The 4K patch for Redout Lightspeed Edition, a futuristic anti-gravity racer by an Italian studio, just dropped a few days ago. The patch notes promised native 4K rendering, 300+ bug fixes, major performance improvement and a 60fps lock due to the dynamic scaler. Has the Italian studio 34BigThings, achieved their goal?
Upon playing just the first level of the game, it became obvious that something is not quite right with this patch. While the visuals are absolutely gorgeous and look to be rendering at 4K natively, something seems to be broken with the dynamic scaler: it doesn’t actually look like it’s kicking in at all! There are major major performance drops in certain sections to what looks like below 30fps refresh! It’s pretty clear something isn’t quite right. The rest of the first 4 levels all seem to have similar slowdowns in places.
We have had patch issues with games on the Xbox One X, such as with Titanfall 2, that the developers miscalculated and then fixed quickly. Let’s hope they can do the same with this one.
Interestingly, the slowdowns don’t really affect the gameplay as you can still steer the ship easily and response is good. But of course screen refresh isn’t great in places.
However, only around 10% of a level is affected, the rest of the level plays out at an almost locked 60fps. It’s interesting that even slowing down and rotating the camera around the problem area, the slowdown still happens and it doesn’t look like there is any dynamic scaler kicking in or the lower bounds of the scaler are way too high. It also mostly happens when lots of the track is in view all at once so clearly they are overloading the GPU by trying to draw too many things at once without either properly scaling back Level of Detail settings or dropping the resolution.
Anyway, I have contacted 34BigThings to have a look at the issue. Let’s hope for a fix soon.
Leave a Reply