Developer Techland has made a good reputation for creating visually stunning works using its proprietary game engine, the C-Engine, which is also the beating heart of Dying Light 2. With a cross-gen-oriented focus while utilizing the State-of-the-art graphics on the latest hardware, the studio stages richly detailed visuals, seamless texture streaming, and upgrades to physics, AI and animation. Our first impressions? Dying Light 2 can take your breath away, but it goes down hard on GPUs.
Three different rendering modes are offered on PS5 and Xbox Series X and all of them offer good results, but there is not enough power to offer a unique combination of all three. For that you will need a high-end PC: on this platform Dying Light 2 offers even more graphics options, but we will talk about this version in a separate article.
At the moment the question is simple: how does the game play on PS5 and Xbox Series? Are 30fps and 60fps modes the best way to play, or should you go further and access ray tracing? Without a doubt, Dying Light 2 looks great on all three next-gen consoles. The Woodland areas flow beautifully as we pass through them, with no sign of any drop in performance. Even on Series S animations, texture quality and lighting do not look out of place in front of the PS5 and Series X versions; the biggest downgrade is in resolution and frame-rate. Starting with the bad news, multiple render modes are not offered on Series S, instead there is a single native 1080p mode that runs at 30fps (which is also the frame-rate for all last-gen consoles, but of we will deal with this in the next few days). Ray-tracing is also missing on Series S.
On PS5 and Series X things get a little more interesting. Both consoles boot into performance mode by default, which has a locked 1080p resolution. The frame-rate points to 60fps and most of the time it crashes to that value. The solid performance of this release is to be commended, especially considering the fact that Techland does not use any dynamic resolution scaling algorithm. But the combination of relatively low resolution and temporal anti-aliasing results in smooth images. Even so, the improved performance allows the parkour sections to better convey the sense of weight and inertia in the movements. The input lag will also subside accordingly. There is talk of a 120Hz mode that unlocks on Series X with compatible screens, but it didn’t work during the review period. It should be implemented soon and we will not fail to update you on how it works.
Then there is the resolution mode, which significantly increases the sharpness of the image, thanks to a number of pixels on the screen equal to 3200×1800 on PS5 and 3456×1944 on Xbox Series X. On the latter it is an increase of +16.6 %, which is slightly less than the difference in compute power between the GPUs of the two machines. This is therefore a nice advantage on paper for the Microsoft console, but one that finds little evidence in the real world. The definition of the image is indeed a bit higher especially in transparent objects, but the truth is that it is difficult to discern the differences in side-by-side comparisons. In this mode the frame-rate is locked at 30fps, with very rare performance drops and always when there are certain effects in play (for example a jump in the water). From this point of view, PS5 and Series X run very similarly. As for the S Series, its unique 30fps mode is a little less stable but still very solid, albeit prone to screen tearing.
Finally we have the quality mode, which keeps the 30fps but reduces the resolution to 1080p. The unused GPU power reserve is used for ray-traced shadows and ambient occlusion, which add more realism especially in outdoor scenarios: Greenery is transformed with an extra layer of shading. And with ray tracing, the shadows of the characters appear more diffuse the further they move away from the light source. Performance on PS5 and Series X in this mode is also solid and nailed to 30fps.
The effects in place can therefore dramatically transform the visual aspect of the game, but the necessary trade-offs regarding both resolution and performance are evident. It is difficult to choose the best mode. I’ve played around with that performance longer as I personally think 60fps is the most important in graphics, but the ray-traced shadows and ambient occlusion are pretty cool to behold on consoles.
Those who play Dying Light 2 on PS5 or Series X have a ton of luxury options – ray traced shadows, 60fps, and 4K support are all good options. But it’s a shame that all three modes have distinctive features but also compromises in each case. To merge the three modes you have to play on PC: this version offers even more graphical upgrades and higher performance. Dying Light 2 requires a very powerful PC with RTX GPU (and DLSS is crucial in performance). Despite this, Techland is to be commended for empowering the console player to choose which aspect is most important to him, but those with a Series S will have to settle for gaming at a ‘last gen’ 1080p30 resolution.
We believe the biggest revelation of this game is the effectiveness of the ray traced shadows, all calculated in real time. Dying Light 2 stages many moments to put them in the spotlight, even in the early stages of the game, with the low sun causing fantastic shadows hitting the forest trees. The upgrade over the other modes is titanic, and this rendering mode is worth trying. Others may find it difficult not to play at 60fps, but at least the choice is in the hands of the user.
There is still a lot to talk about Dying Light 2. We’ll be looking at coverage of the PC version, which offers incredible graphics features, in a very short time. We will also take care of the performance of a wide range of different hardware, and offer you our optimized graphics options. We also plan to cover last-gen releases and see if the game scales well, at least if it does better than Cyberpunk 2077, for example. In the meantime, we can highly recommend buying on next-gen consoles, but if you’re a Series S owner, please be aware that rendering modes and overall quality are somewhat limited.
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