PS5 Pro racing game round-up – F1 24, The Crew Motorfest & TDU Solar Crown

The PS5 Pro pulled up to the starting line with a broad list of 55 games that were PS5 Pro enhanced at launch. While we’re still waiting for Gran Turismo 7’s update, three of these are racing games – F1 24, The Crew Motorfest and Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown – and they really do give us the full highs and lows of what PS5 Pro Enhanced games can be with different results thanks to a trio of bespoke in-house game engines.

Let’s start with The Crew Motorfest, which would appear to be the most straightforward. As a cross-gen game it’s inherently very scalable son base PS5 you had two graphics modes because of this, giving you a pretty much locked 30FPS in Quality mode and generally solid 60FPS in its Performance mode. Visual quality between the two is pretty much identical outside of resolution – a full 4K target in Quality mode, and a dynamic 1440p with FSR2 upscaling in Performance mode – though there’s some more noticeable pop-in for smaller scenery items and shadows in performance mode, arriving at roughly half the distance to the camera.

The overhead lanterns pop in at around 215m for PS5 Pro, 175m for PS5 ‘Fidelity’, and 115m for PS5 ‘Performance.

The PS5 Pro ditches the graphics setting, giving you a 60FPS target and a 4K output, but it using PSSR upscaling to enable Ubisoft Ivory Tower to push some higher quality effects, as detailed in the patch notes.

Screen Space Reflections are still used here, as opposed to a jump to ray tracing, but they use higher level of detail to make car bodies and water look more precisely reflective, so you have the same weaknesses that SSR give you, such as driving under a bridge darkening all the road’s surface light reflections for a moment. They’ve also increased the shadowmap cascade detail, to give sharper shadowing. Then there’s a 15% bump in world objects and foliage, aiming to fill out crowds that bit more, upgraded volumetric clouds, and an increase in the number of Image-Based Lighting elements to again improve quality of lighting and reflections. With PSSR, the game should have around 1700p before upscaling to 4K, and the result is sharp and good looking.

Outside of some minor pop in and a softer image, PS5 ‘Performance’ holds up well.

The thing is that this all feels like the RPG looting and perks where you get a 2% upgrade to damage output – it’s a little bit underwhelming. The PS5’s performance mode is really the go-to, with FSR2 working fairly well from a 1080p to 1440p core resolution range, and while that does give a softer image, it’s honestly quite difficult to spot when you’re 2 or 3 meters from your TV. Get closer and the PS5 Pro does take that step forward, but without the highlighted features from Ubisoft, I was very hard pressed spotting the differences outside of sharpness. Not only that, but there are minor dips in performance still, which I could find when skimming through frame-by-frame for points of comparison.

Still, this is a good “does what it says on the tin” kind of upgrade.

Moving on to F1 24, and we get meaningful ray-tracing on console for the first time in this series. Ray tracing first debuted with F1 21 on PC, but on console had only ever been featured during non-racing moments. Now with the PS5 Pro, ray tracing is featured in racing for the first time and in a rather refined form as Codemasters have iterated on their EGO engine.

F1 24 ray tracing is best seen during wet races.

First things first, F1 24 has a different meaning to quality and performance than most games. The base PS5 Quality here is the 60fps game mode with a native 4K target, while Performance shoots for 120fps.

Really the only place for the PS5 Pro to go is for adding ray tracing on track. There’s the eye-catching ray-traced reflections, of course, but that’s joined by ray traced ambient occlusion (RTAO) for improved shading, and dynamic diffuse global illumination (DDGI). The main one that’s missing on PS5 Pro during a race is ray traced shadows. Put things together and, depending on the time of day, the lighting and weather, this can all lead to some quite notable changes.

The screen is no longer reflected unrealistically on the wet track surface.

The difference is most strikingly rendered on a very wet race day. The base PS5 uses screen space reflections, but with a wet and shiny asphalt surface, the limits of SSR are shown as it can be excessive and give an over-the top mirroring effect, where reality would be much more subtle. By contrast, ray traced reflections are a little less… shouty, let’s say. Things like billboards on bridges and big screens are no longer reflected in the wet floor as their reflected or emitted light is more rapidly diffused onto the rough surface.

Spot the ray-traced reflections in the glass barriers at Melbourne.

