Bethesda’s FPS Boost: The Fight Between Framerate and Resolution Comes to a Head

Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, with a doubled FPS boost, without any patching. Almost sounds too good to be true on console, right? Well, that’s because it is.

To officially play these games at a desirable framerate on Xbox Series X, you have to choose between 4k resolution and 60fps, because if you choose the latter you’ll find yourself playing at 1080p.

Why? There could be many reasons, although we know that a 60FPS mod does the trick with far less of an impact on image quality. It may be the added effort going into framerate is doing a number on the game’s resolution scaling, or it might be that the “patch” only applies to the base game, and not the One X version. Those are the theories floating around on the web, but the result is the same.

But in the greater scheme of things, this tech automatically adds a choice between resolution and framerate – and it’s interesting to see the results.

FPS Boost

A number of Bethesda games were given the magic FPS Boost treatment earlier this week: Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Skyrim, Prey and Dishonored. Without editing any code – just by using some kinda of software-based voodoo – all these games now run at 60fps instead of 30fps.

PC people might be sniggering into their gold-plated goblets right now, but obviously it’s a big deal on console. It means all those incredible games from the Xbox One generation could potentially reach up to 120fps without the need for developers to intervene. Remember all the port begging for the original Red Dead Redemption? Imagine if Valve could’ve just waved a magic wand and suddenly it was there. This feels a bit like that at times.

But there’s a downside. Two of the games – Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 – run at 1080p when you turn on the frame doubler. For this reason, it’s not done by default – you have to go into the settings and select 60fps. Honestly, the second you click it and reboot the game you can see the difference, especially inside.

Is it worth it? That’ll depend almost entirely on your preference, and on your set-up. If you’ve got a 1080p screen, it’s a no-brainer. If you’ve got a 4k screen, it’s less easy of a choice.

Luckily there’s an unofficial way of doing it. But what happens next? Do Microsoft tinker further, leave it down to player choice or maybe they wait for that resolution booster we heard about last year (it was demonstrated on the Gears remaster). Combining the two could hypothetically solve this issue, although without knowing exactly what the issue is we don’t know for sure.

Conclusion

My first thoughts on FPS Boost is that it’s an incredible piece of work. Digital Foundry said Prey and Dishonored are well worth checking out.

But for some the need to compromise might be too much. For those people, I hope a solution is found sooner rather than later.