- Alone in the Dark has been tested across all major consoles.
- The game runs at a dynamic resolution in Performance mode, dropping down to 450p at its lowest.
- This trade-off leads to a fairly consistent frame rate.
The latest Alone in the Dark entry brings the three-decade-old horror franchise back with an Unreal Engine 4 makeover. While the game looks quite good, it is far from the most ambitious release this year.
Then, it might come as a surprise that it pushes console hardware to its limits. According to an analysis, the Xbox Series S version, in particular, struggles in Performance mode. This mode sees the game dropping down to 450p resolution to maintain 60FPS.
Why it matters: The Xbox Series S was marketed as a 1440p gaming console. While this target might have been overly ambitious, 450p is far from ideal on modern systems.
The game runs at 4K resolution in Quality mode on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, but the Xbox Series S is quite an outlier.
Even when targeting 30FPS on the budget system, Alone in the Dark runs at 900p in Quality mode. However, the resolution is dropped further once the frame rate is doubled.
Considering 900p is far from the standard today, this is already less than ideal. According to Digital Foundry, Performance mode runs between 450p and 900p. Typical resolution lands at 684p, but this produces blurry results across the board.
Even though the game already looks blurry at 900p, Alone in the Dark becomes worse while running at 450p as it suffers from serious image breakup and visual noise on any movements in the game.
During the cut scenes, the low resolution of the game is easily noticeable.
While this resolution isn’t ideal, it has been noted that the Xbox Series S has the least frame rate drops during combat. This is likely due to the massive resolution compromises.
As a result, Alone in the Dark rarely falls lower than 45FPS on this console, making for a smooth albeit blurry experience.
Not too long ago, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons depicted similar resolution figures on the console. However, intensive games like Lords of the Fallen can reach similar lower bounds on its bigger brother as well, the Xbox Series X.
While the aforementioned examples highlight the intensive nature of Unreal Engine 5, Alone in the Dark runs on Unreal Engine 4. This makes the resolution figures quite surprising, to say the least.
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