Game Pass Shooter 'Shadow Warrior 3' Now Supports 60FPS On Xbox Series S

The number of games which receive a 60fps Series S patch a while after launch is very encouraging, with a little dedication it truly can run games very well... the downside is that the damage reputation wise is often done already.

To counter this Xbox should ALWAYS tweet/advertise such updates to ensure that S owners/prospective S owners can feel assured about the performance of games on their chosen platform.

I have both an X and an S and I mostly feel the experience is absolutely fine on the S, it’s a lovely little machine, these patches just need to come faster.

@JetmanUK ^^ This

@Kaloudz damn shame Kaloudz, I loved it to bits

@JetmanUK While I don't think the S was necessarily a great idea, I do think it's more capable than what gets reported.

I think developers don't take the time to optimize for it as they are (understandably) more focused on PS5 and Series X.

I think developers take a "nuclear option" and lock games at 30fps and 1080p just because it's easier to do so than to really tweak things to get a 60fps option - and it meets the requirement to have the game released on Xbox.

Though, the way Microsoft advertised the Series S at first, they made it sound like it was engineered to do exactly what the Series X can do at a lower resolution - which is found to not be the case.

@GamingFan4Lyf I think it's engineered to work exactly like they said it was. The problem is the way developers make and release games has not gone the way they expected. They were expecting development would have changed by now to properly use the new features, multithreaded designs, scaled assets for the reduced memory etc. And instead, development as basically continued like it's the PS360 and brute forcing everything through, partly because PS5 lets them, encourages them to, and Xbox just doesn't matter enough. Both X and S have half their capability sitting unused as games chug away on a single thread and one set of assets are rammed through the pipeline.

@NEStalgia This is very true. Microsoft designed the Series X|S around multi-threading (as well as DX12) - which is where the true power of the system relies. Even the split-memory specification probably has its advantages when used properly.

It's a darn shame too, because it's not like multi-core CPU/GPU are anything new.

Digital Foundry has been pounding the drum on proper threading for a while now - especially with modern PC games as shader compilation stutter is becoming a major issue.

This is where I applaud Nintendo developers. Look at what they can create with such limited hardware.

I feel it makes them better coders to the point that if they ever had Series X|S/PS5 level hardware, they'd probably do things with it that no one thought possible just because it probably looks like an infinite floodgate of possibilities given what they've had to accomplish now.

I am sure the Switch requires some extremely smart threading techniques to do what they do because the single core hardware specs alone aren't great.

I wouldn't exactly blame Sony for doing what it does - it's working out well for them in the end. Developers can just continue doing "business as usual" but with more horsepower.

I would say that Microsoft is doing more to advance the industry on a fundamental level (i.e. trying to achieve smarter coding and not brute force coding) than Sony, though. Unfortunately for developers and publishers "time is money" and it's the consumers who lose out.

@GamingFan4Lyf Yeah, that's the thing, Xbox is based on what PC should have been doing, and the devs just....aren't doing it. It's a crying shame what's happened in PC gaming. We're over a decade past when games should have transitioned to new architectures yet everything still runs like a 90's game, leaning into the ancient and debunked Intel "megahertz myth" design philosophy of the time, and just trying to brute force everything.

Technically even PS5 is being held way back by this problem. Sure, the PS5 handles being used incorrectly and just brute forcing things much better than XSX and even PC does, but that's still not close to fully using it, it, too, has most of it's real power squandered and unused behind idle cores. I think it's only going to be the tech wizard studios at Sony like ND (I hate their game design but can't deny their tech know-how) and Guerilla that really pushes the real threading.

But yeah, at this point I think MS is fighting a losing battle, game dev studios don't want to change techniques, they want to do things efficiently doing what they've always done, and the consumers just need "more megahertz" to make it work right. We never left the 90's. Every other industry adapted a long time ago and cloud pushed the need to adapt as all resources are shared.

@NEStalgia 100% agree.

I think UE5 will change this going forward as there are many studios that leverage Unreal Engine. UE4 is..well...not very good regarding multithreading. Shadow Warrior 3 uses UE4.

DF goes into pretty good detail about this in one their videos where they discuss Redfall. Basically, the majority of game's performance issues boil down to UE4.

I wish Arkane would take the effort to update Redfall to UE5. It's a great candidate for Nanite and it could solve some performance issues (namely getting it to 60fps). It would make for a great "relaunch" too. Heck, they might even be able to populate the world more with an engine switch - so content-related upgrades are also possible.

As Digital Foundry pointed out, Fortnite shares a similar visual style and far surpasses Redfall in terms of visual flair and runs at a pretty solid 60fps - even with real people running around causing chaos. It's just significantly more efficient.

Heck, the most recent Layers of Fear demo on Steam runs on my Surface Book 2 with an Nvidia 1060 6GB. Sure, I can't run it at "4K Ultra settings", but I can get like 85fps at 1080p using the Lowest settings and it still looks amazing.

Since that's a slow-paced game, 60fps isn't exactly required, so I can even crank it up to like High settings and get a playable 30fps.

There is hope. But we have got to get out of this cross-gen phase first.