Ghostwire Tokyo technical analysis

Beyond the story and the gameplay, I must admit that I was eagerly awaiting the release of Ghostwire Tokyo as it was shaping up to be a game of the latest generation. Tango GameWorks has not had to deal with the restrictions imposed by the "old generation" in its progress, and the truth is that I was quite eager to see how this would affect the game on a technical level, especially in such important points as the difficulty of the geometry, the quality of the texturing and the size of the levels.

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

• DLSS rebuilds and rescales the image using AI (artificial intelligence) to select and combine the best frames, using both exclusive and temporary elements.
• FSR uses a simple, 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 hardware dedicated.

Before starting the analysis, I remind you that You can enlarge all the images by 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 making itself felt

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

The quality and The difficulty of geometry is superb, even in the most remote and smallest elements and elements, and At no time are we with those "dirty" textures (poor quality) that are a tradition 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 to you about this in their corresponding specialist analyses.

To illustrate this we only need to take a look at the scene in the hospital bed. Notice how carefully each and every detail is taken care of, so much so thatand even the folds of the sheet can be seen in bed. The geometry of each and every element is at an optimal level., even the more complex ones like the remote control next to the television, the vase of flowers and the machine that tracks heart rate. We can check Tokyo through the window with an effect so true that it could easily pass for a photo.

Everything I just said in the previous paragraph applies to each and every situation in the game. You only have to look at the quality of both the level modeling and the elements that populate them, as well as the texturing of the images that we are going to observe now when we delve deeper into ray tracing. Personally, I like to highlight the level of geometry that shows the different items of clothing spread throughout the initial scene., since they are quite complicated and in other titles a considerably easier geometry and a flat texture would have been solved.

Yeah, Ghostwire Tokyo “tastes” like “next gen” from the first moment, and unlike Dying Light 2, it doesn't require ray tracing to achieve this. The entire game itself is a work of art on a graphical level, and I'm clear that it wouldn't have been feasible to move that level of appearance to the "old gen". In the attached image that you will find below these lines, that of the vending machine, you can also clearly see the difference that the geometry makes, and it happens that the modeling of bottles and cans is almost perfect.

Ghostwire Tokyo and ray tracing: Reflections create a unique experience, shadows, not so much

At Ghostwire Tokyo, ray tracing is apply only to the reflections and shadows. If we deactivate the two changes, we will find some reflections of space of screen quite well done, although with each and every one of the restrictions inherent to this technique, which means that certain elements will suddenly and meaninglessly disappear when moving the camera, that several reflections will not occur correctly and that we will also have a very marked mirror effect, even on rough surfaces.

Turn on ray tracing applied to reflections marks an optimization very large, 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, In fact, several of them are not shown in the scene without ray tracing, such as the cars on the right, which are somewhat isolated, for example.

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

All of this causes the ray-traced reflections to add a significant layer of realism to the city of Tokyo, and everything around us. Other surfaces, such as cars and trucks, also develop realistic reflections thanks to ray tracing, and in a much cleaner way. Overall I'm pretty clear, Ghostwire Tokyo is Among the games that have best used ray tracing applied to reflexes.

In the following images you can continue observing the great difference that the ray tracing applied to reflections in Ghostwire Tokyo. In the first two images, where we look towards the sidewalk with the sound guides for blind people, we see that ray tracing creates Highly realistic and moving reflections, but in addition to this it achieves that differentiating effect on surfaces that we mentioned, avoiding the generation of a mirror effect on rough surfaces.

Both of the following images are another clear demonstration of the good performance of ray tracing. applied in reflections. In this scene from Ghostwire Tokyo we have a myriad of reflections that fall on different surfaces and they 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 avoiding the generation of that mirror effect that we have when disabling ray tracing, and that causes even a black bag to produce an exaggerated reflection.

Moving on, Tango GameWorks did an incredible job with both lighting and shadows. Even with ray tracing applied with shadows off, the immersion and look of Tokyo is sublime, which makes it advisable to prioritize ray tracing applied to reflections if we have a device that is not very strong and we only have the possibility of leaving 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 more to see it., and if we are moving this becomes 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 and more realistic finish.

