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A PS4 exclusive until now, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture's PC release is unusual - not least for Sony Santa Monica's hand in publishing and funding the project. However, the shift in platform means developer The Chinese Room can bolster the game's already impressive visuals with even higher-grade visual fidelity. But in pushing CryEngine 3 to greater heights on PC, is this really the best way to play the game, and what do PlayStation 4 users actually miss?Everybody's Gone to the Rapture relies on the same physically-based lighting on PC to achieve a gorgeous, almost photorealistic take on a Shropshire-inspired village. It's among the best uses of this rendering method we've seen to date; materials for frosted glass, brickwork and woodwork across its Tudor-style pub fall eerily close to the genuine article. But to augment the experience, PC adds quality settings for textures, shadows and object detail - which go from low to very high, in some respects enhancing visual aspects over PS4.
Viewed up-close, PS4's geometry, foliage, and core texture-work are identical to PC's best. However Sony's machine falls visibly short in its use of texture filtering across roads, with signs of a trilinear approach causing a blur on the ground. PC uses a higher-grade 16x anisotropic filtering at the very high texture preset, and it's surprising to see filtering on the low preset is still ahead of PS4 in overall clarity. Viewed dead-on, assets actually show little change in switching between each setting, but the grade of filtering is certainly in flux as we move between each.
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