Nathan Drake is back once again with his first PlayStation 5 adventure, bringing Chloe and friends along for an updated and upgraded dual package of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and the spinoff Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. Offering enhancements and some huge performance leaps over the globetrotting thief’s PS4 & PS4 Pro release. But is a treasure worth fighting for?
This new remaster offers a few paths to play, with existing disc or digital owners of the PS4 version of either included game being able to upgrade for $10s, euros, or great British pounds to this new pack. Or you can make a full purchase if you’re new to the Uncharted fold, and even PC players will get a release later this year. As we have seen in previous remasters from Death Stranding and Ghost of Tsushima, you can easily import your PS4 save using the main menu’s in-built conversation tool. Allowing you to pick up where you left off – just sharper and faster than before. Simply download or USB copy your save over to your ps5 drive, then fire it up and convert it to a PS5 format. Note that you can copy multiple saves; you simply need to do them one at a time from the main menu.
Indiana Modes
The biggest upgrades are resolution and performance, with Legacy of Thieves offering three modes of play. Sadly, there is no multiplayer included in this version, which is a shame as one mode would’ve really helped that style of gameplay. The first of the trio of modes is Fidelity, which runs at a sharp and crisp 3840x2160 (aka 4K) resolution at the same 30fps as the PS4 & Pro version, which run at 1920x1080 and 2560x1440, respectively. This helps all related buffers within the image, such as alpha textures, shadows, screen space reflections, and more.
Next – and likely the most popular – is Performance mode, which offers the same 2560x1440 resolution of the PS4 Pro by doubling framerates to 60fps by halving frame-times to 16.67ms. The loss in pixel clarity from 4K is a minor but noticeable sacrifice, but the gain in temporal pixel counts and extra fluidity is a welcome one, specifically considering the controller input latency which I will get to later.
Finally, we have the Perf+ mode, which again doubles framerates over the Performance mode to 120fps – so long as you have a TV to support that. The cost is, again, resolution, which now drops by 50% to 1080p, matching the base PS4 but running at four times the framerate. This mode is clearly the one that looks the softest on a 4K screen, but the latency improvements are again noticeable even over the 60fps Performance mode. No Dynamic resolution scaling appears to be in use but the engine’s temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) helps minimize noisy segments and the MB shutter speed has been increased to compensate for the faster framerates, which helps improve clarity in motion on objects, textures, and more over the PS4 and PS4 Pro. All three modes are available in Uncharted 4 and The Lost Legacy and can easily be swapped in the menus with no delay, meaning you can pick your poison between pixel clarity or pixel frequency, and swap between them based on what you’re doing at the time.
With a game such as Uncharted, the increased controller refresh fluidity is beneficial, if not game changing. What is a humongous improvement, though, is the cartridge-like loading times – or rather the near lack thereof. Even on an SSD-powered PS4 Pro the load from a save unpacking into RAM can take over 36 seconds; on PS5, Legacy of Thieves is over 10 times faster, with loads now taking approximately three seconds and effectively removed. Menus simply fade out and the action fades in. This shift to a native PS5 app enabled Naughty Dog to leverage the SSD speed most integral to the memory subsystem configuration, all within the new SDK and relevant API calls. In addition, the Legacy of Thieves version has a smaller in footprint on your drive due to the Oodle texture compression tech and dedicated compression hardware built into the PS5’s system on a chip (SoC). With both games installed, it occupies 40% less drive space as a whole.
Performance
What of that performance then? Let’s start at the top: with Uncharted 4 and the PS4/Pro version, both targeted 30fps and in the majority of action, and they held close enough to that to never be an issue. One of the biggest and most frantic sections was the Raiders of the Lost Ark homage truck-and-jeep chase that was first revealed in the famous E3 2015 gameplay trailer. It saw dips on base PS4 and Pro to almost identical levels, mostly only into the next refresh cycle of 16ms, but this could see low 20fps moments crop up in brief segments of action, largely fill-rate and bandwidth-limited, but occasionally you could also get longer stutters with context switching. These cause 80 to 100ms spikes and hangs when they occur, pointing to CPU, memory, or other cache-related delays. These happen with the switch over to driving as the world simulation is warped back into line. As a 30fps game running on original PS4 hardware, though, it was solid.
It should come as no surprise to see that on PS5 it does not drop a stitch within the same stressful segments when running in the native 4K/30fps mode. It keeps the frame-time meter flatter than a bad guy’s ECG after a run-in with Nate the serial killer. This is true of the Fidelity mode both in Uncharted 4 and The Lost Legacy.
Moving to the 60fps Performance mode, we do now start to see some drops in these same heavier sections of Uncharted 4 and some of the battles in Lost Legacy as well. They’ve been always minor and never that frequent in my run of play, but when it happens it skips into the next refresh cycle and they never add more than short-lived, mid-50fps segments. Most action scenes, cinematics, and exploration are at a steady 60fps, which is a solid boost from the previous 30fps ceiling. The same scenarios and sections play out in both games and really secure Performance as the preferred mode in my playthrough of the PS5 port.
The final Performance+ 120fps mode is the most demanding on CPU time, and any bottlenecks that may crop up when trying to target such a high refresh rate of 8ms. As such, we can see more frequent dips from this target in both games across action, and they are the biggest when driving across the wide, linear levels in the jeep. Uncharted 4 does come out on top, maintaining frame rates above 100fps in my tested segments. Again, due to 8ms frame time being half that of 60fps the drops here are almost imperceptible when they crop up. The Lost Legacy, on the other hand, can be a little heavier on the GPU and fill-rate with all the foliage amongst the battles, which see us drop close to that 100fps line more often and into the 90s when we look at long terrain views while driving. These are again, brief, and infrequent enough to not be of a great concern, but they’re the only drops I really noticed without the frame-rate tool picking them up.