Some of the starfield screens look great to me. They are good technically, and great with the architecture and art direction. Go ahead and compare it to spider-man, but the only thing they have in common is that they are uneven, both with good and bad screens.
As for spider-man, this is a repeat of the first one for me. I initially thought the first one was inferior graphically to hzd. Horizon had some real punch you in the face graphics. Something about it. Spider-man didn't have that punch. But the closer I looked, especially when I finally got to see it running live in front of me, I saw the graphics are at least as good as horizon but in a different way. Aside from the character faces, though. idk what's going on there. They should call guerilla about that.
Spider-man running on a ps4 with the upscaling, motion blur, models, and more was all really good. With sm2, it doesn't get to compare to the original ps4 version because reasons. So it's compared to sm remastered on ps5. Compared to that, sm2 looks like it's had the improvements evenly spread through the image. It's still that style that doesn't punch you in the face like horizon or last of us, but when I look closely, it looks better than the excellent sm remastered in every way. The improvements are spread out and everything is just enough to notice. Compared to the first game, it's the type of generational increase I would expect since games are running at 60 now.
There are some spots where the improvements aren't very noticeable. Then there are shots like the swinging through the city posted above, that are showing a clear difference. I see some people don't think it is, but I think if they played 2 for awhile and went back to 1, they would see a big difference. The most noticeable is better shadows. Then after that, the lighting is better, then the materials. Everything else is also better though, even with the clearly increased world density.
But then you get that lizard fight. Now that might be the best shit I've ever seen. I like post affects and they are slathered all over there. Spider-man and lizard where set so convincingly into the scene. The lizard's teeth and gums is a halo grass moment. When he climbs up the wall and the sun is shining on him through the skylight it shows what a game like gow could do with this since it can set up all the scenes just right. And then it's all dunked in that awesome motion blur. If you freeze frame, you can see the blur all over and it actually doesn't look that good, like every blurred object is being masked out and it looks nasty. But when the game is running, you can't see that and it looks fantastic.
I think wolverine could look better, but it's going to be another small round of improvements. If you don't think sm2 -at it's best- looks like a generational improvement at this stage of diminishing returns, then you are going to be waiting a while for that game that finally does it. Maybe something will pop out of nowhere that blows our minds but I don't think there is a ton of gas beyond this in a ps5. Ay least without games going max 30fps.