Recently, the Shin’en Multimedia studio released a new title called The Touryst for PlayStation consoles. The game has a notable unique feature – it’s the first title ever available in 8K.
On September 9, 2021, The Touryst, a voxel indie adventure game originally released in 2019 for the Nintendo Switch, was released on PS5. A key feature of the PS5 version of the game is support for native 8K resolution at 60 frames per second. Digital Foundry put The Touryst to the test, evaluating its performance and comparing the graphics quality to the Xbox Series X version.
Before the beginning of testing, the experts spoke with the developers of The Touryst from the studio Shin'en Multimedia, who confirmed that on PS5 the game is rendered in a native resolution of 7680x4320 pixels without upscaling, image reconstruction, or similar technologies.
Since the PS5doesn’t support an 8K output over HDMI 2.1 despite the logo on the package, the game uses SSAA to output 4K images to the screen. In fact, supersampling averages and scales four pixels of the original 8K picture into one, thereby increasing the detail. In the game settings, a native 4K resolution mode is available without anti-aliasing. The developers left it, among other things, so that players can see the difference between 4K and 8K.
The 8K mode in The Touryst provides better anti-aliasing of the edges of the blocks that make up the entire environment, changes the intensity of the depth of field effect, and also increases the clarity and resolution of cascading shadows.
The difference in graphics is noticeable, including with The Touryst on the Xbox Series X, where the game is rendered in native 6K resolution, and when output is scaled to 4K using supersampling.
The developers explained that they implemented support for 8K resolution on the PS5, but not on the Xbox Series X for several reasons. Firstly, the game engine is demanding on the frequency of the graphics chip, which is higher for the PS5 - 2230 MHz versus 1825 MHz for the Microsoft console. The Digital Foundry emphasized that despite this, the Series X video chip is more productive since it has a large number of computing units.
Besides, Shin'en didn’t just port The Touryst to PS5 from PS4 but rewrote the engine to take advantage of the next-generation console graphics APIs.
There are no performance issues with The Touryst on both consoles. It seems like the game made the first step for the future 8K games.
Comments
Fill out the form above to leave a comment