DF Weekly: The launch of Fallout 4’s next-gen upgrade could have gone better

You could call this week’s DF Direct a set of patch tests that arrived thick and fast for a number of titles of varying scale. The addition of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora’s “favorable quality” 40fps mode brings an excellent balance between resolution and visuals for Xbox Series X and PS5, while Lords of the Fallen’s 1.5 update finally fixed the long-standing “0fps” issue, reported back in the day. The biggest addition by far, however, is the “next-gen” update for Fallout 4 – and it’s quickly developing into a bit of a saga.

A few weeks ago in the DF Direct, we outlined some of the existing issues in the PC version that really needed to be addressed – the ability to scale the game beyond 60fps and fixing the possibility of weapon shards that literally crash any RTX graphics card. None of these issues have been resolved, and plenty of other issues are coming to light that question what the point is for PC users. Even the much-vaunted ultra-wide support has problems.

In the console world, significantly more effort has gone into upgrading Fallout 4 for today’s hardware. Before last Thursday, the best you could get was the Xbox One X version running back-compat for the Series X, along with the FPS Boost 60fps variant, which actually ran at a higher framerate, but dropped in visual quality to on Xbox. One level S. Bad. Meanwhile, the ‘720p60’ module that enabled 4K60 on the X series seemed to have disappeared. So how are things with the new patch?

• 0:00:00 Introduction
• 0:01:57 News 01: Fallout 4 is getting a mixed current-gen update
• 0:22:14 News 02: Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora gets 40fps mode
• 0:38:07 News 03: Lords of the Fallen is getting a performance boost
• 0:49:12 News 04: Alex dives deep into gaming technology
• 1:11:56 News 05: ROG Ally updated with AFMF technology
• 1:22:08 News 06: Paper Mario Preview!
• 1:29:31 Supporter Q1: Could frame gen be used to scale a game from 40fps to 120fps and then decimate it to 60fps?
• 1:34:07 Supporter Question 2: Why do some Microsoft games show different settings on PS5 than Series X?
• 1:42:49 Supporter Q3: Do you prefer Doom 1993 or Doom 2016?
• 1:47:11 Supporter Question 4: Is sampler feedback the savior of the S series? And is the PS5 API better than Microsoft?
• 1:53:07 Supporter Question 5: Is continued PS4 developer support a problem for Sony?
• 2:00:13 Supporter Question 6: Could the Switch 2 have a picture quality advantage over PC gaming handhelds?
• 2:05:35 Support Q7: Are the 13900K and 14900K processors really unstable?
• 2:10:54 Backer Q8: What would Republic of Gamers look like?

It’s all a bit confusing. The patch notes describe a 4K 60fps performance mode, a 4K 30fps/40fps quality alternative (depending on whether you’re running on a 60Hz or 120Hz display), and a 1440p ultra setting option. It seems to have shipped for PS5, but there are issues with Xbox Series X. The performance/quality mode switch doesn’t work. Evidence suggests that the X Series is locked to performance mode only. Disabling this feature on Series X doesn’t seem to change anything – and the visuals are significantly reduced not only compared to PlayStation 5’s quality mode, but also the Xbox One X 4K 30fps back-compat variant you were able to play last week.

It looked like a cut and dried bug that we reported to Bethesda last week as soon as we noticed it, only for this tweet will appear from the publisher on Sunday, indicating that all is well – the quality mode apparently worked and also ran at 60fps, seemingly focusing on dynamic resolution scaling to maintain performance. Maybe we were wrong? We are only human. We do things wrong, just like anyone else. However, fresh footage told the same story – we still see no difference between the performance and quality modes, and on the rare occasion that the Series X does experience a frame rate drop, it happens identically between the two modes.

Hopefully this will be resolved soon – assuming we’re right here and there’s nothing wrong with our console – but in the meantime there’s definitely plenty of work to do on our coverage due later this week.

Other than that, there’s plenty more to enjoy in this mammoth edition of DF Direct Weekly. Alex returns to the hotbed of information, the latest edition of the GDC and GTC technology presentations detailing the latest innovations in the world of path tracking rendering. I spent some time trying to generate frames on an Asus ROG Ally with the release of AMD’s Fluid Motion Frames driver update with mixed feelings about the results, while Tom Morgan tackles the Paper Mario 30fps situation head on. Did Nintendo really remake the 60fps GameCube game as 30fps Switch, and if so, why?

Meanwhile, Supporter Q+A keeps on delivering! What happened to Xbox shader feedback sampling? Could frame-gen supply more than one interpolated frame? What’s up with the unstable Core i9 13900K and 14900K processors? This last point has been a real problem for me as my 13900K based system keeps crashing in Adobe Premiere unless I lower the power consumption. Finally, what would a true Republic of Gamers look like politically?!

At this point, it would be remiss of me not to point out that our great support program provides early access to every direct and additional content, updates on what we’re up to each week, and also hosts our great community where employees interact. daily with supporters – the relationship with our audience has been nothing but good. And finally, just a polite reminder that the DF Store Warehouse Sale is still on but ends today, and of course check out the new Bespoke Collection items too. If they do well, we may see more merchandising based on words and phrases that often appear in my reviews. I’ll be back next week!