.
This reflection will show up on the glass, and then blended as a transparency with the interior.

But the thing I was talking about is that a BVH is not geometry.
A BVH is a bounding volume that encompasses geometry. And it has several levels, to have a finer bound over each object. Creating a tree of nodes.
BVHs work by quickly eliminating large portions of the scene from consideration when tracing a ray or detecting collisions.
When tracing a ray through a scene, the ray tracer would first check to see if it intersects the bounding volume of the root node. If it does, then the ray tracer would recursively check the bounding volumes of the child nodes, and so on.
If the ray does not intersect the bounding volume of a node, then the ray tracer would skip all of the objects in that node's subtree.
If the rooms are rendered by normal rasterization, then they need to either physically exist inside the building geometry or being rendered to texture. Both would not explain the artifacts he points out.

The BVH is not restricted to being used with reflections only. His assumption is that the whole cube-like interiors are fully raytraced at a lower resolution, thus the upscaling artifacts. Then the windows would have reflective and refractive rays. But without a developer interview, we will probably never know.
 
Half of the map is literally new. The other half has been revamped as well. Saying it's the same assets is a lie in many of those cases as well.
It's Spider-Man. It's New York city. What the hell did you expect?

Half of the map is new in a 5 year IP that has been using the same old map for 3 games. If they were other developers they would have received a lot of criticism for this.

Saying it's Spiderman and NY doesn't excuse them from not making a more detailed city on new games. They could perfectly remade all the assets for Ps5 , make new ones, and recreate the city much better. What they made is increase the number of cars on streets and some changes to textures and vegetation. They made improvements to RT and lightning on top of that, but we can't say "generational leap on visual fidelity" coming from a intergen game like Miles Morales.

As we see they made a incredible job on action scripted sequences, both in scale and complexity. Some of the interiors have an insane amount of detail on geometry, textures and amazing material representation. That's all new and we need to recognize that work, but they cleary could have done much more on the city if they have more time to develop a game.
 
They definitely shouldnt have made Miles and Ratchet though. Had they worked on this exclusively for 5 years, it wouldve looked a whole lot better with even more next gen features. This is kind of crazy for a game made in 2.5 years.

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Totally disagree!!! Those two games gave me around 25 hours of amazing fun and happiness. I'd never trade that in for a 15% bump in one SM2 game.
 
If the rooms are rendered by normal rasterization, then they need to either physically exist inside the building geometry or being rendered to texture. Both would not explain the artifacts he points out.

The BVH is not restricted to being used with reflections only. His assumption is that the whole cube-like interiors are fully raytraced at a lower resolution, thus the upscaling artifacts. Then the windows would have reflective and refractive rays. But without a developer interview, we will probably never know.

Why would they ray-trace that, when a normal rasterization is much faster?
 
91 average on aggregators, stunning visuals, handful of FPS and VRR options day 1, and complete game on disc. So obviously they should never have released the last two games, and they were uber lazy by recycling assets when the game is still set in the same city.

Sure, why not?
 
They made improvements to RT and lightning on top of that, but we can't say "generational leap on visual fidelity" coming from a intergen game like Miles Morales.
Again it is a bit unfair as we are comparing it to a cross generational game that was actually making use of PS5 features so in a few years expecting a complete reboot / full next-generation leap is unfair.

They worked on far more things than adding pedestrians and cars (which again is a lot of work in an open world game like this: it makes NYC feel alive). A lot of the buildings have geometry details and texture changes, vegetation is different and so is the overall lighting of the environment (RT is a big improvement considering the quality of the reflection has improved a lot, they have added reflections of reflections, as well as they extended RT to far more surfaces like larger bodies of waters and puddles throughout the city). They even improved significantly over R&C's portals tech. We could also talk about building interiors (which are now 3D instead of projected cube maps) you can see while walking on buildings.

Quality of life improvements such as the massive loading times and traversal speed ones (allowing for faster swinging and gliding which is a new mechanic) should also not be understated.
Or the amount of work they did on useful graphics options, accessibility, day one no patch game quality and performance, etc… this game oozes quality and passion from every pore.
 
Half of the map is new in a 5 year IP that has been using the same old map for 3 games. If they were other developers they would have received a lot of criticism for this.

Saying it's Spiderman and NY doesn't excuse them from not making a more detailed city on new games. They could perfectly remade all the assets for Ps5 , make new ones, and recreate the city much better. What they made is increase the number of cars on streets and some changes to textures and vegetation. They made improvements to RT and lightning on top of that, but we can't say "generational leap on visual fidelity" coming from a intergen game like Miles Morales.

As we see they made a incredible job on action scripted sequences, both in scale and complexity. Some of the interiors have an insane amount of detail on geometry, textures and amazing material representation. That's all new and we need to recognize that work, but they cleary could have done much more on the city if they have more time to develop a game.
TOTK

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Again it is a bit unfair as we are comparing it to a cross generational game that was actually making use of PS5 features so in a few years expecting a complete reboot / full next-generation leap is unfair.

