Yesterday PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds received its Xbox One ‘Game Preview' launch just ahead of the PC's exit from Early Access. The console launch was set to be a big deal for Microsoft's machine, after all, PUBG has been the biggest game on PC all year long and opening it up to the console market was set to make it even bigger. Unfortunately, technical issues have been left unresolved, meaning PUBG on Xbox One is a bit of a mess.
Battlegrounds doesn't run particularly well on PC systems, but it is certainly playable, which has helped attribute to the game's wide success. On Xbox One, the story is quite different. Digital Foundry put the game through its paces this week, showing frame rates dipping well below the 30fps target on both the base console and the Xbox One X.
Textures on the base Xbox One version are poor all around and the game will often dip below even 20 frames per second. The Xbox One X does a slightly better job and runs at full 4K resolution, but the frame rate still suffers. Digital Foundry reports that average frame rates for a 22 minute long game sit at 25.6 frames per second on Xbox One and 27.6 frames per second on the Xbox One X.
Those are the averages, but we see some pretty bad dips across the map, entering buildings, looting, driving, dropping from the plane and even just being in the waiting lobby all see major dips. In all, the video paints the game as something that would be quite difficult to comfortably play.
The Xbox Game Preview program is Microsoft's equivalent of ‘Early Access' on Steam and things have only just begun, so we can expect to see improvements over time. Still, it is disappointing to see that neither game can quite hold the 30 frames per second target.
KitGuru Says: I have a few close friends who only play on Xbox One, so I was looking forward to picking this up and playing it with them. However, in its current state, it doesn't seem like the game would be particularly fun to play. 30 frames per second is already a huge compromise, but hitting that target for long periods of time appears to be quite rare for the console version.