Sucker Punch described how Ghost of Yōtei presents vast, richly detailed landscapes without sacrificing performance.
The team extended the draw distance, shifted object management to the GPU, and aggressively culls unseen elements before G-buffer processing. Distant mountain ranges are baked into textures, and GPU-driven rendering allows them to double the density of grass and objects: environments that would contain over a million trees and rocks are reduced to roughly 60,000 draw calls.
Procedural object generation and GPU compute pipelines lower CPU overhead. Fields of flowers can bloom in real time, and a weapon “cut buffer” enables blades to slice through grass, flowers, and small plants with accompanying particle effects. In snowy biomes, snow deforms under footsteps, rolls, and combat, while a subtle shimmer completes the visual polish.
The atmosphere has been enhanced compared to the Tsushima engine: clouds are rendered with parallax, and volumetric fog interacts with light beams.
Ghost of Yōtei’s world technology blends baked distant detail, GPU processing, and interactive materials to maintain a consistent framerate.
Ghost of Yōtei is available on PS5 and PS5 Pro.
Source: iXBT.games