Spider-Man 2 Will Have Ray Tracing Across All Visual Modes

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is just about a month away, as the PlayStation 5 sequel is set to launch on October 20. While both the original 2018 game and its 2020 spin-off sequel Miles Morales were also on PlayStation 4, Spider-Man 2 is being made exclusively for the PS5’s beefier tech. As such, developer Insomniac claims it’s been able to leverage the system to achieve ray tracing across the board regardless of what graphical performance setting you play on.

In an interview with IGN, Insomniac Director of Core Technology Mike Fitzgerald and Project Director Jeannette Lee talked about the tech behind the upcoming open-world game. When the topic of ray tracing (realistic rendering of reflections, lighting, and shadows) came up, Fitzgerald explained that Spider-Man 2 will offer multiple framerate options (30, 40, and 60 frames per second). The 30fps mode will have better graphical fidelity, but if you trade some of that prettier image quality you’ll get a smoother framerate at 60. The 40fps option is for those of us with a 120Hz TV.

Regardless of which you pick, Fitzgerald says ray tracing will be on by default for each mode, and says this is thanks to the studio working with the PlayStation 5 long enough to understand the tech, having released three games on the system already between both prior Spider-Man games and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.

“For this game we’re really able to deliver [ray tracing] as a baseline performance mode,” Fitzgerald told IGN. “There’s no mode of this game that has the ray tracing turned off, no need for it. We’ve really figured out how to deliver what we feel like is the right Spider-Man visuals and we want to make sure every player is seeing that.”

That all sounds impressive, and if Insomniac is this good with the tech by now, I’m curious to see what its Wolverine game will look like whenever it comes out. But even before this, Insomniac’s games have been a pretty strong technical showcase for the PlayStation 5. Rift Apart’s portal tech was really wild to see, and supposedly needed the PS5’s solid-state drive to accomplish.