Shin’en Multimedia released The Touryst, a new action-adventure puzzle game with a cute and blocky animated art style, for PS4 and PS5 consoles last month. The PS5 version happens to be a pretty big deal because it’s the first next-gen console game to genuinely support 8K. As showcased in a video analysis by Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry, The Touryst internally renders at 7680×4320, and it does so without any trickery such as checkerboard rendering. What’s even more impressive is that the game is able to maintain 60 FPS at this extreme resolution.
There’s a major problem, however: despite the shiny logo that Sony placed on the front of the box, the PlayStation 5 doesn’t actually support 8K output yet. Still, what Shin’en Multimedia pulled off with the The Touryst remains enticing for players, in that its native rendering resolution can still be leveraged for super sampling, enabling a downscaled image that’s extremely clean with minimal aliasing.
From Eurogamer:
Shin’en is using the extreme resolution for super-sampling anti-aliasing: essentially, every pixel on your 4K screen is downsampled from four pixels for pristine image quality. As for what kind of difference this makes to the overall presentation, Shin’en has you covered there too. You can actually drop back down to native 4K in the options menu – just disable anti-aliasing. Shin’en tells us that when and if the platform holder makes good on the PS5 packaging’s 8K promises (VRR first please, Sony), a simple patch should allow the game to output the 4320p framebuffer directly for a 1:1 pixel match on an 8K display.
The Touryst is also available to play on Xbox Series X, but that version only internally renders at 6K (5760×3240). Shin’en Multimedia says that the difference is owed to the PS5’s increased clock frequencies and the difference in memory set-up. The engine was also rewritten to take advantage of the PS5’s low-level graphics API.
Source: Eurogamer