Viral PS5 motorcycle race looks so real it's giving people anxiety

A snippet of gameplay from a PS5 racing game is dropping jaws around the internet as people grapple with the fact that it is not, in fact, real life.

The footage is taken from Ride 4, which dropped onto new-gen consoles in January a few months after its previous-gen release date, and it's enchanting viewers on Reddit, Twitter, and just about any other platform where people can comment "there's no way that's a game" underneath a video - the original appears to have been posted by the Joy Of Gaming YouTube channel early last week and has since racked up more than 2.6 million views, and this Reddit reupload is knocking on 100,000 upvotes.

While the original is in 4K and 60FPS, the video actually benefits from the internet's endless cycle of saving and reuploading: each resolution change and additional visual artifact smoothes over whatever little inconsistencies might hint toward its virtual origins, until eventually it looks pretty much exactly like the kinds of real-life racing videos that occasionally cross over your feed.

Well, except for the fact that anybody trying to go this hard on a motorcycle in these conditions IRL would probably have a death wish, as Obsidian studio director Josh Sawyer points out.

Meanwhile, Gears of War lead designer Cliff Bleszinski was just busy admiring the view. 

And elsewhere on Reddit, players were discovering more compelling motorcycle racing footage, this time from Road Rash (1991). Listen, realism can take a backseat if it means we get to whip the other racers with chains.

If you wish you had some near-photorealistic racing action on your screen, you should stay tuned to our guide to PS5 restocks.