The first 8K / 60 FPS PS5 game of all time

The tourist, first released on Switch in 2019 and Xbox in 2020, has finally made its way to PS4 and PS5. But the PS5 The port of this adventure-filled tropical puzzle carries a special distinction: it is the first 8K / 60 FPS console game ever to be officially released. But don’t rush to buy an 8K TV just yet.

Developped by Shin’en Multimedia, The Touryst first arrived on Nintendo Switch in November 2019. Subsequently it ended up on Xbox One in 2020, then later a new and improved port became a Xbox Series X / S launch title. These new ports looked great thanks in large part to the clean, colorful, voxel-like visuals of the original game.

It is thanks to this clean and simple art style (and a few hardware differences in the PS5) that the developers were able to deliver the first console game to a faithful rendering, 8K native resolution. That’s right, The Touryst on PS5 can operate at an internal resolution of 7680×4320, and depending on Eurogamer and Digital foundry, the developers say they’ve achieved this remarkable performance milestone without time-based supersampling, checkerboarding, DLSS-like scaling, or any other fancy trick. This game actually runs at 8K / 60 FPS.

Digital foundry posted a video explaining how The tourist on PS5 is able to look and perform so well at such a high resolution.

The first thing to keep in mind is that while the game is running at a full 8K resolution, the actual gameplay on your TV is only shown in 4K. So what is going on? Well, it all comes down to the fact that—at least for now—Sony PS5 does not actually support 8K output. Now, the PS5 box your console shipped in might have advertised this, but as of now Sony hasn’t patched the console to support that higher resolution.

But that doesn’t mean rendering the game in 8K is a waste of time. Instead, the developers are using the increased internal resolution as a form of supersampling anti-aliasing, meaning on-screen graphics have sharper, smoother edges with less jaggedness and artifacts. similar. While the game is displayed in 4K for the moment, the developers said Eurogamer that when Sony finally decides to update the PS5 to support 8K output, it would only take a very small patch to let people play their game in 8K, assuming they have a fairly sophisticated TV. . But for now, the game’s ultra-high render resolution is used to make it look better on low-res screens.

It should be noted that the previous Xbox Series X version of The tourist operates at an internal resolution of 6K. The developers told Digital Foundry that their engine is now able to expand further thanks to the PS5’s faster GPU and memory. In addition to the higher internal resolution, the PS5 version shows marked improvements in its shadows and depth of field effects.

Before you get too excited and rush out to buy an 8K TV (which I told you not to do before …) remember that 8K games are going to be very, very rare on this generation of consoles. The tourist started life as a Switch game running at 720p. And while its developers are extremely cunning and talented, there’s no denying that the game’s straightforward visual style is key to making it perform so well at such an extreme resolution. GTA6, future Call of Duty games, and other so-called AAA games won’t run at 8K / 60 FPS anytime soon. Heck, 4K / 60 is often out of reach.

Maybe when the PS6 turns around 8K games will be more mainstream. For now, enjoy The tourist on PS5 and expand its bit of technical magic.