Watch Dogs: Legion - essentially identical on PS5 and Xbox Series X

3 years 5 months ago

Featuring a beautifully rendered open world recreating one of the world's most iconic cities, while leaning heavily into hardware accelerated ray tracing, Watch Dogs: Legion is one of the most technically ambitious games for the current cross generation period. The cross-platform comparison between the next generation machines isn't the most interesting head-to-head we've seen so far - PS5 and Xbox Series X are very, very close - but it's great to see ray traced reflections appear on Xbox Series S. Yes, we're getting hardware RT on a £250/$250 console.

But to address the most burning question, I can confirm right away that Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 do indeed run with practically identical visual settings - an almost complete match for the details locked away in the PC version's configuration files (which don't just include PC settings, but every single version). This is most readily evident in side-by-side ray tracing comparisons - the RT effect is identical, but crucially, the cut-off for objects not in the reflection is also the same, meaning matched fidelity in the effect itself, but also identical compromises and optimisations.

Series S also has the same settings for its ray traced reflections, but with one crucial difference. The premium consoles target a dynamic 4K rendering resolution for the majority of the presentation, but reflections run at checkerboarded 1080p instead. For Series S with its much lower 1080p target pixel-count, RT reflection resolution drops in step - reflections here are rendered internally at 720p instead, with the same reconstruction technique.

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