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

thesixthaxis.com:

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