Beyond the story and the gameplay, I must admit that I was eagerly awaiting the publication of Ghostwire Tokyo as it materialized as a new generation game. Tango GameWorks he has not had to deal with the restrictions imposed by the "old gen" in his progress, and the truth is that I really wanted to see how this affected the game on a technical level, more than anything on such important points as the difficulty of the geometry, the quality of the texturing and the breadth of the levels.

On the other hand, Ghostwire Tokyo is also a game that creates a lot of interest on a technical level due to the fact that it uses ray tracing applied to reflections and shadows, and due to the fact that incorporates DLSS, FSR and TSR. As our much more advanced readers will know, we are talking about three image rescaling technologies that work in a very different way:

• DLSS rebuilds and rescales the image using AI (artificial intelligence) to pick and match the most outstanding frames, and using both unique and temporary elements.
• The FSR uses a simple and fixed algorithm that rescales the image using only unique elements.
• The TSR is a much more advanced rescaling than the previous one, since it rescales the image using exclusive and temporary elements, but it does not need dedicated hardware.

Before starting the analysis, I remind you that you can enlarge all the images clicking on them, and you can also open them in different windows to compare them in a much more direct and easy way.

Ghostwire Tokyo: The "next gen" effect is visible

From the moment we start having fun we are with a special recreation of the popular Shibuya crossing, and that first scene is much more than enough to realize that we are facing a new generation title that certainly breaks with the primary restrictions imposed by the "old gen". As we continue in the game, that feeling that we are facing a "next gen" game is accentuated, especially at the moment when we have the possibility of contemplating Tokyo from above. The breadth of the scope, and the quality of it, are sensational.

The quality and the difficulty of the geometry is superb, even in elements and elements much farther apart and much smaller, and at no time are we with those "dirty" textures (of poor quality) that are a traditional in intergenerational titles. Without going any further, this was a notable drawback in recent games, such as Dying Light 2 and Resident Evil Village, and now I talked about it in their corresponding specialist reviews.

To illustrate this we just have to take a look at the hospital bed scene. Look at how careful each and every one of the data is, so much so thatand you can also see even the folds of the sheet in bed. The geometry of each and every one of the elements is at an optimum level, even those much more complex ones like the remote that is next to the television, the vase of flowers and the machine that tracks the heart rhythm. In addition we can see Tokyo through the window with an effect so true that it could pass perfectly for a photo.

Everything I just said in the previous paragraph continues in each and every one of the game situations. You only have to look at the quality of both the modeling of the levels and the elements that populate them, such as the texturing, of the images that we are going to observe now when we delve into the ray tracing. Personally, I like to highlight the level of geometry that shows the different clothes scattered throughout the opening scene, as they are quite complicated and considerably easier geometry and flat texture would have been solved in other titles.

Yes, Ghostwire Tokyo "tastes" to "next gen" from the first moment, and in contrast to Dying Light 2 it doesn't require pulling ray tracing to do so. The entire game itself is a work of art on a graphic level, and it is clear to me that it would not have been feasible to move that aspect level to the “old gen”. In the attached image that you will find under these lines, that of the vending machine, you can also clearly see the difference that geometry makes, and it happens that the modeling of bottles and cans is almost special.

Ghostwire Tokyo and Ray Tracing: Reflections Create a Unique Experience, Shadows Not So Much

In Ghostwire Tokyo, ray tracing is applied only to reflections and shadows. If we deactivate the two changes, we are going to find some screen space reflections quite successful, although with each and every one of the restrictions of that technique, which means that there will be sudden and meaningless disappearances of certain elements when moving the camera, that several reflections will not occur correctly and that we are going to have, in addition to this, a very marked speculum effect, even on rough surfaces.

Turning on ray tracing applied to reflections marks a very big optimization, so much so that the images speak for themselves. Look at both images of the Shibuya crossing, in the first we see ray tracing enabled, and in the second we have it disabled. With that technology activated we have a higher proportion of reflected elements, actually several of them are not shown in the scene without ray tracing, like the passenger cars on the right, which are a bit far away, for example.

But that's not all, the reflections are also developed in a considerably truer way and have a simply stunning quality. Ray tracing lets teach still reflexes actively, like the screen with the communicator of news on the move, something that you can see in the video that you will find at the end of the product, and it perfectly differentiates the reflections that are generated on much more reflective surfaces, such as puddles of water, from those that take place on rough surfaces, such as wet asphalt. In this way, the reflections in the puddles are much more intense and have a much more marked speculum touch, while the others have a much duller and less sharp finish.

