Next-gen sports games get subtle, solid improvements

One of my favorite things to do whenever new consoles come out is see how sports games run on them. It’s not that I necessarily expect them to be all that different on more powerful hardware — quite the opposite, in fact. Since sports games tend to depict enclosed, fixed environments and need to have perfectly smooth performance every year, they’re normally stable and reliable whatever system you play them on.

If you look at FIFA, NBA 2K, and Madden, for example, they already run at native 4K and 60 frames per second on the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X — a pretty rare achievement for most games on those machines. But that means when it comes to the PS5 and the Xbox Series X, 2K and EA have had to figure out new ways to make the next-gen...

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