Spider-Man 2 on PlayStation 5 offers two graphics modes, Fidelity and Performance, with different frame rates & resolutions. But which is the best way to play?
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is finally here, and on the cusp of the PlayStation 5’s third birthday, assumes the throne as the console’s most technically impressive game to date.
I said effectively the same thing last fall about God of War Ragnarök, but in this line of work, there’s always something on the horizon that has the potential to make you look foolish in retrospect. (And hey, I did say that Ragnarök could be the PS5’s most technically impressive game yet — back then. A lot can change in 11 months!)
Insomniac Games has brought to bear all of its experience developing for the PS5 — this is the studio’s fourth project for the platform, following 2021’s Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart — in delivering an open-world superhero adventure that makes the most of the console’s hardware. It’s the first entry in the franchise built specifically for this system. The two previous games were 2018’s Marvel’s Spider-Man, which debuted on PlayStation 4, and 2020’s PS5 launch title Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which was a cross-generation game, so it had to be designed in a way that would allow it to run on PS4 as well as PS5.
In Rift Apart, which debuted exclusively on PS5, Insomniac showed what it could do when it didn’t have to worry about supporting older hardware: dimension-hopping action that relied on the PS5’s speedy SSD. The studio has built upon that work with Spider-Man 2, making even better use of the SSD to allow for instantaneous fast travel and other remarkable transitions. And the Spider-Mans’ hometown of New York City — three boroughs of which are now available, with Queens and Brooklyn lying across the East River from Manhattan — looks as amazing as our two heroes, rendered with real-time ray tracing in every graphics mode.
You may be wondering about those modes, and about which one is the best option. There’s a lot on offer, but the long and short of it is that you’ll get a great experience at all times.Spider-Man 2’s graphics modes, explained
There are two ways to play Spider-Man 2: Fidelity mode and Performance mode. You’ll find them under the “Graphics” area of the settings menu’s Visual section, and unlike in many other games, you’ll also find detailed descriptions of each mode and the associated options.
As you’d expect, the image quality and resolution are at their highest in Fidelity mode, which has a frame rate target of 30 frames per second (and is the default setting). The Performance mode makes trade-offs in resolution and other areas to target 60 fps. Both options use dynamic resolution scaling, adjusting the amount of pixels being rendered in order to hit the frame rate in question.