All of this causes ray-traced reflections to add an essential layer of realism to the city of Tokyo, and to everything around us. Other surfaces, such as cars and trucks, also develop realistic reflections through ray tracing, and in a considerably cleaner way. As a general rule, I have it quite clear, Ghostwire Tokyo is among the games that have best used ray tracing applied to reflections.

In the next images you can continue observing the big difference that makes the ray tracing applied to reflections in Ghostwire Tokyo. In both first images, where we look towards the sidewalk with the sound guides for blind people, we observe that the ray tracing creates highly realistic and moving reflections, but in addition to this it achieves that differentiating effect of surfaces that we commented on, avoiding the generation of a speculum effect on rough surfaces.

Both following images are another clear demonstration of the good performance of ray tracing applied to reflections. In this scene from Ghostwire Tokyo we have countless reflections that fall on different surfaces and that are generated at different distances, which creates a complicated situation that ray tracing solves in a fabulous way, distinguishing between surfaces, fine-tuning the intensity of the reflections depending on the distance and the area and preventing that effect from being generated speculum that we have by disabling ray tracing, and that causes even a black bag to produce an exaggerated reflection.

Changing the third, the truth is that Tango GameWorks did an incredible job with both lighting and shadows. Even with ray tracing applied to shadows turned off, the immersion and look of Tokyo is sublime, which makes it advisable to prioritize ray tracing applied to reflections if we have a not very strong apparatus and we only have the possibility of leaving us between the 2 changes.

However, this does not mean that using ray tracing applied to shadows does not represent any optimization. that optimization It exists, but it costs a little much more to see it, and if we are on the move this is even more difficult. Look at both images below these lines, in the first we have applied ray tracing to the shadows, and in the second we have not. With ray tracing both the shoe and the coffee cup cast a shadow, and generally the scene has a much darker finish and relative to the truth.

In the next situations we will examine it in a much more extensive way. The first exhibits Ghostwire Tokyo with ray tracing applied to shadows, and the second without ray tracing. Notice on the balconies of the back block, to the right of the red sign. These develop some shadows according to the truth, and the same happens with our sign, and with other elements such as traffic signals, the fences located on the sides of the sidewalks and even the red cone, which receives the shadow of the fence.

We can also see visible differences in the baby carriage scene. Look at the shadow cast by said car, and also at the shadows cast by the other elements of the scene. With ray tracing enabled, the sharpness of the shadows is superior, and we can also see that the clothes and bag shown in the background develop shadows that disappear when ray tracing is disabled. Personally, this scene was among the ones that best reflects what ray tracing applied to indoor shadows can offer, although unfortunately it does not work equally well in all cases, as we will see in the next paragraph.

In these last 2 images the ray tracing applied to shadows marks a much smaller difference than it should, something that is the consequence of an integration that, as I have previously mentioned, is not as successful as ray tracing applied to reflections. That scene gives for considerably more than what we observe, since in it only the shading of certain elements, such as the legs of the table, are slightly improved, but not the shadows emitted by the elements present in it.

Rebuilding, and Rescaling, Tokyo: NVIDIA DLSS vs. AMD FSR

Ghostwire Tokyo is a title that, as we have said, works with NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and TSR. Now I have explained to you at the beginning of the product exactly what all these technologies are, so now is the time to see what difference they make and what outcomes they propose. I remind you that, if you do not have one Graphic card GeForce RTX 20 or higher, you can only turn on the FSR or the TSR.

TSR provides image quality midway between FSR and DLSS. It is superior to the first, but inferior to the NVIDIA solution, something that would make us think that it is the second best option, and yes, it is in terms of quality, but not performance, since it achieves a lower optimization than FSR, especially in the much higher quality methods, so keep that in mind, especially if your device is going just a bit to displace Ghostwire Tokyo.

As far as NVIDIA DLSS is concerned, this technology is doing great at Ghostwire Tokyo. The reconstruction and rescaling work that it achieves is so good that, even in performance mode, it is capable of rendering a result very close to what we would get with native resolution. If we use the DLSS in quality mode in Ghostwire Tokyo we will achieve a result higher than the native resolution, thanks to the good reconstruction work that makes the elements much smaller and farther away.

