After a year of PlayStation 5 exclusivity, Ghostwire: Tokyo is finally out on Xbox. This open-world horror-first-person-adventure mashup is definitely a unique game, but it did suffer from a range of technical issues when it first launched. Poor performance and sluggish controls plagued the PS5 version of Ghostwire, along with an overwhelming range of graphical options. The good news is that the game looks just as good on Series X, but the bad news is that none of the technical issues have been addressed on PS5 since launch – and so the Xbox versions are similarly affected. Even more disappointing is that performance is lower on Series X, while there are noticeable reductions in quality to the game’s striking ray-traced effects.
Ghostwire: Tokyo ships with a sobering variety of visual modes – far too many, really, with none of them providing a definitive experience. On PS5 and Series X, there are an effective 10 visual options for players to choose from – quality, performance, and then multiple variants of high frame-rate quality and high frame rate performance, depending on the refresh rate of the console and whether you want to engage v-sync or not. And on top of that, there are five different settings for motion blur quality – the default looked fine, so we stuck with it. The situation is much simpler on Series S, with a just one quality and one performance mode – but no ray tracing effects.
Ghostwire: Tokyo is an Unreal Engine 4 based game with basic visual features that don’t change too much between these options, though performance and quality modes on Series X differ in one key respect – ray tracing. The quality modes pack RT reflections and hybrid RT shadows, and they do make a pretty big impact on the visuals. Tokyo in Ghostwire is perpetually rain-slicked, which means a very heavy use of reflections across the environment. The mix of cubemaps and SSR that’s used in the performance mode does a reasonable enough job, but it looks pretty lacklustre when the screen-space information it needs is occluded.
