The Nioh Collection on PlayStation 5

PlayStation 5’s Nioh Collection sees Tecmo Koei bringing together his two PS4 epics into one complete package with all downloadable expansions, delivering a massive amount of content. On top of that, the publisher also promises improvements to existing PS4 / PS4 Pro versions, with both titles offering supposedly native 4K modes, as well as support for games at 120Hz. On top of that, there’s a new “ PlayStation 5 standard mode ” – makes this a quality mode targeting the capabilities of new hardware for a vastly improved experience. So how does all of this play out and what kind of improvement are we looking for over the existing PS4 Pro version – which offers its own 4K and high frame rate support that’s a question. interesting to answer because basically the older versions of Nioh on PS4 Pro offered a great degree of flexibility with their own performance and quality modes and as they relied heavily on unlocked frame rates and upgrading. dynamic resolution scale, you can already get an enhanced experience from existing games just by running them backwards compatible. on the new Sony platform.

However, these are remasters and while the upgrades are hardly day-to-night upgrades, they are substantial. For starters, Tecmo Koei removed the somewhat questionable checkerboard rendering from the PS4 Pro version (which had issues like obvious aliases and double-wide transparency effects), opting for native resolution rendering on PlayStation 5. Do not don’t get me wrong here – checkerboard may sound impressive, but Nioh’s implementation wasn’t particularly good, so switching to native rendering offers an improvement in image quality that you won’t get with backward compatibility. Second, in Nioh 1 at least, 4K mode delivers just that, with just a hint of dynamic resolution scaling, while PS5 standard mode increases the settings but widens the DRS window, which means 1800p and potentially even lower resolutions may be possible.

And then there’s the 120Hz mode: the resolution drops, but the improvement in input lag and visual response is really impressive – for Nioh 1, it’s my favorite way to play, especially since the level of detail (beyond the number of pixels) is comparable to other modes. I’ll dig into the video for a more detailed breakdown of how the different render variations stack up in terms of specific examples, but think of this as a fuller, more polished version of a truly great PS4 game and you. will understand how I rate it so high.

John Linneman and Alex Battaglia dig deeper into the Nioh collection on PlayStation 5 – what does it look like and how does it play, and which game modes are best for each title?

Nioh 2 is a more difficult game in terms of rendering requests – perhaps not surprising considering that it only launched in March 2020 – so even though the same three modes are rolled out (and the resolution rendering native preserved), the results are not quite so pristine. 4K mode doesn’t really work at Ultra HD resolutions, but comes close, varying between 1944p and 2160p for much of the duration, while the DRS range widens much more in PS5 Standard mode, but benefits from ‘Improved shadows and draw distances. The 120 Hz mode is not as efficient as that of Nioh 1 – the loss of detail is significant and the quality of the shadows is poor.

Performance is important for the Nioh series, and that’s pretty easy to cover up – Nioh 1 is mostly locked at 60fps in standard 4K and PS5 mode, while the 120Hz output is similarly tenacious in its consistency, spending the vast majority of its duration. delivering 120 images per second. It’s a big improvement over PlayStation 4, and it’s a pleasure to play. The more demanding Nioh 2 isn’t as successful – 4K and PS5 Standard modes are generally good, locking into target frame rates, but not as consistent as the first game. The 120Hz mode is also good. less consistent, often dropping to 90-100 fps in more open areas.

This is where the lack of VRR support on the PS5 platform is disappointing: a dropped frame in 120Hz mode is an 8.3ms stutter, and when many of them occur within a short period of time, stuttering is noticeable. But at the same time, the persistence per frame between 90 fps and 120 fps is less than 3ms – and with VRR, frame time variances would be much, much harder to detect by the human eye. I really hope to see a good platform-level VRR implementation added to the PS5 – the technology is hugely impressive and already proven on Xbox Series consoles.

Getting back to the Nioh collection specifically, the load times – or lack thereof – are exceptionally impressive, to the point where both titles load so quickly, it’s almost like a cartridge experience. This is a day and night improvement over last generation consoles, and even a significant improvement over last generation code running under back-compat on PS5. It’s a further refinement on what is already a much improved game, and one that I highly recommend checking out. And one more thing for fans of the physical disc: The Nioh collection is complete on Blu-ray, with one disc per game, and no additional downloads are required to fully enjoy the experience. Pleasant.