I am not gonna lie. I have been VERY disappointed by most of these PS5 ports. Death Stranding is an exception, not the norm. Not every game is doing this 8x boost to the pixel budget taking PS4 games from 1080p 30 fps to native 4k 60 fps while offering higher quality PC settings. We just had Uncharted 4 get released and ND basically increased the resolution by 75% and the framerate by 100% and called it a day. Thats not even a 4x increase to the pixel budget. The PS5 should be able to do much more in that game, and unless they butcher the PC version like they did GOW, we should soon find out.
Guardians of the Galaxy runs just fine on PCs at 60 fps. You dont have to go all the way down to 1080p to get 60 fps even that is variable on consoles. On PCs, I have more control and can do far more with my 2080. Horizon not being able to do 60 fps without heavily downgrading the resolution is bizarre and I am a 100% sure my PC should easily be able to run it at native 1440p 60 fps whenever it comes out. Same with Ghost of Tsushima.
Typically I'd agree with you on the benefits of a closed system, but we have rarely seen it this gen. I believe Doom, AC Valhalla, Spiderman, Death Stranding and a couple other dynamic resolution games are the only games that have truly been able to extract every ounce of power from the PS5 and XSX. Those devs settling for fixed resolutions and capped framerates have shortchanged us.
You're right but i think you answered your own question. The vast majority of the 3rd party PS5 "ports" are last gen engines not at all optimized for next gen hardware. The reason why Death Stranding is different is because it is a game and an engine that was designed first and foremost for
console then later ported to the PC. The devs then spent some time to optimize the engine a bit for PS5 before porting it over to that platform from the PS4 code. Getting Decima to run well on PC is not trivial and Guerilla had been doing work on optimizing for PS5 for a while now.
Again, when a developer can take time to optimize code for the console hardware, amazing things can happen. This is especially true for AMD aligned titles that will generally run better on RDNA class HW when compared to NV GPUs (i.e ACV, Godfall, Ghostwire Tokyo etc). Ghostwire is another great recent example of a game that runs at dynamic 4K (~1800p native) and 30fps on PS5 with RT enabled but a 3070 can't run 4K/30fps w/RT consistently and a 3060Ti can't run at 1440p/30fps with RT enabled. Being a Sony aligned game that's PS5 exclusive for a year, they spent considerable time learning some of the ins and outs of the console and achieved far better results than other 3rd party games like Control and Guardians of the Galaxy (especially with regards to RT perf).
We just had Uncharted 4 get released and ND basically increased the resolution by 75% and the framerate by 100% and called it a day. Thats not even a 4x increase to the pixel budget. The PS5 should be able to do much more in that game, and unless they butcher the PC version like they did GOW, we should soon find out.
Also, I've said this before on these forums, but folks clearly had unrealistic expectations for Uncharted 4 (and similar PS4 ports) on PS5. Keep in mind that the game runs at 1080p/30fps on PS4 (and 1440p/30 on PS4 Pro). Without making any other changes, getting that game to run at native 4K/60fps would require roughly 8x the power. Well the PS5 is only ~7x the PS4 GPU at best and ~5x the CPU. It's not enough raw horsepower to get a PS4 game running at 1080p/30 up to 4K/60. Sure they could do things with DRS and temporal upscaling to get there but the naughty dog engine does not have DRS built in currently (which is why EVERY release since UC4 has run at a constant resolution on PS4/PS4 pro) and it would have required tweaking the engine to a point that probably wasn't worth it for the remaster. I assume we'll see much of these features added to their full PS5 "next gen" engine in the future, but don't expect miracles on the existing engine given the hardware they're working with.