News - Call Of Duty: Warzone 2. 0 - Ps5 Vs Xbox Series X/s - The Df Tech Review
For many, the release of Warzone 2 is the big event following on from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's campaign and multiplayer in a full-priced game package. Warzone 2 is now available to everybody as a free-to-play mode. Battle passes and microtransactions are the path for free-to-play games, of course, and this is no exception, but fundamentally.
Warzone 2 is playable without really having to spend a penny, and personally, that's exactly how it is. For the last week. Visually, 60 fps is a lot to preach, and going a step further, is 120 fps viable for Warzone 2 as well? Let's find out. As for the battle royale mode, easily the most exciting part of jumping from the old Warzone is its new giant-scaled map named Al Masra, which is colossal in size.
It's a joint effort between multiple studios within Activision, and as a result, it ranks highly. As the biggest Battlefield in the series' history, we've already caught tiny, bite-sized portions of it in Modern Warfare 2's Team Deathmatch mode, with maps like Albagra Fortress and Tarak, and even classic maps from the original 2007.
Modern Warfare and its 2009 sequel, Modern Warfare 2, make cameos like the Showdown terminal and more. As a longtime Call of Duty fan by this point, just seeing how the complete map slots together is quite a sight, always full of new surprises and nods to the series' past. I've barely scratched the surface of what's here, but also worth noting is that the goal wasn't to add several new mechanics, some more substantial than others, but cheap among them is aquatic combat boats.
Shootouts in the water have all been shown off in the campaign, and they're part of the gameplay dance here too. So to the comparisons now to cover a mode like Warzone 2 in a DF style: Tech analysis is an unusual challenge. I mean, how do you compare a game with so much variability and so much scale, with no scripted set pieces?
matching footage between PS5 series X and S down to the frame, the answer turns out to be in the game's spectator mode and making the most of Warzone 2's cross-play support, so here I set up a squad with the entire DF team to article capture the game simultaneously, on different consoles. Rich is on Series S here.
John is on PS5, and here I am on Series X, and after a few or even all of us perish in the gulag, we then watch the same player to get a matching world view. So to repeat, it's the same gameplay except running on different spec machines, all of which have different resolution targets, graphic settings, and a different resulting frame rate at 60 fps or 120 fps, but the result is honestly fascinating to see when all three are pitted together.
Speaking of the setup here. I'm using Warzone 2's default graphic settings on the console; at least mostly, the field of view setting is kept at the default 80, and we keep depth of field engaged as well. To make the visual differences easier to spot, I've switched the world and weapon motion blur off on PS5 Series X and S Plus, and film grain is set to zero for a similar reason.
Clarity is boosted, plus it generally helps with article compression, so a double win there. This gives us a clear, crisp view of our one matching sequence, and to be blunt. PS5 answers X are broadly identical as you'd expect; all settings are very much a match on the premium Flagship machines in terms of resolution, shadow textures, and crucially, foliage density.
The series' version, though, is where the downgrades become more apparent and also where we see Warzone 2's biggest divergence from the core Modern Warfare 2 campaign. So what exactly are the changes to the IW engine here compared to the regular Modern Warfare 2 game specifically? It's in the engine's handling of resolutions as ever; there's a dynamic resolution in place on all three systems, backed up by temporal up sampling to construct a higher resolution image in the case of PS5 and Series X that reconstructed images in 4K while Series S aims for 1440p except the true native resolution beneath the tau is often different in Warzone.
In the main game, for example. Series S scales from 2560 by 1440 down to 1280 by 1440 by halving the pixel count on the horizontal axis only, and that works brilliantly for halting 60 fps, but in Warzone 2, more drastic measures are in place to adjust GPU load on Series S to account for, say, the huge map size and 150 players going into action where anything becomes possible, in Warzone the resolution now dynamically adjusts on both axes, taking us down to 1280x720.
At the absolute lowest to be clear, 720p represents the worst-case pixel counts, and really any number between that and 1440p is possible, but yes, if we freeze the first rendered frame as Series S cuts to the gulag or look to the screen's edges in taxing scenes, we see this raw base image before any reconstruction takes place.
For the most part, the reconstruction using the TAA method here does wonders for Series S's image regardless of the base pixel counts; the result looks seriously clean and makes long views over Almasra's terrain easier to decipher. Now, as for PS5 and Series X, this again shows a difference from the core Modern Warfare 2 game.
PS5 and Series X now scale on both axes to the lowest native resolution of 1920x1080, again reconstructed by TAA to 4K for perspective. The lowest number in regular Team Deathmatch games was 1920x2160, where the scaling was just on the horizontal axis, but yes, given so much is possible on screen in Warzone 2, it does suggest a new lower bound for the pixel count is in place, so the end result isn't a true 4K.
Certainly not all the time we get numbers between 1080P and 4K, but the perceived effect on a 4K screen is still pretty decent. If you look into the visual settings, PS5 and SiriusX are identical. Series S has some paybacks, just focusing on 2ZS and X in comparison. For one, shadows are dropped on Series S visibly on this plant on the door here, and looking to long grassy hillsides, the density of grass is dropped a level on Series S as well.
All other settings in well-cooled detail at range are identical for competitive reasons and equally for texture quality; those are all identical across Almatra too. A lot of this will come as no surprise, but there is an argument here that less busy, less abundant grass and scenery might be an advantage for Series S players.
I mean, think of it this way: With less grass, there's less to obstruct your line of sight as you approach the crest of a hill. You might just get the jump on a prone enemy faster as a result, but in reality, this is such a marginal case. In a nutshell, the resolution, grass, and shadows are the three big cutbacks to expect until it's mostly superficial stuff not related to the core mechanics or the key geometry of the world.
