Developer Techland has a reputation for delivering exceptional visuals via its own in-house technology – the C-Engine, taking centre-stage in Dying Light 2. With a focus of straddling the console generations while utilising cutting-edge visuals on the latest hardware, the studio promises us a rich density in detail, seamless streaming, upgraded physics, animation and AI. Our first impression? Dying Light 2 can look astonishing – but it’s no secret that it’s exceptionally heavy on the GPU.
Three different rendering modes are on offer on PS5 and Series X consoles, all of them delivering something desirable – but the horsepower simply isn’t there to offer them all in combination. For that, you’ll need a high-end PC (where Dying Light 2 offers even more visual features) and we’ll be talking about that in our next piece.
Right now the question is simple: how do PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles run the game? Are 30fps and 60fps modes best for play – or should you push higher for the ray tracing features? Without question, Dying Light 2 looks great on all three current-gen systems. Woodland areas flow beautifully with rare signs of performance drops. Even on Series S, animations, texture quality, and lighting compare favourably to PS5 and Series X – the big downside being in resolution and frame-rate. To get the bad news out of the way first, the multiple rendering modes are not present on Series S, which is fixed to a native 1080p at 30 frames per second (and to be clear, the 30fps target is also set for the last-gen machines too – we’ll be looking at those versions in the next couple of days). No ray-tracing features are included on Series S either.
It’s with PS5 and Series X where things get a little more interesting. As standard, both machines boot in performance mode where rendering resolution is locked to 1080p, while frame-rate targets – and doggedly locks – to 60 frames per second. The sheer consistency of this mode is laudable, especially as Techland does not lean into dynamic resolution scaling to achieve this lock. However, the combination of the relatively low resolution and the temporal anti-aliasing solution ensure that presentation is definitely soft. Even so, the improved performance brings out the best in the sense of weight and movement in the game’s parkour segments. Input lag will be lower too. There are reports of a variable refresh rate mode exclusive to Series X that unlocks the frame-rate on 120Hz screens but unfortunately, this was not functioning during the review period. It should be available soon and we’ll report back on how well it functions.