Fe is a game that looks absolutely gorgeous and its visuals immediately catch one’s attention with its very distinctive art style. These visuals will surely look even better in the enhanced versions of the game for the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. However, there are sure to be some differences in how the game performs on these two different consoles.
To learn more about these differences in power and how Fe runs on these consoles, GamingBolt reached out to lead programmer Johan to provide some answers to these questions.
"The Xbox One X gave us more for free in terms of raw power, whereas we didn’t prioritize making the necessary adjustments for PS4 Pro."
How much time did it take to get the Xbox One X version up and running?
Up and running? Not so much. Up and running well took a bit longer since we had focused primarily on PC once we brought the platform on board, and taken some liberties with the resources as you can imagine. We didn’t really focus on One X specifically, so once Xbox One was in order One X naturally solved itself.
You recently confirmed that the Xbox One X version of Fe will run at native 4K whereas the PS4 Pro version will run at 1260p. We understand what are power differences between the two but wasn’t some alternate solution considered for the PS4 pro version? (something like checkerboard rendering).
Considered, yes, but unfortunately didn’t make the cut. The Xbox One X gave us more for free in terms of raw power, whereas we didn’t prioritize making the necessary adjustments for PS4 Pro.
I also find it interesting that Fe runs at 30fps on the Xbox One X. Fe doesn’t seem to be resource thirsty (it looks amazing from an art style perspective). Is there a specific reason why Fe doesn’t run at 60fps on the Xbox One X given its power?
We were actually surprised when we saw the One X performing as it did on that resolution, but when we really started looking closer at the enhanced versions of the consoles (Xbox One X and PS4 Pro), it was at a stage in the development that we were very restrictive with the changes we made. It was tempting of course, but whereas increasing the resolution is fairly safe, doubling the framerate runs a higher risk of introducing an obscure bug somewhere. It was a risk we didn’t want to take at that point, as we were unsure we’d be able to properly test it properly. But who knows what the future brings.
"The extra resources are cool to have and allows us to maybe do some platform specific enhancements, but in general we’d rather reach a wider audience than missing out on potential players due to system requirements."
As someone who has worked on both the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, what is your take on the differences between them or are they quite similar?
From where we’re standing, they’re quite similar. Compared to their standard counterparts they give us more power for free as well as additional features exposed in Unity that we can fiddle around with. But as for pitching them against each other, we treat them quite the same.
Xbox One X has a ton of memory on board (12GB in total and 8GB of that is available for games). Do you think PC game developers such as yourself, will now be setting your PC memory requirements even higher in the future due to Xbox One X offering even higher memory allocations?
Not unless we have good reason to. The extra resources are cool to have and allows us to maybe do some platform specific enhancements, but in general we’d rather reach a wider audience than missing out on potential players due to system requirements.