"We know we're confident we can ship this now. This is going to be a 60 frames per second game with ray tracing, as the PS5 should have." That's Insomniac Games head of Technology Mike Fitzgerald, and those words carry more weight than they might seem at first glance.
Marvel's Wolverine will run at 60 FPS with ray tracing enabled in its default Performance Mode on the base PS5. Not the PS5 Pro. Not a high-end PC. The standard console sitting in most living rooms. And for Insomniac, that's a genuine first.
A different approach from day one
Here's the thing: Insomniac has shipped 60 FPS Performance Modes before. Spider-Man, Ratchet and Clank, Spider-Man 2, all of them gave you the option to trade visual fidelity for frame rate. But ray tracing in that mode? That's historically been the last-minute bonus, the "this is pretty good" addition that made it in right before launch.
Fitzgerald described exactly that pattern in his own words, saying the team would always end up with a Performance Mode with ray tracing late in development and think it looked pretty good. This time they flipped the script. The team committed to 60 FPS with ray tracing from the start and built the entire game around hitting that target. It's now the default mode, not an optional toggle buried in the settings.
That distinction matters. Building toward a performance target from the ground up produces a different result than retrofitting one near ship date. Every asset, every lighting pass, every environment is designed with that 60 FPS ray-traced baseline in mind.
Why Logan's world needed to feel destructible
Fitzgerald also spoke to something that ties directly into the performance conversation: destruction. Wolverine is not a character who leaves a room the way he found it, and the team wanted the environments to reflect that.
"Logan's a really destructive character," Fitzgerald said. "The aftermath after you fight a big battle, we wanted to make sure you didn't feel like you were defeating a bunch of The Hand and then walking out of this pristine market that you happened to be in."
That's the kind of detail that separates a game built around its character from one that just puts a famous face on a generic action template. Persistent environmental damage requires real technical investment, and the fact that Insomniac is talking about it alongside performance targets suggests both systems are being treated as core to the experience, not afterthoughts.
What this means for players picking up the base PS5 version
PS5 Pro owners will likely see additional headroom, but the fact that the base console gets 60 FPS with ray tracing as the out-of-the-box default is the headline. You won't need to dig into settings to get the best-feeling version of the game. It's just how Wolverine runs.
Ray tracing at 60 FPS on base hardware is a meaningful technical achievement, particularly for a game that appears to be leaning hard into dense, destructible environments. Markets getting torn apart, enemies scattered through tight spaces, lighting reacting to all of it in real time. Pulling that off without dropping to 30 FPS in the default mode is exactly the kind of thing players notice even if they never check a spec sheet.
With the release window getting closer, the Marvel's Wolverine guides collection is already building out for everything you'll want to know before and after launch.
