Marvel's Spider-Man got a massive technical face-lift yesterday. Insomniac, the development studio behind 2018's web-slinging mega-hit, addressed more concerns regarding the next-generation port. Including adding a toggleable performance and ray tracing mode for all PS5 players.
The PS5 port of Spider-Man 2018 garnered a fair bit of criticism upon its reveal. It's been one thing after another for this next-generation conversion from no free upgrades for folks that already owned the PS4 version to the recast of Peter Parker's character model. Thankfully, Insomniac's response has been swift. Namely, in how patches adding technical bells and whistles are coming in hot and fast. Yesterday's 1.002 patch added a Performance RT mode, which ups the framerate cap to 60 FPS and implements ray tracing.
James Stevenson, Community Director at Insomniac, announced these improvements on his personal Twitter account. You can check it out for yourself in the Tweet below.
Some players, however, are reporting that the Performance RT mode is making Marvel's Spider-Man crash. At least, it seems only to take you back to the cross-media bar this time. Previously, crashes in Spider-Man made the whole system restart. Thankfully, that no longer appears to be the case. We haven't tested this ourselves, though, to clarify.
Not selecting the Performance RT mode still has its advantages, however. According to Stevenson, some technical losses that come with the new mode include native resolutions behind the scenes are scaled back, pedestrian density is lower, and the LOD distance (might) see a reduction. It's a bit confusing, though, as to what he means by that latter point. You would figure the LOD distance would either take a hit or not; the "might" is lacking in specificity.
At any rate, it's great that Insomniac is taking criticism of the PS5 port to heart. Obviously, stuff like Peter Parker getting a baby-face still isn't great, but spit-shining the presentation overall goes a long way in proving the studio cares about what fans want.
Source: Resetera