Last-gen and current-gen versions tested.
What is the most visually impressive indie game you’ve ever seen?
From our perspective,The Ascent- released last summer for PC and Xbox - is a strong candidate.
As action breaks out The Ascent becomes an electrifying visual showcase, bathed in explosions and bullet trails.
Even the game’s narrative sequences, which zoom in to close range, don’t highlight many shortcomings.
So how do the ports to the various PlayStation platforms stack up?
Bloom lighting takes on a different appearance, and generally looks weaker and less precise.
The depth of field effect in cutscenes runs at a reduced quality, without a strong bokeh effect.
Finally, the number of background NPCs in the environment is reduced.
Performance would also dip in a more conventional sense.
The good news is that the PS5 release is mostly in quite good shape.
Both of these performance issues remain in place but don’t impact on the experience too much.
It’s serviceable enough on the PS4 consoles but the experience on current-gen hardware is much improved.
In between the stutters, the PS4 builds run fine, with a well-implemented 30fps cap without frame-pacing issues.
Testing the most recent patch, things haven’t changed much.
Averaged across three runs, still takes Xbox One X takes 177 seconds in the initial load.
PS4 Pro takes that down to just 52 seconds.
PS5 is faster, but not to a dramatic degree, requiring 43 seconds of loading in total.
Series X comes in a touch faster, with a 38 second initial load.
It’s nothing objectionable of course but it’s typically a longer wait than most other current-gen titles.
