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If you were hoping that the Xbox One X’s very powerful hardware under the hood would be used to make games like Destiny 2 run smoother or better or out-perform the PS4 Pro, think again.
It looks like Sony is playing the performance-parity game now that the PS4 Pro has been proven to be the weaker hardware when measured up against the Xbox One X, forcing companies like Bungie to downgrade Destiny 2 on the Xbox One X to match performance specs with the PS4 Pro.
During this year’s E3 Bungie had a sitdown with one of the many hosts of the E3 live-streams, Geoff Keighley, and they revealed that there will be forced parity between the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X for Destiny 2. Geek Culture Podcast posted up the video with Keighley interviewing the Bungie guys where they reveal that the game is hard-locked on all home consoles to 30 frames per second.
Xbox gamers have been begging for a 60fps patch or unlocked frame-rates like the PC version of Destiny 2, but alas it was not meant to happen. We also know that the there are no frame-rate hardlocks within the engine sim-time given that the engine can run Destiny 2 at unlocked frame-rates on PC.
The developers reluctantly had to acquiesce that there is spec parity between the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X editions of Destiny 2, even though the Xbox One X is far and beyond capable of doing things the PS4 Pro could only dream about while jerking off to the possibility of running games at native 4k and 60fps.
The big difference in GPU power, memory bandwidth and CUs really puts the Xbox One X a league above the PS4 Pro. For instance, the PS4 Pro only sports 4.20 Teraflops, where-as the Xbox One X is capable of 6 Teraflops of processing power. The Xbox One X has more shared RAM at 12GB compared to the PS4 Pro’s 8GB of RAM, faster shared RAM access, and enough GPU power to mop the floor with the PS4 Pro, wring out the mop in a bucket, and then mop the floor with it again.
We’ve seen the PS4 Pro struggle to run games like Ghost Recon: Wildlands at 1440p and 30fps. This has led to a lot of people who aren’t fanboys becoming disappointed in the poor man’s technology powering Sony’s half-arsed system. Microsoft, however, has been promoting the Xbox One X as a powerful home console capable of running games at native 4K.
This looks especially pathetic for Sony coming off the 4K gameplay footage that Microsoft is promising for games like BioWare’s Anthem.
However, it should be noted that many of the tech demos and games running at 4K during E3 were doing so on high-end PCs running equivalent hardware to the Xbox One. Microsoft was a bit more upfront about that issue after the debacle that occurred during the E3 2013 event where it was discovered that the Xbox One units at some kiosks were dummy units, and various Xbox One exclusives were actually running on high-end, Windows 8 PCs with an Nvidia GTX Titan.
Anyway, you can look for the pared down and gimped console versions of Destiny 2 to release on September 6th, 2017 on Xbox One, PS4 and PS4 Pro, and the PC version is due to launch on October 24th, 2017. The Xbox One X version won’t be available until the console launches after November 7th, 2017.
