A Plague Tale Requiem - 60FPS Performance Tested - PS5 vs Xbox Series X 

9:34 this is the way to do it. Taking out small clumps of grass in a scene is far less distracting than having them constantly pop in and out depending on your proximity to them

While there are some small blemishes on the performance, it still amazes me how much better of a job a small studio like Asobo has done with optimizing their game across all platforms (save for the redundant and bad ray tracing patch on PC) compared to major studios. It's absurd that an AA game runs and frequently even looks better than the horrendous ports of TLOU and Jedi: Survivor. Kudos to them, but also shows that players should not be forgiving of bad performance, because optimization is not some elusive, esoteric craft that's suddenly impossible because of the increased hardware demands of current-gen titles.

I have to say the 40 fps mode was pretty good. It's a 33% increase in refresh rate so it makes sense that the improvement over 30 is this noticeable.

The tradeoff is absolutely worth it. 60fps fluidity in the refresh is now very important to people. And of course the 30fps mode is still there for higher fidelity if people want it. Options are good

All developers should do what they did to this game, amazing job

Regardless of the trade-offs necessary in this game to get it to run smoothly at 60FPS, I will ALWAYS be a fan of having the OPTION to choose between 30 or 60FPS in these games because 9 times out of 10 I'm always going to opt for the 60 FPS option in order to have better game responsiveness and fluidity.

I think it's a good compromise and a clever solution to those who want 60fps gameplay, it's great to see a studio stick by their game and make it the best it can be. Respect to the devs & DF for shining a light on this patch.

I feel like if they managed to scale the motion blur of the lower refresh rate rats, it could have really 100% sold the effect. With a 360° shutter angle and high enough sample counts, it would have a really cool filmic blur you would expect from an offline CGI render of a swarm of rats.

Asobo deserves serious praise for what they've achieved with this game and this update. As the gaming industry becomes more and more homogenized with studios dropping their in-house tech for Unreal, and as more and more games release in poor technical states, Asobo has forged ahead with their own tech and have been able to delivered impressive visuals paired with highly optimized perfromance. Everyone at the studio should be proud of what they've accomplished.

Plague Tale are such underrated games

I actually think this is a good way to go about it. The most noticeable part of playing 60fps is the fluidity of the controller response and camera. So, having other elements run at 30 at a distance isn't too noticeable and I wouldn't mind other games going this route. As long as they don't take it too far. I don't want npcs running at 5 fps lmao

It's a very good upgrade all around though. You can tell the dev really put thought into sticking with 60fps. Unlocking the fps is also good at future proofing the game for next gen consoles.

The music in this game is beautiful! Reunion being my personal favourite.

The main takeaway in this is that it's not a good idea to buy/play a game at launch these days. Unlike before when the devs release an actual finished product. There's really no point in buying games at launch. Prices are higher. Some modes might be missing. Performance issues that needs to be fixed. Or in this case, an actual upgrade that expands your option when playing a game.

This is an absolutely acceptable trade off because the rats movements are already so jittery that you'd be hard pressed to notice. They overlap and jump over each other so dramatically that the slightly lower fps just makes them, as was put in the video, more otherworldly.

That Harryhausen reference is on point. Great to see developers still being inspired by the wonders of classic stop motion.

Finally this game will get the respect it deserves. I played and beat it at 40fps on my Series X and it was phenomenal, the 120hz mode is definitely a big plus I did try it out again and I will be playing it again but this game really didn’t need 60/120 but I think many will enjoy it more.

13:19 So if rats are at 60 fps refresh in the 120 Hz mode and this 120 Hz mode always stays above 60 fps, why not also 60 fps refresh in the 60 Hz mode?

Wait, if the rats refresh at 60 in the 120hz mode, and it stays above 60 in that mode, why aren't the rats at 60 in the 60hz mode?

well done Asobo Studio !!!

wow this is a delight to see. I started playing this game on Series X but the 30fps was rough so I finished it on my PC. Seeing a small studio do so much to improve their game is a breathe of fresh air. Truly a great game.

