Posted Thu Apr 2, 2015 at 08:49 AM PDT by Justin Clark
Digital Foundry tests reveal Xbox performance problems.
Digital Foundry has posted a performance analysis of 'Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin' on current gen consoles, set to release next week (The PC version is available now on Steam). Both versions appear to be a marked improvement over the visually lackluster 360/PS3 ports, but while DF has found that the PS4 port runs at a fairly consistent 60 fps, with sporadic drops in the 50s, the Xbox One port takes a noticeable, dangerous hit, hovering around 50fps, occasionally tanking into the 40s.
The article gives a particularly egregious example, during one of the earliest boss fights: "The Last Giant boss gives us our lowest drop, a record tumble to 36fps cued by a batch of floating souls. The PS4 goes entirely unruffled by the effect here, and it's fair to say the smoother controller response makes it easier to tackle a lingering knight after this boss battle's finished."
While plenty of titles have been able to deal with such a drop, Bandai Namco's re-release touts the ability to handle more characters--NPCs and enemies--on screen at once as a selling point, and as the Digital Foundry article correctly points out, 'Dark Souls II' is a game where precision timing is of the utmost importance. The unexpected frame drop could cost players at the worst possible moments. A patch has already been released for Xbox that seems to be a bugfix and nothing else. We'll see if a patch is coming for this after the game releases.
Source: Digital Foundry
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