However, there are still more shiny ray-traced reflections on show. You can spot it in places like the reflective protective glass along the pit wall at Albert Park mirroring the grand stands opposite, as opposed to being a white reflection of the sky, as just one trackside example, or on the often shiny front wheel vanes that will now reflect the scenery you’re zipping past. One neat improvement is that, where SSR in bodywork refreshed at 30Hz on PS5, the ray-traced reflections update at 60Hz on PS5 Pro.

RTAO adds shading to the trees in the track scenery.

RTAO and DDGI both also really help to bring more realistic feeling light and shade to the environment, and this is most noticeable on tracks at night, where trees behind trackside barriers are no longer uniformly lit through all their branches, and even further in the backdrops, you can see the skyscrapers in Singapore lit directionally in a way that fits with a city’s nighttime lighting. During the day, take a comparative peek at covered grandstands and you’ll notice that they’re more shaded inside

You’ll spend a lot of time look at the exhaust and rear end of both rivals and your own car if you race third person, and there’s a lot of complexity to the self-shading and reflections that come from the flowing bodywork, suspension and rear wings that is better represented here.

All in all, there’s a pretty good case for bringing ray tracing into racing games as GPU power is increasing… so long as the same frame rate target can be met. The thing is that, as will be familiar to PC gamers, adding ray tracing is expensive, forcing you to sacrifice resolution and use upscaling to claw back the difference. Without ray-tracing the base PS5 has that native 4K target, but the PS5 Pro with ray tracing drops to a dynamic resolution limit of 1440p and uses Sony’s PSSR to get back to 4K. That’s a high enough resolution to give high quality results, though upscaling problem areas like chain fences can break up a bit in motion, having a more jagged, aliased appearance compared to the temporal anti-aliasing of the base PS5 game… not that this matters at the speeds you’re typically going!

PSSR and the lower base resolution on PS5 Pro does lead to some more jaggies.

Two further features that the PS5 Pro offers to F1 24, though which we weren’t able to test at this time, were the 120Hz performance mode and an 8K resolution mode – both sacrificing ray tracing to get the job done.

On the whole, F1 24 on PS5 Pro is a success, folding in naturalistic ray-tracing features without impacting underlying performance. It’s an often subtle difference though, and you’re already starting from a 4K 60fps game on base PS5.

Finally, we come to the runt of the litter with Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown. This open world racer had a troubled launch back in September with some spotty performance and image quality to go alongside its launch server issues. PS5 Pro support was added in patch 2 a few days ahead of the console release, but there’s very little song and dance about this. In fact, the messaging in general is rather confusing.

For the base PS5, patch 2 reportedly increases the resolution of the 30FPS quality mode from 1080p to 1440p, though it was meant to be 1440p at launch already. The update also makes certain optimisations to try and steady the frame rate in the 60fps performance mode, though dips are still pretty easy to find.

There is no meaningful improvement for PS5 Pro in TDU Solar Crown.

For PS5 Pro, there’s no apparent difference in the settings – it’s the same Quality and Performance options with no naming distinction or description changes – and there’s no appreciable difference in frame rate, resolution or graphics targets. The PS5 Pro might be able to work at the top end of any dynamic resolution scaling and there’s perhaps some areas where frame stutters have been ironed out, but I’ve also found areas that do still stutter and resolution gains are debatable without pixel counting. There’s also identical visual quirks and glitches in areas glass building faces, shadow draw distances, and plenty more beside.

If you were hoping that PS5 Pro would be some kind of panacea to improve the game’s visuals, it sadly hasn’t been, and KT Racing still has a good bit of work to do if they’re to win over a somewhat disaffected community.

This is definitely a genre that can benefit from higher powered machines, whether it’s helping open world racers pull off 60fps, or feeding more ray tracing reflections, lighting and shading in to provide more realistic, true-to-life visuals. Though this trio of games definitely shows the variance in what different games, engines and developers can and will pull off.

And on the whole, I would say that it’s fair to be a little bit underwhelmed. The Crew looked good in PS5 performance mode, F1 24 was already at 4K 60 so leans on ray tracing to actually add more subtlety to its graphics instead of glitzy reflections that were already there, and Test Drive Unlimited is… well, it’s still in a difficult spot. So… see you for Gran Turismo 7, racing fans!