Spider-Man Remastered updated with ‘Performance RT’ mode in version 1.002 – here’s the patch notes

Stefan L 12/12/20 Comments Closed

Following on from the update to Spider-Man: Miles Morales earlier this week, Spider-Man Remastered has also been updated with a new Performance RT’ graphics mode.

Now, in addition to ‘Fidelity’, which features ray traced effects at 30fps, and ‘Performance’, which ditches the ray tracing and uses temporal upscaling from below 4K to give 60fps gaming instead, there’s also a ‘Performance RT’ mode.

Update: Here’s the 1.002 patch notes, which do fix a few niggling bugs with the game as well

New Features

Added Performance RT Graphics Mode

Fixes & Updates

Improved quality and performance of ray-traced reflections
Addressed various progression stoppers and stability issues
Addressed various art issues
Addressed various audio issues
Addressed an animation issue while web swinging
Addressed an animation issue while in Photo Mode

The description of Performance RT mode in-game reads:

This is an alternate version of the 60 frames per second “Performance” mode, adding ray-tracing by adjusting the scene resolution, reflection quality, and pedestrian density.

You can find the graphics mode setting after selecting a save slot from the main menu, or under Settings from the pause menu, though switching modes will force you restart from a checkpoint.

Exactly as in Miles Morales, Insomniac are balancing the various parameters they can to offer this additional option. Performance RT reintroduces ray tracing from the Fidelity mode, but Insomniac are able to compensate for the graphics hit and sacrifice in other areas to boost the frame rate up to 60fps. The scene resolution would drop the game to lower than Performance mode – in Miles Morales, Performance RT reportedly now tops out at 1440p – and then likely use temporal techniques to reconstruct a higher resolution image. Reflection quality is also lowered, reducing the number of rays used for them, rendering them at a lower resolution, and so on, but will importantly still be accurate and more realistic.

Finally there’s a reduction in pedestrian density will also help. Dipping into Miles Morales quickly to check out the new settings, we could easily tell that the volume of pedestrians has been reduced by at least 50%.

Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered is available for PlayStation 5 as part of the Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales Ultimate Edition bundle, and only via the Ultimate Edition. There’s no paid upgrade path from the PS4 version of the original game to the new remaster, and it cannot be bought separately. However, you can purchase an upgrade from the standard version of Miles Morales to the Ultimate Edition via an in-game option to get the remaster. That all make sense?

Spider-Man Remastered is a big overhaul of the game’s engine to support the PlayStation 5. This includes making use of the console’s SSD to make things like fast travel ultra-speedy, adding a 60fps performance mode as well as having support for ray traced reflections, and haptic feedback for the new DualSense controller, just as in Miles Morales. Insomniac also decided that they would replace Peter Parker’s face.

In our review of the original game, Gareth wrote:

Marvel’s Spider-Man does a spectacular job of making you feel like the ultimate Spider-Man. From swinging through the city at high speed to fighting off legions of enemies by zipping between them and pulling them into the air, its gameplay looks like a scene from the films. It’s remarkably well realised in terms of its world, design, and even technically, with short loading times and a rock solid framerate even on the base PlayStation 4. If Spider-Man is your thing then this is an essential purchase.

You can read the full review here.

Meanwhile, we gave Spider-Man: Miles Morales 8/10 in our review of the new cross-gen game.