News - Call Of Duty Warzone 2. 0 - Ps4/pro/xbox One/one X Showdown - Last-gen Competitively Disadvantaged
With with Warzone 2 servers now live for a couple of weeks, it's clear the newer consoles, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S, all easily run the game at 60 frames per second. It's a robust experience, honestly, tightly optimized to their Zen 2 cores and their RDNA2 technology, and playing to the strengths of Rapid SSD access speeds for streaming in the terrain of our Mars.
In Warzone 2's new setting, it just flies through; in fact, even 120 hertz is feasible outside of the series' version, but still, a question hangs over the state of last-gen consoles for a majority of console users; after all, the PS4 and Xbox One are still the go-to options, with a huge install base that has to be catered to, so today.
I really wanted to know just how these older machines hold up if we include the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro as well in a four-way split, and if any of these consoles are actually competitive. With PC or newer hardware in frame rate or in settings, and how deep do the cutbacks go for the base Xbox One version, especially, let's find out.
Let's kick off with the base PS4 here. Technically speaking, the PS4 is very nicely optimized for both the campaign and Team Deathmatch modes of the core Modern Warfare 2 game, and all signs point to it being the target system here for locking on to 1080p at 60 fps. Sure, the payoff is imperfect; there are still drops below 60 fps in the campaign, but really, it's respectful given its 2013 hardware now.
If we switch over to Warzone 2, well. The priorities change quite drastically here. Yes, the initial airplane drop sequence absolutely hits 60 fps, and equally, the 2v2 Gulag sections run without a hitch, but once you've deployed your parachute once, all of our Mazarus assets—the textures, grass, and geometry—stream in-app.
Pace yourself well on this nine-year-old machine. There's no holding down a lot of 60 fps texture; pop-in is hard to ignore right at the start. I will say, but most glaring is the fact we're staring at a range of 40 to 60 fps, wavering up and down the graph, and at times dipping into the 30s as well.
Your landing spot in Almasra affects how deep these frame rate dips go, but in general, PS4 rarely even glances at the top 60. Mark Another interesting change from the core Modern Warfare 2 experience is the PS4's native resolution, which for Warzone 2 hits lower extremes. Temporal upsampling is used as before alongside dynamic scaling up to 1080p, but the absolute lower bounds now appear to go to 960, halving the resolution on both axes where in the campaign it was just horizontally.
In truth, the result is far from clean. It lacks definition at a distance for picking out oncoming players; this is obviously a disadvantage next to what a PS5 or Series X player sees. No doubt the TAA The reconstructions all do better than you'd expect given the sheer range of pixel counts from 540p up to 1080p and figures in between, but only so much is possible to salvage detail from a low resolution based image, and it does have an impact on visibility.
Base Xbox One is next, and yes, inevitably both frame rates and resolutions take a turn for the worse. Exact measurements are tricky to lock down, but Xbox One's S version in our case renders to a 900p Target worse, still the absolute lower bounds of the DRS take us to around 800 by 450, a quarter of the target resolution, before being reconstructed.
No surprise, it leaves us with this very muddy, very undefined image, especially when scoping across the horizon. In fact, if we switch to a comparison with the base PS4 for a moment, one of the first casualties really is in image quality. Clarity, Shadows, Textures, Foolish Density All of these settings are identical to PS4; there are no specific lower-than-low Xbox One presets.
In other words, it's just that the resolution takes a noticeable hit. Shimmer on grass noise on fine texture work is much more abundant, and in general, it does the impact of almazra at a distance where there's just not enough pixel detail to do it justice. There's a second problem with Xbox One as well.
Well, before we get to that, there's the obvious texture popping, just like on PS4; okay, these are mostly right at the start of a war zone matchup after landing the jump. It's temporary, but still pretty glaring. Equally frustrating for Xbox One is, in my experience, the audio cutting out certain channels of the mix, the music, and the ambience effects completely for a few seconds until the world has loaded in more.
All of this pales in comparison though to the point I was getting to, which is the state of the frame rate here. On average, we see a full 10 frames per second less than the base PS4 and sometimes more. The overall range jumps down a level to between 30 and 50 FPS plus. The Xbox One introduces screen tearing right at the top of the display, as we see on the 1X version 2 and even the 2v2 Gulag sections barely clearing the gap to 60.
So for any base Xbox One player, downloading wasn't too on a whim as a free-to-play game, and of course, it's hard to believe they'd be really impressed by the results here. I've got to say this low frame rate has a real tangible impact on input latency 2 while turning and picking up weapons, to such a point that you're at a severe disadvantage playing against any other console user in reaction speeds like Xbox Series X.
On that note, here's how bass Xbox One Compares Two Microsoft's best machine Using spectator mode to match gameplay clarity in motion shadow resolution, grass density, and even texture quality, it's a remarkable downgrade. Warzone 2, which obviously runs on Xbox One in the loosest sense of the word, does obviously run; it's just that its Jaguar CP cores are working hard to stream the world in even with the drop in settings like Foliage, where the resolution is paired down to a dynamic 900p and the frame rate is far from the trademark 60 fps.
60fps Call of Duty is known for its long runs, but it's just that it's almost at the stage where a 30 FPS cap would make more sense. The two premium last-gen consoles, the 1X and PS4 Pro, fare much better than you'd expect. PS4 Pro in particular holds up remarkably well, in fact with the best frame rate of the last-gen machines.
We saw it in the campaign mode, and it's true of War Zone 2 as well. The PS4 Pro runs between 50 and 60 fps, sometimes lower, which, all told, gives us a smoother experience while running on foot than I'd expected. Also remarkable is that the PS4 Pro does it at a dynamic 1512p, which in my experience tends to drop on the horizontal axis to 1536 by 1512, though lower may be possible.