Outstanding job from this studio & what an amazing game.

Wow it’s insane seeing 70-90fps on these consoles, but if they had so much headroom I wish they would have tweaked the settings further I would rather have 55-60fps with higher fidelity than additional 30fps that i can’t even see on my tv (most people don’t have 120hz tvs yet i presume)

Nice video DF! Awesome work and engine asobo!

I thought the 40fps mode was pretty good. Amazing game and at times, especially at sunset, incredibly beautiful

Great video Tom! THIS is the way developers should make games! Asobo studio devs made the necessary sacrifices to achieve a true buttery smooth 60 fps in performance mode with no compromise. None of this "half way" crap that results in "kind of" smooth gameplay. Big applause to the studio. Whether it's 30 fps or 60 fps, that's fine - but it has to be SMOOTH and consistent, so you can just enjoy the game and story. I finished the game on PC and I gotta say it's amazing and has a great story.

"I'll be honest, I didn't count all 300,000 rats" So, you've been slacking eh?

VRR seems to be the best thing about these consoles. That, and quick resume, are my two next gen favs.

I noticed this frame rate trick was used in Atomic Heart as well. Even beyond that, at extreme ranges in the open world, AI stopped functioning entirely until you aimed down sights or used some other method of zooming in.

This game actually made me cry. What are an amazing game. Great game if you just wanna have a slow cinematic game

Hi DF, great video as always ! Could you please do an analysis on the perf patch on PC please ? From my experience, it somehow worsened RT implementation even more than how it performed before the patch. The game now runs really smooth on Ultra +DLSS Quality for me (3070ti + 5800X + 32Gb DDR4 4Ghz + NVME Gen4) with RT off, because VRAM usage has gone down (whereas before, textures had to be set to High, and the performance seemed a bit more shaky overall). But with RT on, no matter how other parameters are set (even on the lowest resolution, lowest preset, everything at the lowest but RT on), the game stutters horribly. I wonder if their culling system did not mess with ray tracing ? I noticed that disabling hardware scheduling in Windows 11 settings seems to improve the situation just a bit, but it may be placebo. I'd be curious to know if it runs without stutters with RT on configs with more VRAM/DDR5 vs DDR4/Better CPU/Better GPU... If you could pinpoint the problem/bottleneck that would be amazing! You guys are good at that. Great torture test locations : - Chapter 5 section 2, panning the camera around quickly , while going up and down the beach creates massive stutters with RT on : their are rats and flames on the other side of the river, along with NPC I think, and lots of birds hovering above the river. This scene is riddled with stutters with RT on, and flawless without it. - Chapter 8 section 4 => Begining of this section slows down to a crawl or has severe stutters when RT is enabled - Chapter 10 section 1 / section 5 -Chapter 2 begining (marketplace) That's too bad that RT is broken, because it is really better than dealing with sceen space artifacts. Too bad RT reflection is also absent. But given the current RT implementation I can understand why they did not include it.

This is one of the very few games which deserves to use money on, it's so good, in all sorts of ways, as the firs one, unforgettable, the amount of well crafted work which have been done in this is just astonishing.

Amazing job from the developers, rare to see such commitment these days

Improvements on a very good game are always valuable.

This is one of my favourite games of all time. Beautiful story telling and music that touches hearts

I owe this game a play through. Great upload DF!

The PC equivalent settings for the quality mode, were 1440p, medium settings with ultra textures. So aside from the 1080p, what are the other PC equivalent settings now, for the performance mode?

As I played this on a Series X and a 120+ Hz monitor I got the 40 FPS experience and loved it, but it's great that they have brought higher frame rates to more people with this.

Amazing work from asobo but they could add some upscaling to get the 1080p image up to like something close to 1440p

Tricks like reduced refresh animation are kind of weird looking sure, but for massively improved playability and input response I think a lot more studios should be looking at stuff like this as a way to get around the increasing amount of CPU bottlenecking we're seeing in modern games. I would love these CPU savings options to be implemented on more PC games especially. As there's insanely CPU intensive games like PT Requiem, Gotham Knights, Jedi Survivor, etc.. that bottleneck the hell out of my CPU and make 60FPS impossible even with a 3070.

