Ghost of Yotei – Patch 1.10 Technical Review
Share the Story:
Better late than never
The latest patch from Sucker Punch enhances the sequel to Ghost of Tsushima, with a set of modes of play that, in all likelihood, were planned to be ready at launch Something of a staple now from Sony 1st party titles. They extend the use cases and choice for PS5 and PS5 Pro players but also those with 120Hz and Variable Refresh Rate(VRR) screens. The main advantages are:-
- Those of us that have a 120Hz screen can not take advantage of the smoother, tighter presentation the 8ms refresh offers. With 25ms being the half step between 30 to 60 fps. Enabling a faster, smoother 40hz output in quality (Quality balanced) or Ray Tracing Balanced on base PS5 and PS5 Pro.
- VRR screens are offered an extra choice, is to remove the 60Hz cap or smooth the game out to better maintain that 40Hz target.
Uncapping means the new ‘Balanced’ modes now move from a 1/3 V-Sync refresh (120/3 = 40), to a half-refresh vsync, 60 hz. And where we used to have a 60Hz ceiling, now goes as high as the full 120Hz V-sync. For base PS5 players this is the performance mode only, but PS5 Pro get this and the exclusive Ray Tracing Pro mode, which is the focus of my tests. These new options do cause the resolution to sit slightly lower as a base from the TAAU upsample methods used. Which is FSR3 on PS5 consoles and PSSR on PS5 Pro consoles, and these remain very similar to my review with all modes upscaling to 4K no matter the base or DRS levels.
Pixel Parity
In terms of resoliution counts and the fact FSR3 or PSSR is used, the Image Quality remains clean, sharp and largely stable, with some exceptions, thanks to the art, colour and design. But now PS5 drops lower from my counts in the Ray Tracing Balanced mode, with the old 2880x1620p now being approx. 12% lower at 2688x1512p. Unlocking this and allowing it to ‘attempt‘ to hit 60fps, we now see the lowest count of approx 2176 x 1224p, some 34% less than when using balanced. Stepping through all modes, this is the biggest hit I saw with performance mode still hitting a 1080P low, just more often, when unlocked and Ray Tracing Pro mode unlocked on PS5 Pro also hits the same 1080p low more often, whilst using the computationally more expensive and superior PSSR solution. As before all reconstruct back to 4K with slighty better Lod and Effect quality also over base PS5. Outside of this though the image quality is almost identical to before, just faster and with big increases to input latency. Helped most by the new 8ms refresh now giving us a drastically faster response time slicing over 23% in the Ray Tracing Pro mode down to almost CRT levels of 54ms median. Performance mode is even faster now sub 50ms at 48ms which is over 42% faster than the previous 60hz capped level and this can be felt in combat in addition to the frame rates.
Faster, stronger, harder
The new 40Hz modes are pretty much locked on both PS5 and PS5 Pro, so if you have a 120Hz screen and used to play at 30fps Ray Tracing or Quality, now jump straight to Balanced or Ray Tracing Balanced respectively, as you gain faster response times, smoother gameplay and an almost imperceptible impact to image quality and stability, specifically for base PS5 players as now you can get closer to that prior Ray Tracing Pro 60fps mode that was exclusive to PS5 Pro players before this update. It is with VRR and Uncapping the limits where things get interesting.
Starting with the base PS5, by far the lions share of the market, we can increase the old 30fps cap of the Quality and Ray Tracing modes by over 50% and almost achieve that on average. With the Quality mode just pipping the Ray Tracing mode when unlocked using a VRR screen, 44fps vs 43fps as an average with the 0.1% lows in this heavy streaming section giving us a small win on the stutters. A sub 2% difference is for, everyone playing identical for all intents and purposes. The Performance mode is still where the speed purest should remain with it retaining a 44% improvement over the best quality mode on base PS5, but the choice to play with Ray Tracing enabled now at a variable 60fps with much better input latency is certainly a good addition for base owners on how to play.
Final Verdict
The PS5 Pro, as you would expect, offers a far superior level of choice, quality and performance with the lowest input times and the fastest frame-rates. Again taking that Ray Tracing Pro mode vs Ray Tracing Balanced unlocked on PS5, the PS5 Pro is over 53% faster then the base PS5. In PC terms this is the equivalent of jumping from an RTX 5060 to an RTX 5070 level of GPU, maybe even slightly higher. And that is a level head room we have only seen now due to this enhancements to the source code. Not only that, using the performance mode vs PS5, we see the same boost but this time with Image Quality and performance being superior, only 10% faster in fps but still 45+% higher resolution using a superior upscaler. And all thanks to these new modes we can see the sort of gains the PS5 Pro can deliver over the great base console when it is pushed, I just wish these had come at launch and that 3rd party teams would push the Pro along similar level more often as when it does offer these choices and enhancement, it is tangible difference indeed.
