Despite an uproar over its $50 price and lack of visual upgrades, the just-released PlayStation 4 port of Rockstar Games’ iconic 2010 video game “Red Dead Redemption” has become the top-most trending game on PSN on launch day according to PSU.
Fans have long been wanting a full-blown remake, or at least a remaster, of the original game, which previously was only playable on Xbox 360 or newer Xbox consoles via backwards compatibility. What we got was just a straight port for both Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.
Digital Foundry has done a breakdown of the PS4 version running on a PS5 and compared it to the 360 version running on an Xbox Series X. The results are fairly similar – both running at 4K and a mandatory 30fps.
The new PS5 version, however, comes out on top with a much more stable image which all comes down to two elements – better shadow quality and preserved shadow detail, and mostly the use of AMD’s FSR2.
FSR2, in this case, appears to be providing good quality anti-aliasing without upsampling as the game is already running at native resolution, resulting in what the outlet calls a “temporal super-sampler” that provides a smoother and cleaner image.
In comparison, the Xbox version is using 2x MSAA and a higher anisotropic filtering (16x vs. 8x) on the original 360 image. However, those appear to be the only differences – textures, LOD, UI, etc. remain the same between the versions. Some cut scenes are reportedly stuttering a little on the PlayStation version.
The good news is, unlike the infamous “Grand Theft Auto” definitive editions a few years back, these ports are at least reportedly very functional and don’t offer a dip in quality. The bad news is they don’t offer much of any real upgrade either beyond access to the game on systems unable to play it before.