40fps is still the way to go in my opion. I really felt de drop in resolution and texture quality, just not worth the 20fps upgrade. 120hz display is a must for series x or ps5.

Great job absobo!

ASOBO. What a wonderful studio!!! I wonder how they manage so much, remember they also do MS Flight simulator.

Excellent game, I recommend everyone to play it

It’s wild to see Series X 20fps higher than PS5 at points on a 120hz display. Generally, it’s around 8-10fps with unlocked games but jeez. That was surprising. It’s also super neat because when I was finishing it with an unlocked frame rate I thought the rats refresh rate looked normal… now I know why 🤷🏻‍♂️ Edit: I wonder if Asobo’s work on Flight Sim helped with optimizing it for Series X.

One of the best looking games visually I've ever played. And also one of the most heart-wrenching.

but using Ray Harryhausen as an example, he used a projection method over the stop motion. A bit of motion blur to his own work, which would later be refined in other stop motion productions.

Nice job dude!

Just finished this masterpiece and I honestly can't stop thinking about it, especially the ending. This 60fps mode is definitely worth a replay on New Game +

Asobo are such a brilliant studio

I have a PS5 and still game on my aging 2017 prebuilt PC from time to time. So, I'm no stranger to lowering settings for an optimial (imo) experience. The concessions Asobo made on console are pretty much in line with what I'd do on PC. Innocence is still in my backlog. But, after seeing the work put in on Requiem I may have to pick it up sooner than later. Asobo listened to the community and did the work. I'll support that any day.👍

Nice to see a dev making great decisions. And a small AA dev at that.

SeriesX another One 👍

"Low refresh rats" my new favorite fraze.

I really love this game and I’m really happy they added the option of 60 fps option. I played through the game with the 40 fps options but I know not everyone has a 120hz option. So I’m glad there’s now an option for everyone else to play this game with a higher frame rate.

Unlocked Xbox Series X on a VRR TV seems the way to go

This is an example of a studio truly doing their best. Asobo had to think creatively and likely had to re-examine a lot of code to pull this off. Requiem was one of those games that I wasn't furious at for not having a 60fps option. Let down, sure. But, for the genre and gameplay I never viewed it as a total dealbreaker. I seen how much effort was already put in by such a small team while still raising ambitions over the previous game. Personally, that's why I think this update deserves such high praise. Whether it's more creative thinking like that on display here, simpler optimizations, or just using FSR I see a brighter future for retaining 60fps on our already aging current-gen consoles.

What a game !!! I cried at the final man couldnt run from it !

Wait.. so there's not un-cap 120hz-VRR option for quality/resolution mode? I mean, if there's a quality mode at 40hz locked via 120hz option.. why not an uncapped option too?

So is ps5 and series x now 1080p machines? That was quick

I hope this teaches developers we player prefer smoother gameplay rather than pretty graphics.

All these prominent elements updating at 30 fps has me wondering something: if you ran a game camera internally at 60 fps and wrote a motion blur shader that utilized that extra additional visual information to create a high quality 30 fps motion blur, could that be visually preferrable as well as have the improved latency? You'd get the latency benefits of running at a higher framerate (you'd always display the most recent frame), and similar to a real camera it would look more visually pleasing because there's real information being translated by the blur shader, and you'd get away with half rate optimizations on specific objects without them looking out of place. I'd love to see what that looked and felt like compared to a normal 30 fps.

I am absolutely fine with lowering animation rates to get camera fluidity.

Series X for sure.

Very smart moves by asobo.Other studios should follow

Thank you DF!

Im just glad folks have the option now

Good to see this finally being delivered but it leaves a sour taste in my mouth. They should have told us months ago that a 60fps patch was coming. Cause I played it on release in 30fps and the 30fps felt so insanely choppy. It really did drag the whole experience down a lot...

