Let’s be honest, Bethesda games haven’t been on the cutting edge of tech for a while now. The time when The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion set a new standard for the then next generation of consoles seems like it was forever ago now (which, to be fair, was over a decade ago). Bethesda’s lone new game this generation has been Fallout 4, which will never win any awards for how it looks or performs.
Even so, Digital Foundry’s findings about the game – at least based on an early build of it, running on the Xbox One X – are particularly disappointing. Digital Foundry reports that the game runs at 30 frames per second, with frequent drops to below that, and in some places, drops down to the single digits as well. Past a certain distance, it seems like shadows start rendering at 15 FPS as well. Textures seem to be low resolution, although they do employ up to 16x AF filtering. The game runs at a dynamic resolution, running at 4K, but dropping down to 2880x2160p (which is 75% of native 4K) sometimes.
All of this sounds supremely disappointing, but there is some hope—the game is over a month away from release, and technical issues such as these can be smoothed out in these last few weeks. Not just that, but Digital Foundry is claiming that Bethesda has stated the frame rate drops and bugs will be ironed out by the time the game releases too—which I hope they are. It’s just that this early report isn’t the most confidence inspiring, for what it’s worth.
Fallout 76 launches on November 14 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. If you’re interested in learning more about the game, make sure to check out the latest information drop we got on it, which, among other things, explained how camps and looting will work in the game.