Sucker Punch revealed how Ghost of Yōtei showcases large-scale and detailed landscapes without performance drops.
The developers increased the viewing distance, transferred object management to the GPU, and aggressively remove invisible elements before G-buffer processing. Distant mountains are "baked" into textures, and GPU rendering allows doubling the amount of grass and objects: scenes with over a million trees and stones are reduced to about 60,000 draws.
Procedural object creation and GPU calculation chains are used, which reduces the load on the CPU. Fields of flowers appear in real time, and a "cut buffer" for weapons allows cutting through grass, flowers, and small plants with particle effects. In snowy biomes, snow deforms under footsteps, rolling, and combat, and a slight shimmering effect completes the scene.
The atmosphere has been improved compared to the Tsushima engine: clouds are rendered with parallax, and volumetric fog reflects rays of light.
Ghost of Yotei's world technology combines "baked" distant details, GPU processing, and interactive materials, which allows maintaining a stable fps.
Ghost of Yotei is available on PS5 and PS5 Pro.
