If you watched the PlayStation 5 Pro reveal last week you’ll have heard a lot of impressive-sounding things about the new console’s capabilities, with Gran Turismo 7 — briefly — used to highlight them.
Following that reveal, Sony has been providing higher-quality video to certain media outlets to allow more direct analysis of the visuals than the live YouTube stream would allow due to the compression of such video. Renowned graphics and technical expert channel Digital Foundry was among those that have been able to get their hands on the ProRes files to take — quite literally — a closer look.
In a video with founder and technology editor Richard Leadbetter, producer Alex Battaglia, and contributor Oliver Mackenzie, DF has pored over the footage and shared its findings over all the game in the presentation, including GT7.
GT7 actually has its own pretty high benchmark to clear, running at 4K60 — even if the 60 does drop on occasion, such as the left-hander before the tunnel at Trial Mountain — on the standard model PlayStation 5.
The key feature highlighted in the PS5 reveal video is the addition of real-time ray tracing on-track, during races, and the 4K ProRes videos do reveal a little about how Polyphony Digital has gone about this for the PS5 Pro Enhanced update we’re expecting soon.
On analysis, DF estimates that the ray-traced reflections — which allow you to see cars reflecting in each others’ bodywork — are at about a quarter of the resolution, or roughly 1080p. However it’s quite a taxing process and it seems that the overall resolution takes a hit to what DF states is 1188p while holding the 60fps frame rate.
That’s about 55% of the resolution of the standard 4K (2160p), and this is where the new PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, or PSSR, comes into play. This upscaling technology bumps the resolution back up to 4K, though it is obviously not quite as sharp as the native 4K.
While not a perfect implementation — Mackenzie noting that there are some occasions where the ray-tracing breaks up a little — the team does seem impressed with how the interiors, and particularly different interior materials, work with the real-time ray tracing to add to the immersion. It’s compared favorably to the way the effects appear in Forza Motorsport, for example.
One thing that the team hasn’t yet seen is the 8K version of the game noted by outlets that were at Sony Interactive Entertainment’s US headquarters in San Mateo for the PS5 Pro hands-on. We’re expecting to hear more on this soon.
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