They worked on far more things than adding pedestrians and cars (which again is a lot of work in an open world game like this: it makes NYC feel alive). A lot of the buildings have geometry details and texture changes, vegetation is different and so is the overall lighting of the environment (RT is a big improvement considering the quality of the reflection has improved a lot, they have added reflections of reflections, as well as they extended RT to far more surfaces like larger bodies of waters and puddles throughout the city). They even improved significantly over R&C's portals tech. We could also talk about building interiors (which are now 3D instead of projected cube maps) you can see while walking on buildings.

Quality of life improvements such as the massive loading times and traversal speed ones (allowing for faster swinging and gliding which is a new mechanic) should also not be understated.
Or the amount of work they did on useful graphics options, accessibility, day one no patch game quality and performance, etc… this game oozes quality and passion from every pore.
In a nutshell how it is a generational leap.
 
Making fast travel gorgeous and speed up travelling is not what makes a game next gen. Same assets in the same place for third time in more than 5 year dev time in a row. Nothing more to say.

Joined 2021
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Post 48, three of which are in this very thread. Ok, raise your hand, who's alt account is this?

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Youtube drama spicing up.

His settings are probably off. He's unable to get unlocked framerates working. I didn't watch the video but hearing him talk about the 40 fps mode, he said that was capped too.

Either it's a bug or he hasn't enabled a setting to uncap the framerate.
 
His settings are probably off. He's unable to get unlocked framerates working. I didn't watch the video but hearing him talk about the 40 fps mode, he said that was capped too.

Either it's a bug or he hasn't enabled a setting to uncap the framerate.

In the video he shows that he exported a 120hz capture to Premier Pro and manually hand counted each frame with the games' 'unlocked' FPS setting and it does not exceed 60.

His evidence is pretty sound, but of course it could be an issue on his capture end as well.
 
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In the video he shows that he exported a 120hz capture to Premier Pro and manually hand counted each frame with the games' 'unlocked' FPS setting and it does not exceed 60.

His evidence is pretty sound, but of course it could be an issue on his capture end as well.
It is probably something that was bugged in the latest patch like he said. The TVs are inaccurate when the framerate drops below 48 fps on ps5 but over 60 fps, they are very accurate.
 
In the video he shows that he exported a 120hz capture to Premier Pro and manually hand counted each frame with the games' 'unlocked' FPS setting and it does not exceed 60.

His evidence is pretty sound, but of course it could be an issue on his capture end as well.
What capture card do they use? If it doesn't support VRR and 120fps then it's useless.
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Peter Parker's Spider-Man has the best rendered male ass in gaming history. Best rendered female and ass overall still goes to Chloe Frazier in Uncharted 2 with Catwoman in Arkham City as a runner-up.
"Umm which way did Chloe go?"

"You're a dirty old man Sullivan."

"Uh huh..."
 
Half of the map is new in a 5 year IP that has been using the same old map for 3 games. If they were other developers they would have received a lot of criticism for this.
So apart from increasing the texture resolution, adding details to the buildings, revamped the lighting, added Brooklyn and Queens, increased foliage density, increased areas where ray traced is applied, adding more props, updated some things to reflect the passage of time, etc, what exactly have Insomniac done to the map?
 
No idea what people are complaining about. This definitely looks like a generational leap.

Apart from visual upgrades, on the left you clearly see a game, on the right you see a living world. That world comes at a cost, but there still are visual and performance upgrades and it's the kind of living world people have been asking for almost the entirety of last-gen.

Some people are never satisfied.
Living world? This isn't GTA mate, it looks fantastic but that's not a living world as you put it.
 





Youtube drama spicing up.

His pinned post:
Just re-did the test on LG C2 + Benq Mobiuz DIRECTLY connected with HDMI 2.1 - 4K, 120Hz, VRR On in PS5 settings. In-game Performance, VRR uncapped, 120Hz mode on. No Capture card, so recorded slow motion footage (120FPS, 240FPS) off screen footage on my iPhone. Have to do something very fast in-game so just spun the camera around spiderman while just standing really fast. Then analyzed the off-screen footage frame by frame, second by second. It's 60FPS, i don't trust the FPS counter on TV's. Also did the same test in regular performance mode without 120Hz or VRR, the results are exactly the same when counting frames.


The top comentary on his video:
The values DF was giving were based on the VRR readings from the TV that include/count doubled frames. It is not a lie; it is simply how the technology works. Please do not spread misinformation. If you want more info regarding this look at this DF analysis video titled: Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves: New 120Hz VRR Patch Unlocks PS5 GPU Performance.


Thanks for the video anyway. I hope that the Uncharted DF video have one of your summaries, and thanks for those by the way!
 
I wish these devs would focus more on RTGI rather than reflections that make no real overt difference.
i think since the game has fixed time of day they can pretty much bake the light as they want and achieve a close result to RTGI, RTGI is more for games that has day and night cycle like TW3, but i can be wrong.
 
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Fast travel is just click and you are immediately anywhere in the map. Good stuff.

Some small spoilers below.


Amazing. I LOVED what they did with the cool loading intro's in Sunset Overdrive. They really nailed traversal and the feeling on gliding it looks like. Man..I'm impressed. Can't wait to try it.
 
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