New Resident Evil 3 Remake patch boosts Xbox One X performance

A story with a happy ending? You bet! When we first took a look at Resident Evil 3 Remake's playable, we were impressed by another storming technological showcase for Capcom's excellent RE Engine - but there was a show-stopping problem: the Xbox One X rendition of the game significantly under-performed against PlayStation 4 Pro. Indeed, in certain scenes, frame-rate could even drop beneath Xbox One S's output. The good news is that the game has been patched, delivering a huge increase to performance.

To understand the situation more clearly, we need to look back at the brilliant Resident Evil 2 Remake and its presentation on the enhanced machines. Both PS4 Pro and Xbox One X delivered a final rendered output of 2880x1620, upscaled to 4K. This presentation was in itself reconstructed using a checkerboard-like effect - a process where the Microsoft machine enjoyed a quality advantage over its Sony equivalent. In moving to Resident Evil 3 Remake, PS4 Pro seemingly remains where it is, with Xbox One X pushed to reconstructed 2160p output instead. In doing so, a massive chunk of performance was lost - something that was immediately apparent to the Resident Evil fanbase running on Microsoft's machine.

"Capcom is definitely aware of the fan feeling with regards to Xbox performance, so they [the developers] may look into providing a solution some time after launch," we were told at the time via a statement which essentially offered no time frame or even a firm commitment to fixing the game, but the good news is that the solution is now here - and it's a relatively straightforward fix. Based on pixel counts, it seems that the developer has matched RE2 Remake by running the game at 2880x1620 rather than 3840x2160. That's just 55 per cent of the pixel count overall (75 per cent of native resolution on each axis) but the impact to image quality isn't especially noticeable during gameplay - but the boost to frame-rate definitely is.

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