God of War Ragnarök - PS5 vs PS4 vs PS4 Pro - The Complete Cross-Gen Comparison

With the arrival of the new God of War in stores, we can finally reveal our full cross-gen comparison for Santa Monica Studios' brilliant game. Oliver Mackenzie and John Linneman - with a little help via pointers from the game developer itself - showcase how smoothly Ragnarök scales across the generations, ensuring everyone gets an excellent experience appropriate to the performance level of their console.

[hj-hvrt]

The fact that this game looks and runs as well as it does on a console that came out in 2013 is absurd

[baguete]

No matter how powerful your console is, art direction is key to provide impressive graphics above fidelity or photo realism, and Santa Monica Studios are simply masters on what they do, above all else a polished experience with near perfect performance across the board, something really rare nowadays.

[notyourmama]

All Developers should be required to take a “how to optimize” class from these guys

[IMZ]

SM studios don't miss or cut corners. You can see the time and effort the devs pulled off. The VA is killing it along with the scoring team. The love is real for Ragnarok.

[daking]

Santa Monica and Insomniac are so impressive with optimizing their games. I loved Rift Apart and this game looks to be amazing as well

[squidgyrock]

Absolutely stunning send-off for PS4. No idea how they got this much out of that console

[Yahkahvich]

Just like God of War 2 back in 2007, GoW: Ragnarok is sending out the PS4 with a beautiful swan song.

[K-Lowe]

This game was built for the ps4... it is actually incredible that it runs at 1080p 30fps and looks THAT good

[LARSTAKA-]

I really like this type of videos. I actually saw differences on both. Bothe look amazing but it is cool that they add extra things where they can

[ThaddeusColeman]

I like this more conversational style of video you guys did for this one. I'll be up for seeing more of this style!

[BrianM]

It's a pretty awesome experience, so far.

[gustavocustodio]

What a great video! Thanks Digital Foundry

[thesoulfulwanderer]

Artistic skill and love of the craft have trumped the latest in graphics. It looks incredible, the story is amazing. 10/10 worth the wait. Sony has a gem of a studio.

[chad]

Appreciate that Santa Monica understand that not everyone can get their hands on a PS5

[nightowl]

I had the same reaction to TLoU 2, like this game, that game had no right looking as good as it did on a base PS4.

[dylanr]

Professionally crafted, looking forward to jumping in after work today. Looks damn good on all the consoles and I'm totally happy with the results on the Pro since that's what I'll be playing on.

[GodofWarChuka]

They look the same on PS4 Pro and PS5. But I’m picking up the PS5 version today! Thanks for Not posting Spoilers yet! 👍

[dr.loomis]

I remember playing Uncharted 4 on PS4 Pro back in 2016 and thinking "I'd be happy if games looked like this and ran at 60 FPS on new consoles." Here I am with a PS5 and Series X and that is more or less what has happened, and I'm not complaining. Games like GOW Ragnarok and Horizon Forbidden West still blow me away visually while running incredibly well. Unfortunately when games go full current gen, I think we'll see a return to a 30 FPS target.

[beardalaxy]

Really great news! I was hoping that this is the approach they took, considering there are way more PS4s out there than PS5s at the moment and this was a heavily anticipated game. I'm not personally into the game, but it's good knowing my roommate who only has a PS4 will have a good time with it :)
That motion blur implementation is actually incredible, that might be the smoothest 30 FPS I've ever seen.

[wile]

The snow in this game is the sexiest snow I've ever seen in any videogame