In order to make it much easier for you to appreciate the differences between DLSS and FSR in different quality methods, I have attached a succession of comparative images where you can see them in a single face-to-face scene. You can enlarge the images with an easy click and open them in a small tab without dependency or download them to see them much larger. In each and every one of them I indicate the configuration of the DLSS and the FSR, and remember that in each and every one of the cases Ghostwire Tokyo was configured at the quality limit, and with active ray tracing and at the limit.

Ghostwire Tokyo: Performance and Item Consumption

To finish our technical analysis of Ghostwire Tokyo we are going to reinforce its performance, and also in the consumption of game elements. To offer you a much more extensive vision in this sense, we have used a high performance graphics card, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, and also a standard quality graphics card, the GeForce RTX 3050.

These are the device information on which we have moved Ghostwire Tokyo:

• OS Windows ten Pro 64-bit.
• Ryzen 7 5800X (Zen 3) processor with eight cores and sixteen threads at 3.8 GHz-4.7 GHz.
• Gigabyte X570 Aorus Ultra motherboard.
• 32 GB of Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro SL RAM at 3,200 MHz CL16 (4 modules).
• Corsair iCUE H150i Elite Capellix White cooling system with three 120mm Corsair ML RGB fans.
• RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition graphics card with 12 GB of GDDR6X and GeForce RTX 3050 with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory.
• Sound BlasterX AE-5 sound card Added.
• SSD Samsung Evo 500GB 850 (OS).
• Corsair MP400 4TB PCIE NVMe SSD.
• 2TB Corsair MP600 Core NVMe PCIE SSD.
• 2TB Seagate SHDD with 8GB SSD as cache.
• Corsair AX1000 Nutrition Source 80 Certified Titanium Added 80 Titanium Added.
• Six Corsair iCUE QL120 RGB fans.
• Lightning Node Core and Commander CORE to monitor fans and lighting as well.
• Corsair 5000D Airflow chassis.

The GeForce RTX 3050 is capable of running Ghostwire Tokyo seamlessly in 1080p with full quality and ray tracing disabled, and thanks to DLSS as well gives a special experience in 1440p. The moment we activate ray tracing, the hit that this technology has on performance is colossal, and we require DLSS to compensate for it.

The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti reveals that it is on another level, and it's with the ability to scroll Ghostwire Tokyo even in native 1440p with ray tracing to the limit without breaking a sweat, although it's true that we also saw a huge bump in performance when turning on that technology. Fortunately, DLSS in quality mode is more than enough to make up for it. As a curious note, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti goes so far in 1440p that DLSS in quality mode only optimizes performance, although lowers GPU utilization to 75%.

We turn at this time to know the consumption of the central processing unit. Ghostwire Tokyo is a new generation game that has not started from the base of the previous generation of consoles, but despite everything we are with a very low use of the central processing unit, so much so that sometimes we move under the 30% with the Ryzen 7 5800X. At maximum, we bring the 50% close to punctual instants, which means that:

• It is a GPU bound game.
• It does not require much more than 4 cores and eight threads, but it does require an optimal IPC.

Regarding memory consumption, Ghostwire Tokyo registered an average consumption of 12GB of RAM at 1440p and of practically 15 GB in 4K. As far as graphics memory is concerned, in 1080p the average consumption was 6 GB of graphics memory in 1080p, a figure that rose to just over 7 GB of graphics memory in 1440p and almost 8 GB in 4K.

Rarely, with both the GeForce RTX 3050 and the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti the game tends to clutter much more graphics memory than it needs, and the consumption gradually increases until it takes up almost all the free graphics memory. In this way, although with the RTX 3080 Ti we started with a consumption of about 8 GB, in the end we ended up turning the 11 GB. This is what I have explained to you on other occasions, the game does not require the use of 11 GB of graphics memory, but uses it in a precautionary way.

Ghostwire Tokyo is fully upgraded to take full advantage of a strong SSD, something that can be seen not only in the load times, which only last a few seconds, but also in how well the game's graphics engine works in the game. time to create the new parts of the map as we visit them.

As a general rule, I think that Tango GameWorks did an incredible job on a technical level with Ghostwire Tokyo. It is true that there are some things that can be improved, especially in relation to the low use of the central processing unit and the GPU, which are generated in resolutions lower than 4K if we use a rescaler and disable ray tracing, but even with those "stones in the shoes" Ghostwire Tokyo has a fabulous ride and it is with the ability to raise the bar as far as graphic quality is concerned.

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