Wolverine: PS5 vs PS5 Pro NXG Technical Review
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Sibling Rivalry
J ames ‘Logan’ Howlett is not a family friendly type of guy and Insomniac have kept that in focus, of sorts, with Wolverine. Running under their own proprietary Engine, improved here, but sitting safely within the Spider-man game DNA that became the studios (and in many aspects PlayStations) golden goose. Delivering a darker, more visceral game with a tailored progression and combat system that has as many pluses as negatives.
Starting with Base PS5, it is clear the game was built here, as noted, on the feet, knees and shoulders of Spider-Man and Rift Apart. Dual modes, both support Ray Tracing with fidelity mode offering higher resolution RT reflections, higher LoD, higher, denser hair strands, better shadows and diffuse lighting quality. Plus, higher resolutions. Again, I must commend Insomniac for the clear, concise info on what the modes offer. They also offer a nice pause screen for changing brightness and contrast so you can see what changes. Changing mode does force a restart which make my job harder but is the best option to restart the rendering which will greatly reduce memory, path and such bugs cropping up and is cleaner for the player. Both modes upscale to 4K via Insomniac’s temporal injection TIUA and fidelity hovers between 1440-1800p Base, perf around 1080-1440p base. The standard that insomniac brought in with Ratchet and clank returns, 120Hz and VRR mean we can see what headroom we have left over. Using these leaves every setting the same, but a choice of smoothed VRR (which maintains resolution and the same target 30/40 or 60fps output as close as possible). Then unlocked allows both to scale lower for a higher refresh. Meaning fidelity can now dip to around 1080-1260 as a base res and perf can now drop just under 1080 to approx 1792×1008. The benefit is in performance and input latency being dramatically increase at times, 100%, almost, in both Fidelity and Performance mode. Oddly the Fidelity mode seems to top out at 59fps and the performance mode at 110fps, so likely a target refresh rate issue of 16.94 and 9.09ms respectively is the aim, remember at this level of refresh every microsecond counts.
Big Brother
The game is not transformed on the bigger console, simply Enriched. The biggest is the use of PSSR2 in both of its modes, Performance Pro and Fidelity Pro, along with a 3rd option to enable Advanced Ray Tracing effects. PSSR2 is Sony’s proprietary ML based upsampling AA exclusive to the PS5 Pro with its main aim to enable far superior image quality, higher fidelity, detail and stability for a cheaper cost than native rendering. Here the games appears close to 4K both as base and output in the Fidelity mode and somewhere between 1440-1800p in its performance mode. The same 120Hz and VRR modes lower these targets to enable higher performance when Unlocked is chosen, which means we see around 1620p as a low in Fidelity and around 1152p in the performance mode. And the main benefit of PSSR2 is this always looks great and maintains a sharper, more detailed, and stable image than even the base PS5’s 30fps Fidelity mode in that PS5 Pro Performance mode. Reducing ghosting, TAA trails, pixel silhouettes around complex, high contrast, moving pixels, more difficult to resolve as the resolution gets lower. But PSSR2 has almost none of this, sure some pattern merging can still occurs but the TAA ghosting, edge flicker, and noise is largely gone. Leaving a clean, sharper and more coherent image in motion or stationary. This is carried over to all elements of the game in texture detail, hair strands, Ray traced effects, distant objects. And at times can make a huge increase to texture and game detail over the base PS5.
Sharpening the Claws
Effects wise, we see very similar results. Hair Strands look very similar, Ray Tracing is refined but uses the same Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) and distance levels. There are occasions where the Ray T raced Reflected objects resolve more fine texture and lighting details on base PS5 when static compared to PS5 Pro, likely a PSSR2 issue with RT effects as the Insomniac TIA is hand tuned for RT and all effects. Overall, we see slightly better implementations of all of them likely related to resolution as much as the base setting. LoD distance, Ambient Occlusion (AO) is probably the most obvious, but they track close to the base PS5 for those players to not miss out.
The Advanced Ray Traced option does attempt to add more, it states it only works in the Fidelity Pro mode. It improves RT Reflection quality, and thus the BVH Proxy object as resolutions of the reflections are higher, approx 1440p in standard Fidelity and around 4K with Advanced RT Enabled. In addition, improved AO is added, on top of the Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) that PS5 and PS5 Pro uses without this enabled. The Screen Space GI Pass is added to help bounce like which looks to come from select light sources, aka the sun, along with a subtle increased AO pass. Sounds good, however in play this looks much bigger on paper than in practice. The AO helps the most, adding more occlusion in recessed areas, and the radiosity enhances surfaces, recessed areas, and faces, hair a little more with light bounce, plus the excellent hair strand system, best seen on Wolverine’s furry locks, is also enhanced here with more strands and slightly better self-occlusion, but the impact is again minimal without side by sides and can have a small impact to performance. The improvements are clear in the video above, but not dramatic increases. That said it is still a nice to have but does little to distract from an accomplished technical and presentation level on the base PS5 and PS5 Pro.
