Shin’en Multimedia’s brilliant game – The Touryst – is now available for PS4 and PS5 consoles and it is now confirmed as the very first native 8K rendered game on the new generation of consoles, running beautifully at 60 frames per second no less. That’s right: according to our discussions with the developer, the game internally renders at 7680×4320 – no temporal super-sampling, no reprojection, no checkerboarding, no AI upscaling. It’s full-on 4320p.
Of course, there’s a problem here in that PlayStation 5 does not support 8K output via HDMI 2.1, despite proudly displaying an 8K logo on the box. In this case, Shin’en is using the extreme resolution for super-sampling anti-aliasing: essentially, every pixel on your 4K screen is downsampled from four pixels for pristine image quality. As for what kind of difference this makes to the overall presentation, Shin’en has you covered there too. You can actually drop back down to native 4K in the options menu – just disable anti-aliasing. Shin’en tells us that when and if the platform holder makes good on the PS5 packaging’s 8K promises (VRR first please, Sony), a simple patch should allow the game to output the 4320p framebuffer directly for a 1:1 pixel match on an 8K display.
However, before we go on any further, it should go without saying that the chances of PS5 and Series X delivering native 8K gaming going forward is unlikely to say the least, and the whole question of whether it is even worth it is up for debate as sell-through of 8K displays hasn’t exactly set the world alight. However, for this game, it’s about scalability and usefulness in application. The Touryst’s voxel-style aesthetic was originally designed to run at native 720p at 60fps on the Nintendo Switch in mobile mode, and it has scaled upwards onto other platforms since its debut.