Darktide & Space Marine 2 on PS5 Pro – A tale of two PSSR’s

thesixthaxis.com:

There’s now a pair of Warhammer 40,000 games that have been given the PS5 Pro treatment, with the recent launch of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide on PS5 having support built in at launch, and a patch for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 adding new graphics profiles to make the most of the mid-gen console. They’re both great games if Warhammer, hordes and co-op are your jam, but one definitely has a leg up over the other than to the vagaries of PSSR upscaling on PS5 Pro.

Let’s start with Darktide, making its way to PS5 after a period of console exclusivity on Xbox Series X|S, and having recovered from a rocky initial launch on PC in 2022. The grimdark sequel/successor to the Vermintide series does a great job of capturing the Warhammer 40,000 universe’s grimy blend of gothic architecture, sci-fi and malevolent Chaos gods, sending you and your expendable buddies into the Hive world of Tertium to fight Chaos-addled hordes in Left 4 Dead-style co-op.

One of the main cuts for the game on console was to cleave out the very costly ray tracing effects from the PC version, and that’s true across the board on PS5 – there’s no ray tracing on PS5 Pro, even – but it’s still a very striking looking game, thanks to the emphasis on its lighting and strong use of colours amidst the darkness to set the tone.

The game on base PS5 looks and feels very similar to the Xbox Series X version, with both fidelity and performance modes. I would suggest that the PS5 has a slight edge in performance, as I felt fewer frame rate hiccups, though all graphical modes have a fair bit of aliasing and there is also a fairly significant amount of detail pop in really quite close to the camera at times.

PS5 Pro comes with just a single mode and no performance options. The aim here is the mid-gen console’s publicised goal of having quality mode visuals and performance mode frame rates. It does a decent job of this, but the leaning on PSSR is Darktide’s undoing here, as the upscaling algorithm introduces more