Hairy Potter
Hair tech is iterative over prior games, looks good and moves well, but can be mixed and still often glitchy due to physics syncing on cuts and overreacting, dithering is also present with performance mode being worse. It is obviously cut back on Logan and more so other characters in the game. It enhances cinematics and Pro has better hair quality, helped most by PPSR2.Ray Tracing, due to the much smaller scope, closed off levels, less NPC’s, cars, views, geometry and more with far less reflective surfaces in moment to moment play, this makes less of an impact than Spider-Man due to the lack of glass buildings, shop windows and New York mid-town traffic hustle and bustle, puddles are taken care off though. This also greatly aids visual quality of textures and performance as the BVH can be smaller but more detailed and streaming and memory more focused on immediate areas rather than ancillary objects.
The Dismemberment and blood system is a new feature and enables Logan to go full berserker mode and take of arms and legs, but no heads, which seems an odd omission. The Limbs and Geometry are swapped in and out quickly which causes some lerps into new positions but along with the, likely particle driven that also offers some molten blade sparks action, offers blood systems and decal splats that land on walls, floors, NPCs and faces all adds a Tom Savini proceedings to the action. The weight and physical contact when stabbing is also well done, with no floaty, cropping happing to ruin the mature moments. I just wish they had more dynamic actions, combat and moves that enabled a wider set of attacks, counters and enemy times to show of the animation and gore system even more as I feel it is missing a wider variety and is very quick at times meaning you cannot appreciate the effort into the some of the move sets, the same camera system helps swoop in and get a better view of certain key moments, but it is never as flamboyant or slowed down as Spider-Man was, which I feel could be a nice addition if updates are planned post launch. The physical destruction of fixed objects, procedural glass, wood, doors and other bits add an increased level of interactivity which I appreciate and think works well with Wolverine’s violent nature. But it is obviously limited and impacted, like most of these kinds of systems are, but the things that do not fall into this feature more so than the ones that do, i.e. the exception becoming the rule.
Number of the beast
The team have refined and focused heavily on the balance between high fidelity detail and high octane action, and are an exemplar for 120Hz And VRR screens. Starting with fidelity mode, the base 30fps mode is the sharpest and still feels smooth with motion blur and decent input latency, all covered at the end of this section. It is a great way to play, but the 120Hz option means you can halve the gap to 60 almost for free, as I covered many years ago in my God of War review (Below), V-sync has a cost to performance and simply being able to refresh in half the time can pay dividends. As it divides the 120Hz into 3rds, taking the 33ms down by 8.3ms to 25ms, 8ms slower than 60, 8ms faster than 30fps. Resulting in a smoother, 40Hz cadence which improves fluidity of motion and input latency, if you have a 120 screen use this mode. VRR owners can go even better, as noted smoothed just helps iron out any minor dips whereas unlocked can effectively offer a high IQ 4K/60 mode, with it now able to achieve 50+ FPS very often in exploration, stealth and combat. You can see how the game performs in all its mode in the video review on this page.
Final Verdict
Wolverine is another accomplished, technical proficient, and high performing game that has some good looking areas, characters and effects. But, the sheer pace of output from the studio is becoming evident in the quality and certainly strides forward, 5.5 titles in around 8 years puts everyone else to shame, but that has come at the cost of progression and is really unsustainable. I have a full, and short, gameplay review video coming up once the game launches to reduce spoilers. But the game is almost a mega-mix of PlayStation hits over the past 10 years, some God of War, some Ghost Of Tushima, some TLOU, Uncharted, and a huge helping of Spider-Man and R&C. And in the end too many cooks have spoiled the broth, story is weak, characters are tropes of themselves, and level design and structure is disjointed and juxtaposed at best. From a technical perspective they have delivered a superb, and high quality output on both consoles. Helped by the smaller scale of the game over Spider-Man, but in reality we should not be hitting 100fps levels on a PS5 1st party title this late in the console lifespan, highlighting how their technology has been refined but stalled. I hope the team get the time to build, update, and invest into something new and fresh. A true 30fps, high fidelity, and focused game that leans more into the signs here of extended physics, dismemberment, real time Ray Traced Global Illumination, and less on hitting a new milestone deadline. What is here is fun, the combat has great elements but feels incomplete, repetitive very early on, and lacks real depth to make it any more than more powerful versions of the same move. In small stints and in set-pieces it can be great, but this is a summer popcorn game, will occupy you for a few hours but leave you feeling a little empty at the end.
