I agree DRS should be implemented. But no, the graphical improvements are not minor. For those who have spent a significant time with Pt. 1, I implore you to jump back into Pt. 2 as I did last night and notice a few key lighting tech advancements.
Notice how interiors with natural light from sun have very little bounce light. I chalk this up to PS4 limited memory with so much precomputed light data to stream in. You will notice especially in these areas how Ellie/Abbie character model is always lit; effectively the player is always a light source for themselves and the surrounding environment.
There are a number of reasons as to why this isn't ideal:
First, player character model always looks so soft and out of place especially in comparison to Pt. 1. Note that this is also an issue in Horizon Forbidden West hence the hero lighting applied to her as well. In HFW case, everything is so damn vibrant they need to do this, still has awful visual drawbacks.
Second, it is significantly breaks immersion. It frankly looks very silly to see a dark corner suddenly become illuminated because you walked towards it.
In Pt. 1 Remake, not only do they have enough memory and streaming capability on PS5 to have significantly higher quality indirect lighting for indoor environments, but they also have enough compute power to ditch technique of having the player character be a moving light source, with the flashlight being able to produce enough bounce lighting
in real-time to appropriately illuminate areas as needed. Again, this is why framerate tanks when turn on your camera and move around the environment. Don't believe me? Go run the game uncapped 120hz and see performance dip 20-25%.
Don't have time to record video from Pt. 1 but this shot illustrates how the fixed lighting is completely abandoned, resulting much hire realism for the entire scene.
So for those saying the remake could have been made for PS4, please just stop. PS4 does not have the memory or compute performance to incorporate the "minor" changes implemented in Pt.1
NXGamer
, I would have loved for you to cover this topic in greater detail. It makes such a difference considering the game's environmental setting