Grand Tour 7 Coming out tomorrow, to give you an idea of what to expect in terms of performance, Digital Foundry has an analysis of the PS5 version.
According to Digital Foundry, since the release of Gran Turismo Sport, the game’s checkerboard 1800p has been upscaled to full native 4K. In addition to the higher pixel count, the image is also enhanced thanks to texture filtering, shadow quality, reflection quality, and more. DF says that while it’s not perfect, it “greatly reduces some of the visual artifacts you might find in GT Sport.”
The game also adds per-pixel motion blur during actual gameplay at full resolution, however, there aren’t any lower-resolution options that might allow hardware-accelerated ray tracing in-game.
A key feature of Gran Turismo 7 is hardware accelerated ray tracing, but you can choose to use ray tracing or higher frame rates. When using ray traced reflections, the feature works in every scene including cars – except for actual games. This means that the playback and menu systems use the feature, but the frame rate is capped at 30fps, while turning off ray tracing removes the performance limitation.
Ray tracing really makes car paint shine because the clear coat reflects light, creating a realistic surface on the vehicle. With ray traced reflections, the results are “more accurate because the paint reflects not only the environment, but other cars as well as internal reflections.” When activated, ray tracing is applied to all cars, and all cars reflect each other correctly.
The car exhibits “a high level of detail within the acceleration structure,” which means you can expect accurate reflections, especially in playback, but the performance hit makes it unsuitable for Polyphony’s 60fps-targeted gameplay.
When using ray traced playback, the frame rate is capped at 30fps and remains the same most of the time. Playback “runs pretty consistently and looks great in RT reflections,” however, the game’s stress test conditions “had a similar effect on playback,” causing things to drop below 30fps. Once the cars were spaced out during the race, the problem went away. While there is no ray-traced target 60fps replay, the situation is “mostly stable”, with a “tightly packed grid” mixed with inclement weather causing dips.
Digital Foundry says it is currently testing Gran Turismo 7 on PlayStation 4 and PS4 Pro and will publish its findings soon.
If you’re wondering if you want to play this game, you should check out our Gran Turismo 7 review, we gave it a 5/5 because it’s so good that it might “turn casual players into real gas heads”. You can also find out what other reviewers think with our roundup.
