Does God of War: Ragnarök have too many graphics modes?

^ Stay tuned for Jim’s explanation of Ragnarök’s screen settings and how much they matter.

It’s a fair question. Last week, Santa Monica Studio published an infographic detailing all nine possible graphics modes for the long-awaited God of War: Ragnarök. This seemed overkill to some people, especially since (the argument goes) this is a console game, so surely this whole visual optimization thing should be left to the developers. Shouldn’t it ultimately be up to to them to decide what is the best way to run your game on standardized hardware?

Well, there’s merit to that argument, I guess. But this infographic, despite looking like a spreadsheet at first, is just a basic piece of consumer information that tells you what to expect from the product in terms of compatibility with your setup. There isn’t a single use case where all of these “nine modes” come into play (unless you work for digital foundry, our sister site, and it’s literally your job to compare them). In fact, if you have a basic PS4, which the vast majority of the PlayStation user base still uses, you don’t have to worry about any of this. Your options are start or stop. The game is a PS4 title at heart, so you won’t get a poor or clipped experience – fear not, this isn’t another Cyberpunk 2077 situation. It’ll just work, and you’ll have a great time.

On PS4 Pro and PS5, you can choose between performance and quality modes that, if you have either of those machines, you should be more than used to by now. On PS5, there are modifiers to how they behave depending on the capabilities of your screen and how your PS5 is configured at a system level. Bottom line, if you have a VRR and/or a 120Hz panel, the performance and quality modes can take advantage of that.

Of particular interest to me, as it goes, is the Quality + HFR + VRR setup: Spider-Man has a similar mode and it’s excellent. You wouldn’t think a 40fps cap is much better than a 30fps cap, but it feels like a huge jump in performance. It’s not quite as snappy for frameheads who think 60fps is an acceptable minimum at best, but for my own purposes it’s a good trade-off to get lovely shake-free movement without compromising the quality of the shot at all. image.

But that’s for sure. If you don’t care about any of this, you absolutely don’t have to. Just press start and you’re good to go! You are guaranteed a good time. It’s nice that Santa Monica Studio suits those of us who have the equipment and the annoying habit of being picky about these things, to have a preference either way.

Choice! The choice is good!