The winter atmosphere is really great in that pic. Guerrilla did a good job capturing a variety of winter conditions. Plus the Tallnecks are quite photogenic.

I respectfully have to disagree with the bolded. I played these games back to back (H:ZD immediately followed by GoW), 100%ing both of them on the same PS4 Pro on the same TV. While GoW definitely has better looking/more detailed character models/animations, it seems to have much lower resolution reflections/lighting/special effects. As I'm playing it, I can see the dithering (or whatever it's called on modern machines) in all of the energy blasts, fire, reflections on the water, etc. All energy and particle effects appeared much smoother in H:ZD to my eyes. Also, the LOD/draw distance was more impressive in H:ZD. GoW seems much quicker to sub in 2D assets, relying on flatter skyboxes more readily, as opposed to H:ZD's willingness to render things in 3D much further out. At least that's how it all looked to me.

I'm surprised by this. I actually think the snow is just okay in the main game but exceptional in the DLC. The reason being that I can't think of a game I've played with as precise collision detection in the snow. The Uncharteds and God of War (PS4), etc. all have wider girths when a character's polygons displace snow. H:ZD's DLC seems to really tighten up that collision detection so that the displacement is much closer to what the visible dimensions of Aloy et al.'s character models etc. are.

I wonder if the rendering resolution when you're supersampling is more consistent than the checkerboard 4k solution (no idea on this to be honest). If so, maybe you're picking up on that consistency? Or maybe it's the higher resolution on a smaller screen that makes everything appear even sharper? I played it supersampled on my 40" 1080p and personally found it to be much more impressive on the 65" 4K HDR. Of course, I'm a bit partial to HDR...

I can't speak for Ghosts of Tsushima, but I have seen H:ZD's pop in on friends' systems. I never really experienced this, however. I'm guessing the determining factor was that they were running HDDs, and I am running an SSD in my PS4 Pro (Samsung Evo 860, I think)? It definitely seemed to reduce load times significantly.

It's been on my Steam wishlist since they announced it. I'll buy it as soon as they fix it and make the horrible port a passable port. Probably in October or something.

Apologies for the late follow-up: my schedule can be like that.

I'm curious as to why you think GoW, if you recall after two years, is a more technically sound game (<= this is not meant to sound challenging or skeptical...just in case the text reads that way). Are there processes running "under the hood" or things present in frame that I'm possibly (read: probably) simply missing (similar to someone only seeing one perspective of this)? To my eyes, H:ZD looks better in most arenas, but I know that some amount of graphical appeal is naturally going to be subjective (e.g. the way some people prioritize fps over resolution and vice-versa). So, I'd definitely love to know more about the technical achievement side of things.

TLDR: I've been visiting the forums long enough to know that you seem to know far more about graphical techniques/coding/etc. than I do, so I'm always interested in learning more!