When in shadow, the final game exhibits a softer, diffuse appearance which is arguably more realistic - the E3 demo simply appears overly shiny and more plastic-like in comparison. In direct sunlight, the E3 demo gives the impression of a suit covered in saran wrap while the cloth material in the final game exhibits more natural light dispersal. Which one looks better is a matter of taste and varies per scene, but this is clearly an artist-driven change not one made to save on performance. The bottom line is that character detail is excellent and from a technological perspective, it's entirely consistent across the various demonstrations of the game.
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But there are changes in the final game and it seems that a specific cube-map for the scene reflections in the E3 2017 demo is possibly replaced with more generic cube-map art, giving the illusion of lower fidelity reflections. This is just a theory, but mapping scene-specific cube-maps throughout the game's reflections would be extremely difficult, so swapping to the generic art saves a lot of manpower. And we suspect that this would benefit from changing the position of water surfaces to produce the best effect, which is what has happened in the final game.
It's telling that of all the media released for the game, this is the only instance where the change is really evident. If our theory is right, this is a manpower issue, not a horsepower issue - but what's clear is that the underlying tech remains identical, and reflections remain a combination of SSR and cube-maps.
The notion of the change being performance-related - dare I say it - holds no water. For a start, I witnessed this demo being played in real-time on PS4 Pro hardware at E3 last year where it ran at the game's typically solid 30fps. Secondly, as Insomniac has stated, puddles are numerous and large in volume across the game. And finally, the truth is that Spider-Man has actually been upgraded via a day zero patch available to reviewers, which introduces dynamic resolution scaling.
Not to mention the resolution was bumped up from 1440p to a dynamic scaler that averages above 1440p. All the while maintaining the same locked 30fps.
next time quote the source and not some random image from an unknown source with out of context points...
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