A surprise update recently arrived for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, giving the best of both worlds for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles: a high resolution that looks great on 4K displays, in addition to a 60fps target. And if the consistency of the frame-rate isn’t good enough for you, the legacy 1080p performance mode remains. In our opinion, the revised quality mode is the one to play, and the differences in how PS5 and Xbox Series X deliver it is intriguing.
At the base level, Shadow of the Tomb Raider on Xbox Series consoles now enjoys an official ‘optimised for Series X/S’ patch label, suggesting a native app, while the upgrade is still flagged as a PlayStation 4 title when running on PS5. However, it’s pretty clear that despite the new labelling on Xbox, the game is still running on the older XDK – it hasn’t been ported to the new GDK and so doesn’t tap into the more advanced features of the RDNA 2 GPU. We can ascertain this simply because the game looks and runs exactly as it did via Microsoft’s FPS Boost upgrade: performance is identical, resolutions are the same – 2016p on Series X, 900p on Series S. The difference for Microsoft machines is that a progression bug introduced by FPS Boost is now addressed. In effect, FPS Boost is made official by Square-Enix and the bug is gone.
The changes for PlayStation 5 running the game under backwards compatibility are more interesting. The resolution mode operates at 1872p with a 30fps cap on PS4 Pro and until the patch arrived, it was the same on PlayStation 5. However, Square-Enix has switched things up now: Pro is still running at 1872p but the PS5 runs at 2160p, with performance enhanced via the accelerant that is checkerboard rendering. It’s an interesting choice by the developer – the suggestion is that 60fps could not have been achieved by retaining the original release. Checkerboarding lowers the pixel count but allows the PS5 to deliver a higher level of performance.
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