New Resident Evil 3 Remake patch boosts Xbox One X performance
A story with a happy ending? You bet! When we first took a look at Resident Evil 3 Remake’s playable, we were impressed by another storming technological showcase for Capcom’s excellent RE Engine – but there was a show-stopping problem: the Xbox One X rendition of the game significantly under-performed against PlayStation 4 Pro. Indeed, in certain scenes, frame-rate could even drop beneath Xbox One S’s output. The good news is that the game has been patched, delivering a huge increase to performance.
To understand the situation more clearly, we need to look back at the brilliant Resident Evil 2 Remake and its presentation on the enhanced machines. Both PS4 Pro and Xbox One X delivered a final rendered output of 2880×1620, upscaled to 4K. This presentation was in itself reconstructed using a checkerboard-like effect – a process where the Microsoft machine enjoyed a quality advantage over its Sony equivalent. In moving to Resident Evil 3 Remake, PS4 Pro seemingly remains where it is, with Xbox One X pushed to reconstructed 2160p output instead. In doing so, a massive chunk of performance was lost – something that was immediately apparent to the Resident Evil fanbase running on Microsoft’s machine.
“Capcom is definitely aware of the fan feeling with regards to Xbox performance, so they [the developers] may look into providing a solution some time after launch,” we were told at the time via a statement which essentially offered no time frame or even a firm commitment to fixing the game, but the good news is that the solution is now here – and it’s a relatively straightforward fix. Based on pixel counts, it seems that the developer has matched RE2 Remake by running the game at 2880×1620 rather than 3840×2160. That’s just 55 per cent of the pixel count overall (75 per cent of native resolution on each axis) but the impact to image quality isn’t especially noticeable during gameplay – but the boost to frame-rate definitely is.
A game that mostly ran in a kind of 40-45fps No Man’s Land spends much more of its time at the target 60 frames per second, delivering performance results that are very similar indeed overall to the excellent PlayStation 4 Pro version of the game. Gameplay mostly plays out at the target frame-rate, with only major explosions and other bandwidth-heavy effects causing drops to consistency, usually with just fleeting drops into the 50s. During cutscenes, Capcom is less beholden to its rendering budgets, allowing performance to fluctuate more noticeably – the price you’ll pay for those extremely detailed character models and often stunning set-pieces. However, as these aspects of the game are not interactive, they have no real bearing on how it actually plays.
