Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 players will be able to enjoy the game with ray tracing regardless of what graphical setting they pick when the new sequel from Insomniac Games launches exclusively for PlayStation 5 consoles on October 20, 2023. Mike Fitzgerald, Director of Core Technology at Insomniac, revealed the news during a recent interview with IGN, telling the publication that Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 features ray-traced effects even in the game’s Performance mode, a mode that typically does away with demanding effects for higher and/or smoother frame rates. Insomniac’s developers also explained how they have taken advantage of the PS5’s SSD this time around not only for faster loading times, but also for faster traversal (three times as fast, according to Fitzgerald), as well as 3D audio support for higher levels of immersion.
Mike Fitzgerald, Director of Core Technology: For us, this is really a culmination of everything we’ve learned about developing for this console. We did Spider-Man Remastered, Miles Morales, and Ratchet and Clank. And so as our fourth title for the PS5, we’ve really gotten to leverage everything we’ve seen in developing those games. Our performance mode for this title has ray tracing on by default. We’ve really expanded ray traced reflections throughout the game. It’s on the water and the oceans and really gives a more realistic picture everywhere.
…for [the older] titles, we had Fidelity Mode, which had the full 4K and ray traced reflections, and then we had a Performance Mode which turned the ray tracing off and rendered at a lower resolution. And then we were able to add I think around launch, if not just after, the Performance RT Mode as we called it, which was trying to be the best of both. And for this game we’re really able to deliver that as a baseline performance mode. There’s no mode of this game that has the ray tracing turned off, no need for it. We’ve really figured out how to deliver what we feel like is the right Spider-Man visuals and we want to make sure every player is seeing that.