In the next situations we will examine it in a much more extensive way. The first one shows Ghostwire Tokyo with ray tracing applied to shadows, and the second one without it. technology. Look at that on the balconies of the back block, to the right of the red sign. These develop shadows in accordance with the truth, and the same thing happens with our sign, and with other elements such as traffic signs, 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 scene with the baby carriage. Note the shadow cast by the carriage, and also the shadows created by the other elements in the scene. With ray tracing enabled, the sharpness of the shadows is greater, and we can also see that the clothes and bag shown in the background develop shadows disappearing when disabling ray tracing. Personally, this scene was one of those that best reflects what ray tracing can offer when applied to shadows indoors, although unfortunately it does not always work equally well, 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 be, something that is a consequence of an integration that, as I have previously commented, is not as successful as the ray tracing applied to reflections. That scene gives considerably more than what we observe, since in it only the shading of certain elements is slightly improved, such as the legs of the table, but not the shadows emitted by the elements present in it.

Rebuilding, and upscaling, 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 about, so now is the time to see what difference they make and what results they offer. I remind you that if you do not have a graphic card GeForce RTX 20 or higher, you will only be able to turn on the FSR or the TSR.

TSR provides image quality halfway between FSR and DLSS. It is superior to the former, but inferior to NVIDIA's solution, which 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 optimization lower than FSR, especially on higher quality modes, so keep that in mind, especially if your device is a bit tight on moving Ghostwire Tokyo.

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

To make it much easier for you to appreciate the differences between DLSS and FSR in different quality methods, I have attached a series of comparative images where you can observe them in a single scene face to face. You can enlarge the images with a simple click and open them in a separate tab or download them to see them much largerIn each and every one of them I indicate the DLSS and FSR configuration, and remember that in each and every one of the cases Ghostwire Tokyo was configured to the quality limit, and with ray tracing active and at the limit.

Ghostwire Tokyo: Performance and item consumption

To finish our technical analysis of Ghostwire Tokyo we are going to focus on its performance, and also on the consumption of game elements. To offer you a more extensive view in this regard, we have used a graphic card of prominent performance, 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:

• Windows 10 Pro 64-bit OS.
• Processor Ryzen 7 5800X (Zen 3) with eight cores and sixteen threads at 3.8 GHz-4.7 GHz.
• Motherboard Gigabyte X570 Aorus Ultra.
• 32 GB of RAM memory Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro SL 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 12GB of GDDR6X and GeForce RTX 3050 with 8GB of GDDR6 memory.
• Sound BlasterX AE-5 Sound Card Added.
• SSD Samsung Evo 850 of 500 GB (OS).
• PCIE SSD Corsair MP400 4TB NVMe.
• PCIE NVMe SSD Corsair MP600 Core of 2 TB.
• Seagate 2TB SHDD with 8GB of SSD as cache.
• Corsair AX1000 80 Plus Titanium power supply with 80 Plus Titanium certification.
• Six Corsair iCUE QL120 RGB fans.
• Lightning Node Core and Commander CORE for monitoring fans and also lighting.
• Corsair 5000D Airflow chassis.

The GeForce RTX 3050 is capable of running Ghostwire Tokyo smoothly at 1080p at maximum quality with ray tracing disabled, and thanks to DLSS as well gives a special experience in 1440p. The moment we activate ray tracing the impact that is technology has colossal performance, and we need DLSS to compensate for it.

The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti reveals that he is on another level, and it is with the ability to move Ghostwire Tokyo even in native 1440p with ray tracing to the limit without breaking a sweat, although it is true that we also observed a huge impact on performance when turning that on technology. Fortunately, DLSS in quality mode is more than enough to make up for it. As a side note, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is so overpowered at 1440p that DLSS in quality mode alone optimization performance, although decreases GPU utilization to the 75%.

We now move on to learn about the central unit consumption of prosecutionGhostwire Tokyo is a next-gen game that has not departed from the base of the previous generation of consoles, but despite everything we are with a very low use of the central unit of prosecution, so much so that sometimes we move under the 30% with the Ryzen 7 5800X. At most, we get close to touching the 50% at specific moments, which means that:

• It's a game GPU bound.
• It doesn't require much more than 4 cores and 8 threads, but it does require an optimal IPC.

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

Rarely, with both the GeForce RTX 3050 and the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti the game has to cram much more memory graphics card that it needs, and consumption gradually increases until it occupies practically all the free graphic memory. In this way, although with the RTX 3080 Ti we started with a consumption of about 8 GB, in the end we end up turning around 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 it uses it as a precaution.

Ghostwire Tokyo is fully upgraded for make the most of a strong SSD, something that can be seen not only in the loading times, which only last a few seconds, but also in how well the game's graphics engine works when creating new parts of the map as we visit them.

Overall, I think Tango GameWorks did an incredible job on a technical level with Ghostwire Tokyo. It is true that there are some things that could 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 shoe" Ghostwire Tokyo has a fabulous ride and is capable of raising the bar in terms of graphic quality.

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