The Touryst, first released on Switch in 2019 and Xbox in 2020, has finally made its way over to PS4 and PS5. But the PS5 port of this tropical, adventure-filled puzzler carries a special distinction: It’s the first 8K/60 FPS console game ever officially released. But don’t go rushing out to buy an 8K TV just yet.
Developed by Shin’en Multimedia, The Touryst first hit Nintendo Switch in November 2019. Following that, it ended up on Xbox One in 2020, and then later a newly enhanced port became an Xbox Series X/S launch title. These newer ports looked great thanks in large part to the clean, colourful, voxel-like visuals of the original game.
It’s thanks to this clean and simple art style (and some hardware differences in the PS5) that the devs have been able to ship the first console game to render at a true, native 8K resolution. That’s right, The Touryst on PS5 can run at an internal resolution of 7680×4320, and according to Eurogamer and Digital Foundry, the devs say they’ve achieved this remarkable performance milestone with no temporal super-sampling, checkerboarding, DLSS-like upscaling, or any other fancy tricks. This game is actually, really running at 8K/60 FPS.
Digital Foundry released a video explaining how The Touryst on PS5 is able to look and run 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 res, the actual game on your TV is only presented in 4K. So, what’s going on? Well, this all comes down to the fact that — at least for now — Sony’s PS5 doesn’t actually support 8K output. Now, the PS5 box your console shipped in might have advertised that, but for now, Sony hasn’t patched the console to support this higher resolution.
But that doesn’t mean rendering the game at 8K is a waste of time. Instead, the devs are using the increased internal res as a form of super-sampling anti-aliasing, which means the graphics on-screen have cleaner, softer edges with fewer jaggies and similar artifacts. While the game displays at 4K for now, the devs told Eurogamer that when Sony decides to finally update the PS5 to support 8K output, it would only take a very small patch to let folks play their game in full-on 8K, assuming they had a fancy enough TV. But for now, the game’s super-high rendering resolution is being used to make it look nicer on lower-res displays.
It should be noted that the previous Xbox Series X version of The Touryst runs at an internal 6K resolution. The devs explained to Digital Foundry that their engine is now able to stretch further thanks to the PS5’s faster GPU and memory. In addition to the higher internal resolution, the PS5 version shows some clear improvements in its shadows and depth-of-field effects.
Before you get too excited and go rushing out to buy an 8K TV (which I already told you not to do…) remember that 8K games are going to be very, very rare on this generation of consoles. The Touryst started life as a Switch game running at 720p. And while its devs are extremely crafty and talented, there’s no denying that the game’s simple visual style is key to it being able to run so well at such an extreme resolution. GTA6, future Call of Duty games, and other so-called AAA games won’t be running at 8K/60 FPS anytime soon. Heck, 4K/60 is often out of reach.
Perhaps when the PS6 rolls around 8K gaming will be more common. For now, enjoy The Touryst on PS5 and scope its wild bit of technical wizardry.
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