To take advantage of higher resolution and extended ray tracing, you'll have to make do with a 30 fps framerate, but fortunately, from what I've been able to see over my 30 hours or so playing the game, it's stable and perfectly playable. To tell you the truth, I actually played in this mode most of the time, and it was a real treat. I'm going to nitpick a little on the rendering of shadows, which I often find to be lacking on consoles, and ACS is no exception at times. As in the other modes, there's also a bit of image instability on the ground. There are also a few traces of aliasing on wooden or bamboo fences, and always a slight shimmering effect on more distant elements or foliage. All in all, though, image quality is very satisfactory and the game really does offer some magnificent, highly detailed environments. Ray tracing is applied here for global illumination, as in the other modes, but there's also some ray traced reflections in action. In puddles, this is very obvious compared to other modes, but for the rest of the liquid surfaces, it all depends on their size and the elements you're looking at. A boat's lantern will retain its reflection in the water when it's out of frame, and trees generally do too, but some elements disappear as soon as they're out of frame. Character reflections use SSR, and generally speaking, it seems that ray tracing is not activated for elements with which you can directly interact. This is obviously a bit of a shame, but this isn't the first game to carefully select what gets a reflection or not.

Technical considerations aside, ACS really is a highly accomplished game graphically speaking. There's necessarily a certain continuity with Valhalla, but the leap forward is, in my opinion, really substantial thanks to RTGI. The Japanese landscapes are more inviting to contemplate than in Valhalla, and they offer a bit more variety than those of Odyssey. The passage of the seasons is a big plus in terms of visual variety, but I sometimes had the impression that they followed one another in a rather random fashion, rather than in a logical, coherent order. This may be due to key passages in the script that forced the passage from one season to another, but apart from the flashback sequences that take place outside the open world, I didn't get to see winter and snow until about twenty hours into the game, and unless I'm mistaken I think I saw the other seasons on several occasions. Maybe I missed something.

Talking about the seasons, I didn't find that they added much in terms of gameplay. In the summer, for example, there's more tall grass to hide in, and in winter, the little puddles in the gardens are frozen over, so you can't hide underwater, but as I didn't get much snow in my experience, I can't say that it bothered me much... One thing I wanted to note about the game's aesthetics when the snow comes is that the whole open world isn't necessarily covered in snow, depending on the regions you're traversing and the altitude you're at. A touch of realism that I found pretty cool, as is the condensation coming from the character's mouth or his horse when it's cold.

Of course, there's also dynamic weather and a day/night cycle, with effects that look great, including the wind, which blows particularly hard, giving the engine the opportunity to display a whole lot of particles: dust, leaves, flower petals - everything is in motion, sometimes a little exaggeratedly, but it result in very lively environments. Another detail that makes the game truly superb is the sky. There have been quite a few games that have disappointed me in this respect on consoles, including Star Wars Outlaws and Avatar recently, but here I have to admit that I was amazed. The clouds don't suffer from the typical display problems seen in other games where they're handled volumetrically, and I found them visually super-realistic, to the point of often lingering over them during my long hours of play. This might just be me, but ACS offers some of the best cloudy atmospheres I've ever seen in the medium, and this contributes to the very positive impression I have of the graphics. The same goes for all the volumetric effects, which add a lot to the scenes and transform the atmosphere in a very nice way.