DF Weekly: Fallout 4's next-gen upgrade launch could have gone better

You could call this week's DF Direct an assemblage of patch tests as they arrived thick and fast for a range of titles, in varying degrees of scale. The addition of a 40fps 'favour quality' mode in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora strikes an excellent balance between resolution and visual features for Xbox Series X and PS5, while Lords of the Fallen's 1.5 update finally addressed the long-standing '0fps' problem we reported on back in the day. However, by far the highest profile addition is the 'next-gen' update for Fallout 4 - and it's swiftly unfolding into a bit of a saga.

A few weeks back in DF Direct, we outlined some of the existing issues in the PC version that really needed addressing - the ability to scale the game above 60fps and fixing the weapons debris option that crashes literally any RTX graphics card. Neither of those problems are tackled and plenty more issues are coming to light, calling into question what the point is for PC users. Even the much-vaunted ultra-wide support has problems.

In the world of consoles, there has been significantly more effort put into modernising Fallout 4 for today's hardware. Prior to last Thursday, the best you could get was the Xbox One X version running under back-compat for Series X, along with an FPS Boost 60fps variant that did indeed run at a higher frame-rate, but busted visual quality down to Xbox One S level. Not good. Meanwhile, a '720p60' mod that allowed for 4K60 on Series X appeared to have vanished. So, how do things fare with the new patch?

DF Direct Weekly #160: Fallout 4 Upgrade Issues, Avatar 40fps Tested, Paper Mario Switch Preview

• 0:00:00 Introduction
• 0:01:57 News 01: Fallout 4 gets mixed current-gen upgrade
• 0:22:14 News 02: Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora gets 40fps mode
• 0:38:07 News 03: Lords of the Fallen receives performance boost
• 0:49:12 News 04: Alex dives deep into game tech
• 1:11:56 News 05: ROG Ally updated with AFMF tech
• 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 Q2: Why are some Microsoft games exhibiting different settings on PS5 relative to Series X?
• 1:42:49 Supporter Q3: Do you prefer Doom 1993 or Doom 2016?
• 1:47:11 Supporter Q4: Is sampler feedback the Series S savior? And is the PS5 API better than Microsoft’s?
• 1:53:07 Supporter Q5: Is the PS4’s continued developer support a problem for Sony?
• 2:00:13 Supporter Q6: Could the Switch 2 have an image quality advantage over PC gaming handhelds?
• 2:05:35 Supporter Q7: Are 13900K and 14900K processors really unstable?
• 2:10:54 Supporter Q8: What would a Republic of Gamers look like?

It's all a bit baffling. Patch notes describe a 4K 60fps performance mode, a 4K 30fps/40fps quality alternative (depending on whether you are running on a 60Hz or 120Hz display) and a 1440p ultra settings variant. This seems to have been delivered for PS5, but there are problems with Xbox Series X. The performance/quality mode toggle does not work. The evidence suggests that Series X is locked to performance mode only. Disabling this on Series X doesn't seem to change anything - and visuals are notably cut back not only up against PlayStation 5's quality mode, but also against the Xbox One X 4K 30fps back-compat variant you could play last week.

This looked like a cut-and-dried bug we reported to Bethesda last week as soon as we noticed it, only for this tweet to emerge from the publisher on Sunday, suggesting that everything was fine - quality mode worked, apparently, and it ran at 60fps too, seemingly targeting dynamic resolution scaling to maintain performance. Perhaps we were mistaken? We're only human. We get things wrong, just like anyone else. However, fresh captures told the same story - we're still seeing no difference between performance and quality modes, and in the rare instances where frame-rate does drop on Series X, even this happens identically between the two modes.

Hopefully this will be resolved soon - assuming we're right here and there's not something wrong with our console - but in the meantime, there's certainly a lot more work to do on our coverage, due later this week.

Beyond that, there's plenty more to enjoy in this mammoth edition of DF Direct Weekly. Alex returns to the well of red-hot information that is the latest release of GDC and GTC tech presentations, detailing the latest innovations in the world of path-traced rendering. I spent some time checking out frame generation on the Asus ROG Ally with the release of AMD's Fluid Motion Frames driver update, with mixed feelings about the results, while Tom Morgan directly tackles the Paper Mario 30fps situation. Has Nintendo really remade a 60fps GameCube game as a 30fps Switch release, and if so, why?

Meanwhile, Supporter Q+A continues to deliver! Whatever happened to Xbox's shader feedback sampling? Could frame-gen deliver more than one interpolated frame? What's going on with unstable Core i9 13900K and 14900K processors? That latter point has been a genuine issue for me as my 13900K-based system continually crashes in Adobe Premiere unless I cap power draw. And finally, what would an actual real-life Republic of Gamers look like from a political standpoint?!

At this point it would be remiss of me not to point out that our brilliant Supporter Program delivers early access to every Direct and other content, news updates about what we're up to every week, and also hosts our excellent community where staff members interact daily with backers - the relationship with our audience has only been a good thing. And finally, just a polite reminder that the DF Store Warehouse Sale is still active but ends today, and of course to check out the new Bespoke Collection items too. If they do well perhaps we'll see more merchandising based on words and phrases that frequently pop up in my reviews. See you next week!