Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 Performance Review

As Spider-Man 2 swings onto PS5 in the third Insomniac game, the shackles are off on the technological baseline now that there’s no PS4 version to support. Traversal speed is more than twice the previous maximum, with you able to literally fly around New York like a spider bat. Miles and Peter can now catapult themselves, cannonball style, through the skies like Sonic, and yet it never causes issues on the PS5’s blistering memory and SSD speeds, allowing it to stream in even higher traffic, building, and pedestrian density. Water has been a key improvement over the prior games, with full geometric surface bodies now morphing and wrapping around boats and characters and playing a bigger role in the city interaction, your traversal, and even some key action scenes.

Ray tracing is not only improved, with reflection quality and materials increased over the previous remasters, but they are also integral to the art design and are enabled in both performance and fidelity modes. Those same water bodies now use a mix of ray tracing and cube maps rather than the old SSR solution, amplifying water quality significantly. Many of the updates we saw in the remaster are here, such as the AI-generated muscle deformation system which significantly improves suit animations and provides more human shapes and tension; also, that’s a key aspect for Venom’s morphing powers. This remains a consistently impressive effect as it’s incorporated into combat skills throughout your play.

Two Is Better Than One – Modes of Play
With PS4 out of the equation we see two modes: Fidelity is the default and remains the showcase with its capped 30fps frame rate and dynamic resolution scaling, often being close to 4K, with the low point being a counted 3200x1800p. Character models, facial animation, and emotional nuance are all improved – an evolution of the previous games, not a revolution – but when your baseline looks this good you are not in dire need of one. Insomniac’s own hair spline technology has been improved far more though, with Peter, Mary Jane, and Miles hair having more bounce and body than a Baywatch episode. MJ is the star of the show though, with her hair volume and physics being amongst the best. She has several wardrobe changes throughout the story, and yet clipping is almost non-existent. Complemented by more RT reflections than a cutlery drawer, the physics-based rendering (PBR) materials still balance the line between the Uncanny Valley well. This makes the 30fps cap a much easier pill to swallow, aided by an improved per-pixel motion blur.

Fear not 60fps fans: all of that remains in effect in the Performance mode, with no need for a non-RT performance mode anymore. We see similar reductions as before, with the resolution ceiling now at 2560x1440p, which it can hit often (more so in the real-time cutscenes) and a new low of 1920x1080p, but it is often at the higher end of this range. Like Fidelity mode, Performance uses Insomniac’s temporal injection tech to reconstruct and clean the image up to that maximum when it dips below. In addition, RT reflections, although present, use a lower bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) range & quality along with less surfaces reflecting or at least a higher roughness cutoff. Shadows, ambient occlusion, and hair quality are also reduced a little, as are texture in places – likely as a result of resolution. But these are minor sacrifices to make when compared to doubling the performance, with the same high-octane action, blistering travel, and wild spectacle. Performance mode is pretty much locked at 60fps, aside from similar hiccups in our tests and a decline to the mid 50s during the bigger moments, but those are often brief and rare.