In the PlayStation 5 Nioh collection, Tecmo Koei brings the two PS4 epics together in a single package complete with all downloadable expansions, offering a large amount of content. In addition, the publisher also promises improvements to existing PS4 / PS4 Pro releases, with both titles delivering supposedly native 4K modes, as well as support for 120Hz games. In addition, there is a new ‘PlayStation 5 standard mode’ – effectively a quality mode that targets the capabilities of the new hardware for a significantly updated experience. So, how does it all work out and what kind of improvement are we looking at compared to the existing PS4 Pro version – which offers 4K, own high frame-rate support? It’s an interesting question to answer because, fundamentally, the older versions of Nioh on PS4 Pro offered a great degree of flexibility with its own performance and quality modes and as they leaned heavily towards unlocked frame rates and dynamic resolution scale, you can now get an updated experience from existing games simply by running them with backward compatibility on the new Sony platform.
However, they are remastering and, although the updates are hardly nighttime and daytime improvements, they are substantial. For starters, Tecmo Koei eliminated the somewhat dubious rendering of the PS4 Pro chessboard (which had problems including obvious aliasing and double-width transparency effects), opting for native resolution rendering on PlayStation 5. Don’t get us wrong here – chess may look impressive, but Nioh’s implementation was not particularly good, so the switch to native rendering offers an increase in image quality that you won’t get from back-compat. Second, at least in Nioh 1, 4K mode offers just that, with only a suggestion of dynamic resolution scaling, while the standard PS5 mode increases settings, but expands the DRS window, which means 1800p and resolutions potentially still lower rates may be possible.
And then there’s the 120 Hz mode: the resolution drops, but the improvement in input delay and visual response is really impressive – for Nioh 1, it’s my favorite way to play, especially since the level of detail (in addition to the count of pixels) looks comparable to other modes. I would dig into the video for a more detailed analysis of how the various rendering variations compare in terms of a specific example, but think of it as a more refined and full-featured version of a truly excellent PS4 game and you’ll understand how I rate it so good.
John Linneman and Alex Battaglia delve deeper into The Nioh Collection for PlayStation 5 – what does the game look like, and what game modes are best for each title?
Nioh 2 is a more challenging game in terms of rendering demands – perhaps not surprising, keeping in mind that it was only released in March 2020 – so although the same three modes are deployed (and native resolution rendering is maintained) , the results are not exactly that pure. 4K mode isn’t really working at ultra HD resolutions, but it comes close, ranging from 1944p to full 2160p for most of the life, while the DRS range expands much more in Standard PS5 mode, but benefits from enhanced shadows and drawing distances . The 120Hz mode is not as successful as the Nioh 1 – the loss of detail is significant and the quality of the shadows is poor.
Performance is important for the Nioh series, and this is quite easy to cover – Nioh 1 is mainly locked to 60 fps in standard 4K and PS5 mode, while the 120 Hz output is similarly stubborn in its consistency, spending the vast majority of its duration delivering a total of 120 frames per second. It’s a big improvement over PlayStation 4 and it’s a joy to play. The most demanding Nioh 2 is not so successful – 4K and PS5 Standard modes are mostly good, blocking target frame rates, but not as consistently as in the first game. The 120 Hz mode is also less consistent, often dropping to 90-100 fps in more open areas.
This is where the lack of VRR support on the PS5 platform is disappointing: a frame lost in 120Hz mode is an 8.3 ms failure, and when many of them occur in a short period of time, the failure is noticeable. But at the same time, the persistence per frame between 90fps and 120fps is less than 3ms – and with VRR, the variations in frame time would be much, much more difficult to be captured by the human eye. I really hope to see a good platform-level VRR implementation added to the PS5 – the technology is extremely impressive and has already been proven on Xbox series consoles.
Returning specifically to the Nioh collection, the loading times – or lack thereof – are exceptionally impressive, to the point that the two titles load so quickly that it’s almost like a cartridge experience. It is a night and day improvement over the next generation consoles, and even a significant improvement over the next generation code running under back-compat on PS5. It is a further refinement on what is already a much improved game that I strongly recommend checking out. And one more thing for fans of the physical disc: the Nioh collection has full Blu-ray content, with one disc per game and no additional downloads needed to get the full experience. Nice.