Hands On: The Crew Motorfest has Never Looked Better Thanks to the PS5 Pro

We’re big fans of The Crew Motorfest here, so we were pleased to see a PS5 Pro Enhanced version announced alongside Sony’s new console. With the Pro finally here, we took to the well worn roads of Hawaii to see if the upgrade was up to much.

Ubisoft’s racer was already a looker on the base PS5, but it asked the question of this generation: frame rate or resolution? The Crew Motorfest has an option for Fidelity at 4K and 30fps and Performance at 1080p and 60fps on the base PS5. The former is a bit stuttery for a racer, and the latter loses the polish that makes Motorfest’s world and cars come alive.

In steps the PS5 Pro patch which really does exactly what was intended: get rid of the need to choose. Using PSSR to upscale to 4K, The Crew Motorfest now retains those glossy features, with a smooth 60fps, with this new Pro mode entirely replacing the original two. In addition it actually improves load distances and shadow details, so you can really take in those Hawaiian landscapes.

On paper this is the best way to play The Crew Motorfest, but does any of that actually matter when you are ripping through cities and countryside at 150 miles-per-hour? We actually found the upgrade to be quite noticeable, with the muddy 1080p being a bugbear of ours whenever we booted up the game pre-PS5 Pro.

The mixture of high fidelity with vibrant colours (especially on an OLED display) is utterly stunning and the inclusion of light reflections on the car (not ray tracing, mind) really do scratch that shiny car itch. Of course, rounding all of that off with a buttery high frame rate make Motorfest’s playlists great to sink a wee half-hour into.

Our only caveat though is that if you are sitting any more than a few feet away from your screen or monitor, or you are maybe rocking a mid-range TV, most of these upgrades will pass you by. The vibrant colour palette and speed of Motorfest do a lot of the heavy lifting visually, so it’s easy not to sweat the small stuff.

That being said, as frequenters of The Crew Motorfest and with us situated in the optimum pixel peeping position, we came away fairly chuffed with the upgrade on display here. It’s not quite the night-and-day difference many will be looking for, but for those bothered by the lacklustre 1080p on base PS5, this is a welcome improvement. It’s a “does what it says on the tin” kind of upgrade here, exactly as intended for the PS5 Pro, bringing the high fidelity and faster performance modes together for a prettier and slicker experience.

Will you be checking out The Crew Motorfest on the PS5 Pro? Do you think this is a worthy Pro upgrade? Drift on down to the comments to let us know.