Turn on FSR but keep the resolution scale at 100% if you don’t want it doing any upscaling. This looks a lot sharper to me than native resolution with no FSR.
I wonder if this is because the TAA implementation lacks a sharpening pass.
It is the first shipping UE5 game that uses both Nanite and Lumen, and with insanely detailed environments to boot. It holds a pretty stable 60 FPS on the PS5, but it runs at 720p internally and upscales to 4k using FSR2, resulting in some very questionable image quality.
I think these features are insanely cool and their commitment to supporting 60 FPS is commendable, but this really is a case where I would actually prefer 30 or 40 FPS with a higher internal resolution.
Intel’s GPUs are an insane value now that they’ve got a lot of the driver kinks worked out. Some DX11 games still don’t run as well as they would on equivalent Nvidia or AMD hardware, but most newer games are using DX12 or Vulkan nowadays.
“Playable” and “good experience” don’t necessarily mean the same thing though. Those rift transitions in R&C are rough on anything less than a decent NVMe SSD. Though there may be some room for improvement, as even high end NVMe drives struggle to handle these transitions as gracefully as the PS5.
Whether or not playing off an HDD is truly a dealbreaker though depends on where in gameplay the storage speed bottleneck causes problems. For Rift Apart, it’s mostly just an issue with these rift transitions, and the gameplay effectively pauses while it waits for them. For an open world game it could be more problematic (i.e. pervasive traversal stutter during combat.)
I don’t think the slim will be any better than the current models. It sounds like they are doing it to simplify their lineup. One console with an optional detachable blu ray drive. They are likely sticking to TSMC’s 7nm process, so the SoC won’t get any smaller or less power hungry.
You have to use new assets for these old games if you really want to make the most out of ray tracing because PBR materials are necessary to better simulate the way light and reflections bounce off a surface.