Digital Foundry checks technical performance of Metal Gear Survive
Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry has published a video detailing the technical performance of Metal Gear Survive’s beta on each platform (PS4, PS4 Pro, Xbox One and Xbox One X). They conclude that a lot seems to have improved since what they saw in the preview event, and right now the most optimized version is the PlayStation 4 Pro version, with a smooth 60 frames per second and an increased resolution. Microsoft’s new console boasts the highest resolution but doesn’t quite hit the smooth frame-rate of the PS4 Pro, something Digital Foundry expects may still improve before the game’s release. Also, on Xbox One X there seem to be problems with net code resulting in long load times and disconnected players, something that is not an issue in the other versions.
Here is their analysis of the single player preview, when the game was still in an earlier state.
In conclusion, the game does not quite reach the technical standards set by Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, at least not at this point in time. But we are still a few weeks from release and it remains to be seen how the final versions will end up.
Source: Eurogamer
Uh… none of the versions run anywhere close to 4K. PS4 Pro runs at 2134×1440, and Xbox One X runs at 2560×1440. 4K would be 3840×2160.
In any event, the performance is really disappointing, especially on Xbox One X. I don’t know how much optimization can be done at this late in development, but at the very least I hope the game gets plenty of patching to make sure X owners get a good experience. The X should be able to push much higher resolutions and performance than this.
Corrected.
Meaning that 3 year old MGSV TPP was a technicaly superior game? How is this even possible? I thought that by now we would see the world of MGSV look and run even better… Even with the PS1 fog in Survive covering everything up, it still isn’t up to par with TPP? Ridiculous…
Of course it is, why would anyone think otherwise? When Kojima left, key developers left with him. These same people worked wonders on the game engine Decima evident by Guerrilla Games being amazed. Of course, it could have all been PR, but then we got a look for ourselves. We were all astounded with Death Stranding’s reveal. I think it’s quite clear the ones who left to Kojima Productions were perhaps the best (or most of them anyway) when TPP was being developed. Survive was left with whatever stood with Konami. I think it’s quiet clear this spin-off (a spin-off, mind you) wasn’t going to (I don’t think it was ever even meant to) be better than Kojima’s most ambitious game at the time…
I can’t remember if it was an old interview or an article where Kojima said throughout the years he wanted to take a step back from the production from the game they were developing at the time and let his staff take over most of the responsibilities he had so he could focus on creating new ideas, but he was not impressed with the direction they were taking the development and felt obligated to step in and make the game up to his standards. I can’t remember where that is from, but I’m sure I read it somewhere, and I think it’s beginning to show “who” in his staff took the franchise in a direction Kojima didn’t envision for it. I believe those people who wanted to do something different from Kojima are the ones who stayed at Konami. So Survive is what happens when they deviate from Kojima’s vision of Metal Gear.
Keep in mind that MGSV was also released on last-gen systems, so they had to make sure that whatever they did would run on those old platforms as well as the PS4 and Xbox One. This put a limit on the amount of CPU resources they could use at any given time. The result was that, while the last-gen versions ended up kinda unplayable due to what I assume was a lack of real interest on KojiPro’s part, the current-gen versions were buttery smooth. Now that they no longer have to target last-gen consoles, Konami has decided to make Survive more demanding. There’s a lot more enemies, networking with other players, keeping track of various stats, etc. They figured they could make better use of current-gen hardware, but they overshot it. If they implemented a 30fps cap, it would be kinda acceptable compared to other recent open-world games, but coming off the outstanding results of MGSV, it’s incredibly disappointing.
CPU resources were not really the main problem but rather the architecture and most of all, the RAM.
For PS3, 256 Mb of main memory and 256 Mb of VRAM for the RSX made it tedious to manage and dispatch processing between the PPU, the SPUs and the GPU.
They had to even load & run AI intended code on the GPU side, so the processing power was there, but it was very difficult to properely synchronize the jobs and balance storage across units.
APU’s UMA must feel like heaven for them if compared with the efforts needed on the PS3.
Besides, PPC is big endian, so it must be a real nightmare to maintain targeting both little and big endian systems..
I think it has to do with the fact that Konami developers that were left developing this game had not the greatest transition from PS4/Xbox One to PS4 PRO and Xbox One X. Not to mention that the game with it’s lighting and textures look worse than MGSV:TPP.
Most of the technical staff that developed Fox Engine left the company for the new Kojima Productions. New technical team came (maybe even from a PES team) and started working from scratch on this thing.
Don’t look too much in to it. I think they will fix these issues by it’s release.
It ran good enough for me on my Pro but it def felt like this game was released before TPP
A beta code base is often full of residual things to clean up. We’ll check all this post-release, but it would be very surprising (limit hilarious..) if they can’t match TPP’s benchs at least with understandable reasons.
The game that keeps adding cherries to the top of the hated cake
Plus it feels like they put some zucchini instead of chocolate in this cake.. xD