Empire of the Ants, the upcoming Unreal Engine 5 real-time strategy game based on a French sci-fi book, is part of the PS5 Pro launch lineup, being scheduled to release on the same day (November 7).
In our freshly published interview with developer Tower Five, Game Director Renaud Charpentier shared impressions on Sony’s upcoming mid-generation console refresh. According to Charpentier, due to how games are made nowadays compared to the previous generation, PS5 games could take better advantage of the PS5 Pro hardware compared to PS4 Pro and PS4. Most titles nowadays also include variable resolution, offering even more scaling potential. Empire of the Ants won’t support PlayStation Spectral Resolution because it came too late in the game’s development phase. As for the comparison with PC, Charpentier noted that the two cannot be directly compared since a top-of-the-line PC costs between three and five times, and also consumes a lot more energy.
What do you think of the PS5 Pro hardware? What’s the single feature you were most impressed with?
It is a kind of natural evolution of the PS5 hardware, same paradigms but more processing power on the GPU and “ray tracing” cores. For us, the gain of about 50% more GPU processing power is the most interesting of course, as our game is GPU bound, not CPU bound.
Compared to the jump between PS4 Pro and PS4, would you say the PS5 Pro-PS5 difference is similar or reduced (e.g., the advancement is less pronounced)?
It seems comparable in terms of evolution philosophy. It is the same gen console but with better rendering capacities. Now, it is early and so hard to compare what the PS5 Pro will do for PS5 games to what the PS4 Pro did for PS4 games. But globally, it seems many games will go from 30 to 60 fps on the Pro version, and that’s comparable to what we had on PS4 Pro. It will probably scale better for an engine version: most games today do not rely on frame rate to sync/time their simulations. So they are more capable of rendering faster without altering their behaviors.
On PlayStation 4, you still had fantastic games like Bloodborne, where the game can’t run above 30 because the simulation is linked to the rendering. So if you don’t modify the engine and render at 60 fps, then your game will run twice faster, all the game, so everything will be twice faster for the player. Such frame rate bound simulations were still relatively common in the PS4 era, and they made taking advantage of a GPU upscale much harder. So, possibly, PlayStation 5 games will take better advantage of the PS5 Pro’s capacities. The fact that most games nowadays use a form of variable resolution also helps with scaling up the quality with the GPU.
How much of an improvement is there between the PS5 and PS5 Pro versions of the game? Also, how does the PS5 Pro version stack with the maxed-out PC game?
As said and as presented by Sony, it is expected that most games will double their frame rate on the Pro or improve scene quality if they were already running in 60 on a PS5. Still, maxed out PCs are kind of “no limit” so they will of course be more powerful, but you can’t compare them. A maxed out PC is going to cost easily 3 to 5 times more and consume 3 to 5 times more electrical energy. But what is interesting and says a lot about the flattening silicon evolution curve is that your game on your monster PC is not going to look or play 3 to 5 times better than on a PS5 Pro console. There is a huge diminishing return now on high end silicon, and that might have an impact on the life cycle duration of console hardware.
Will there be different modes for the PlayStation 5 Pro version of Empire of the Ants?
No, there is a single 60 FPS mode, so double the frame rate of the PlayStation 5 version.
Are you using PSSR in Empire of the Ants?
We don’t. It came very late in our development cycle for this game, so we stuck to the
Unreal equivalent.
For more on the PS5 Pro, check out our info roundup article.
