A single look at Empire of the Ants may not be enough to tell you that it’s a lower-budget title made by a small team, with developer Tower Five having attempted to deliver impressive photorealism with the strategy title’s visuals. Exactly how well can we expect the game to run on all the platforms that it will be available for, however? Speaking in a recent interview with GamingBolt, game director Renaud Charpentier, offered concrete details on that front.
As per Charpentier, on both PS5 and Xbox Series X, Empire of the Ants will run at “a stable 30 FPS”, while targeting a native resolution between 1400p and 1600; that will then be upscaled to 4K. On Xbox Series S, meanwhile, the game will run at 1080p and 30 FPS (upscaled from a native 972p), while on the PS5 PRo, it will run at 60 FPS and 4K (upscaled from a native 1440p target resolution).
Speaking specifically about the Xbox Series S, Charpentier stated that though the weaker console would have been capable of running the game at 60 FPS, Tower Five decided to limit it to 30 FPS in order to reach the desired render quality.
“The S is close to the X in many aspects, apart from raw GPU power and RAM space,” Charpentier said. “RAM space potentially limits texture quality but not framerate, so it is really a question of native resolution. On the S the strategy is obviously to lower the base render resolution and then to ask the upscaler to interpolate more. Reaching 1440p in 60 FPS is possible but it depends how much trade off you are willing to make on individual pixel quality. For us, 30 FPS was the limit on this gen to reach the render quality we wanted, but other games can have different priorities.”
In the same interview, Charpentier also stated that Tower Five would love to put Empire of the Ants on the unannounced Switch 2, depending on what the console’s specs turn out to be. Read more on that through here.
Empire of the Ants will release for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on November 7.