Chapter 10 has a very big area with loads of rats and soldiers that drop below 50 fps in ps5, for your information. I didn’t find any other drops though. Also am I the only one who found the unlocked mode juddery, even with vrr?

Damn, wish I had waited for this.

We need some more games set in this time frame, it adds an interesting dynamic.

120Hz mode + VRR = orgasm

Updates like this are always sorts of bittersweet to me. Like it's great that you added a 60fps mode but it's 7 months since launch and the majority of people are already played through its 30fps mode.

A very fair trade-off and I'm intrigued 🤔

I do like to play at 60 fps, but after already completing the game once at 40 and trying the new uncapped frames.....the resolution hit is very obvious!

This shows what an even greater advantage Series X can have over PS5. It's enough that DEVS will start to use their true power. Let's remember that Xbox is not yet using its technologies like DX12, Velocity and others.

This all seems like a very clever implementation.

Nice! 🔥

Kudos for Asobo Studios for making the right sacrifices in order to achieve rock solid 60fps. Not only that, but they also deserve praise for optimizing the game for Series X, I really didn't expect the framerate difference on 120Hz mode to be that big. Imagine if every studio took their time with Series X instead of just focusing on PS5.

I’m happy with 40fps. It’s a nice balance

It’s crazy to see how much better the image quality at 1080p is compared to other games like Jedi Survivor at 1440p

Very cool they still dealt with this this long after release. Good on them, much better late than never.

Devs: give us VRR unlocked modes all the time! Should be a minimum now

My frames was being eaten by rats!!

I was really looking forward to this 60fps patch, but for one major reason I will be sticking with 30fps. I am playing on PS5. That reason has to do with how blurry the image is at 60fps. It causes me major eye strain. The image looks like it is out of focus, and my eyes strain trying to "focus" the image. It is really prominent on grass and foilage. Right at the beginning of the game, the purple flowers are a blurry mess at 60fps and look way out of focus. I have not had this issue with any other games that drop the resolution to get 60fps, so it makes me wonder if there is something else going on on top of the resolution drop that is making wverything look out of focus.

Great stuff

Something is weird about this you mentioned that both the unlocked and locked performance modes run at the same visual settings. And the unlocked mode run at 80 to 100 fps with rats refreshing at 60 ! , So if the game can run the rats at 60 fps in the unlocked mode while achieving over 80 fps, why would they limit the rats refresh to 60 fps in locked performance mode ! There is clearly a huge performance overhead even when rats and npc refresh at 60 fps.

I love this game so much ❤

Played this on Series S at release and none of this hindered my experience at all. But glad for those I guess that can actually tell the difference between 30 and 60 fps.

I am wondering if the 40 fps mode can work on a 60 fps display assume the VVR window can go as low as 40

WIsh this mode was available at launch when I played the game. 40 fps wasn't too bad though.

13:25 so why have the rats animate at 30fps at all?

This game looks gorgeous! Glad this patch dropped. If I go back to it I think I'll play on PC since DLSS pulls that resolution up from 1080p a lot better while keeping 60fps, and as a plus it's actually an ok PC version!

13:20 Wait, so if the 120hz mode runs rats at 60fps why doesn't the 60hz mode also do that?

This really shows the difference in the hardware

This is all pretty tragic tbh. Reading the comments I get I'm in the minority, but 60fps should be mandatory now, but the cuts to resolution here is beyond acceptable for those of us who just want a simple life on console plugged in to a large 4k display and AV system. 1080p is just as unacceptable as 30fps. Maybe these devs should rein in their ambitions if they can't achieve next gen resolutions and frame rates.

Resolution 120Hz mode without VRR on PS5 are the best settings for me. It looks amazing on my OLED screen 😋

Nice to see the upgrade which certainly isn’t anything to complain about but I think Requiem could get away with it as ultimately the game isn’t very fast paced so there are few, if any areas, where you really feel the 30 FOS drag in the experience.

MS needs to grab this studio and give them a ton of cash. With the right support I think this studio can hang with Sony’s best

Asobo should be MS next purchase.