Spider-man won't handle 60 FPS in either 4K or 1080p

While PlayStation 4 Pro is definitely more powerful than its older brother, it is still too much for the console to run an open-world game like Spider-Man in native 4K or even 1080p at 60 FPS.

Both Sony and Microsoft have showed their cards when it comes to the upgraded versions of their leading consoles: PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X, and it seems that this round belongs to the “green team”. While at E3 2017 Microsoft proudly bragged about XONEX (still not sure how to abbreviate that) being able to handle most new games in native 4K, PlayStation 4 Pro can only offer a simple, although clever trick to almost match that, called temporal injection.

That trick is going to be used in the upcoming Incomniac’s Spider-Man, the studio said in a Twitter discussion. While the game won’t handle native 4K on PlayStation 4 Pro, it is going to facilitate temporal incjection to look nearly like 4K. What it does is upscale the number of pixels in a frame to 2160p resolution and fill the empty spaces with pixels from the previous frame. It definitely looks better than checkerboard rendering. James Stevenson, community manager at Insomniac Games said:

Temporal injection is a different approach [than] checkerbording to get to 2160p that gets you AA too. We think it looks better.

There is more, however. Spider-Man won’t even handle 60 FPS at 1080p on PlayStation 4 Pro. It seems that a complex open-world game like that is too much for the console to handle at more than 30 FPS. An additional detail shared by Insomniac is that Spider-Man will feature first-person perspective sequences, but it won’t be possible to switch view at any moment.

Spider-Man will be released exclusively on PS4 in 2018. While there is no specific date, Sony implied that all titles scheduled for 2018 would launch in the first half of the year.