Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales has been available on PlayStation 4 and 5 since 2020, but it was only recently released for PC. Two years is a decent amount of time to make some updates and utilize newer tech, so the team at Digital Foundry decided to take a look at these updates.
First, it’s worth mentioning that Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales has about the same performance level as Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, running with Ryzen 5 3600/RTX 2070 Super with 1440P optimized settings. It may even run just slightly better because the game is set in the winter rather than autumn. The lack of leaves on trees may allow things to run a little better.
While almost all of the settings for the two games are basically the same, there are a few optimized settings for both Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Marvel’s Spider-Man that need to be revised. The first setting is weather particle quality, which controls the density of particles like snow. So with “very high weather particles” there are a lot of snowflakes in the air, and with “low weather particles” there are fewer. Then the settings for both crowd and traffic density could also be adjusted. Adjusting these settings help you get the smoothest gameplay on your computer.
The new ray-traced shadows upgrade is only in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and it basically adds more shadows from the sun and moon to multiple objects. Objects like pipes and even blades of grass have shadows, which adds more detail and depth to the image. The upgrade also adds an incredible detail of adjusting shadow sharpness based on how near or far the object is. On PlayStation 5, all shadows are sharp with crisp edges, even when the object is in the distance. This is unrealistic. But the ray-traced shadows upgrade will show distance better by having shadows soften as the distance increases. The example below shows how the building shadow from hundreds of feet away is way too crisp in the PlayStation 5 version.
Of course, it isn’t a perfect game. There are some small details that lose their intense detail levels in the PC version still, but overall, the game looks amazing. It has a high cost on the CPU, so you will obviously have to play around with your own settings. But once you hit the best settings for you, the game runs smoothly and looks great. Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.
