PS5 Pro vs. Insomniac – How Spider-Man 2, R&C Rift Apart & Miles Morales have been upgraded

Insomniac Games has been the bedrock for PlayStation Studios since the launch of the PS5. Already in this console generation, there’s been three major game releases that have led the way for the rest of PlayStation Studios to follow, and now all of their games have been upgraded for PS5 Pro, patching support back in for three fairly distinct eras of game.

Let’s start at the beginning. Spider-Man: Miles Morales was their first effort on PS5, a smaller game between the main numbered entries that could iterate on the superhero series, and a cross-gen release. This brought an upgrade to the late PS4-era game engine from Spider-Man – heck they also remastered that game at the same time – slotting in ray-tracing effects to showcase what the PS5 could do over the PS4 in that department, and using those new ray-traced reflections to really capture the essence of New York City’s many glass sky scrapers.

At launch it had two distinct modes, 30fps with ray tracing and 60fps without, but they quickly dipped back in to share more optimisations with players, introducing a 40fps mode for people with 120Hz screens, as well as a cut down Performance RT mode that still managed to bring in ray tracing while keeping a 60fps target. The trade offs? 1440p as opposed to 4K, and with effects quality at lower resolutions and lower densities as well.

PS5 Pro now has a new Performance Pro graphics mode in both Spider-Man Remastered and Miles Morales, and it’s easy to recommend. This aims to get the full fat fidelity mode at 60FPS through the use of PSSR, with all ray-tracing features enabled at their full quality. Essentially, I would expect that (without doing any pixel peeping) it’s effectively lifted the frame rate cap on fidelity mode, and is just accepting of a possibly wider dynamic resolution when needed, barely losing any tangible quality thanks to PSSR.

It looks pretty great, as a straightforward upgrade, though this is starting to feel like an older game now and is well within what the base PS5 can handle.

Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart might have arrived around half a year after the PS5’s launch, but this was already s big jump forward for Insomniac and PS5 exclusives, a real showcase for both ray tracing and the PS5’s SSD. Again, at launch it had a 30FPS ray tracing mode and 60fps without, and again, it got the same 40fps mode and performance RT after launch… and once again, Performance RT really is the go-to for most people, even if this style of shooter platformer is a very nice feeling game in fidelity mode.

But there’s more deeply integrated ray-tracing throughout the game world on so many more surfaces and even characters, and so the PS5 Pro offers two modes. Performance Pro is similar to Miles Morales, using PSSR to push the base PS5’s fidelity mode through at 60fps, and considering that there was enough headroom in the PS5 to already do this fidelity mode at 40fps, it’s no surprise that the PSSR assisted upgrade looks fantastic here.

But then there’s also a new 30fps Fidelity Pro mode and this pushes the boat out in a few key ways. One thing that can be spotted is an increase in the number of pedestrians and onlookers, filling out the crowd in the opening scene as an easy touch point, as well as some beefed up ray tracing. RT Reflections bump up from a half render resolution – so a 4K output would have 1080p reflections – to a full render resolution, and that’s also accounting for any dynamic resolutions. For comparison, the base PS5 has half render resolution for its Fidelity mode and quarter resolution for its Performance RT mode. There is significantly more clarity to the myriad shiny surfaces through the game, though there’s also a lot of distorted and scuffed up surfaces that make the reflection resolution less noticeable.

Added to this is RT Ambient Occlusion, which was seen in the PC version of Rift Apart. This uses ray-tracing to augment the standard Screen Space AO, bringing more realistic shading and contact shadows, helping objects blend together as a scene more naturally. It’s an interesting one, as it can make shadows more subtle in some areas and stronger in others, while the screen space global illumination bounce lets some light colour transfer, but the stylised nature of Rift Apart maybe makes this less impactful than it could have been – especially as the game was initially designed without it.

Both actually have separate menu options once you engage Fidelity Pro, defaulting to High quality for both effects, though you can step reflections back down to Medium, and RTAO has a Medium and an Off setting – medium removes the screen space GI bounce. There could be a minor frame rate benefit for those playing at 40fps on a 120Hz screen or without a frame cap using VRR, but we couldn’t test this out.

In general, Performance Pro is going to be the way to go here if you just have a 60Hz screen, just as Performance RT was for the base game. I think there’s a benefit to sharpness here over PS5, especially given the fuzzy characters that fill the cutscenes in particular and the style of reflection use throughout the game world – it’s just the right side of excess that higher quality reflections can really add to the game compared to the equivalent graphics mode on base PS5.

And so we come to Spider-Man 2, and this game really shows the growth and maturity of ray tracing within Insomniac games. The studio really knocked it out of the park here on base PS5, going all-in and only offering Fidelity and Performance RT modes, without a fallback mode that omitted ray tracing. That naturally carries through to the PS5 Pro with both Fidelity Pro and Performance Pro modes.

It’s a familiar story, with PSSR helping Performance Pro get the standard Fidelity mode up to 60FPS, while Fidelity Pro bringing some additional higher quality and optional ray tracing features to the table. Of note, Fidelity Pro mode is also able to push level of detail distances out further, which is impressive given the size of the city and the open world scenes you’re often taking in.

The RT Reflections option from R&C becomes RT Reflections & Interiors here, because there’s some black dev magic at play for rendering the rooms in sky scrapers with people and everything – basically there’s secret rooms under the map that are rendered and processed with ray tracing. You only have Medium and High settings with the half and full render resolutions respectively.

Also similar to Rift Apart, there’s the three levels of RT Ambient Occlusion – off as in Performance, Medium and High, as in Fidelity – and it’s again augmenting screen-space AO instead of replacing it, though can provide a good deal of shadowing to a city scape scene.

The Spider-Man 2 exclusive addition is RT Key Light Shadows. This, is all about the city of New York and calculating sun shadows for middle to far distance buildings, replacing the shadow maps from before, and which will be most effective for when you’re out and about and up high, looking for a perfect photo to take. Similar to RTAO, it adds a lot of depth to the image.

What’s nice is that, while swapping Fidelity Pro to Performance Pro requires a restart at a checkpoint, the individual RT toggles can be done without reloading. This does still mean diving into the full settings screen which covers up the game, so back-to-back comparisons in-game are difficult to make unless you take distinct screen grabs, but the main menu lets you apply them with the scenic shots of the two Spider-Men and the city.

Once again, these options are mainly for the tech curious, as there’s really no reason to turn them off in the 30fps Fidelity Pro mode. Again, maybe there’s an advantage to tuning things down for an improved VRR Fidelity mode? There’s more of a need or desire to play at higher frame rates here, given the action combat of Spider-Man 2, so Fidelity Pro will mainly be for those with the possibility of 40fps or better, while those using a 60Hz screen should probably play in Performance Pro.

Insomniac remain the absolute masters of the PS5 within PlayStation Studios. If game development is a marathon, they’ve been able to sprint through the first half of this generation, and it’s truly impressive to see how rapidly they’ve iterate and grown their game engine and confidence with ray tracing.

The problem for PS5 Pro is that Insomniac’s games already look fantastic on PS5, and come with enough headroom to let people engage optional frame rate modes as well. Sure, there’s compromises when going to Performance RT, such as significantly reduced reflection resolution, but they’re well enough disguised and fleeting enough not to be a detriment. PS5 Pro is able to lift away a lot of those compromises, and even introduce ray tracing features that would otherwise only feature in the PC ports.