PlayerUnknown’s Battleground is exceptional for many reasons. It’s tense, new and captivating, which are all tent poles of a good shooter in a space that has been so saturated with the same thing over and over again. One area where it suffers is performance, as many PC players will tell you after a year of painful optimisation and poor updates. And that has made its way to the Xbox One version too, as the Game Preview title struggles to keep things stable.
Digital Foundry did their best to try to accurately test most of the aspects of the online shooter, which is tricky given its dynamic nature. The underlying finding is pretty simple though: PUBG runs terribly on Xbox One, and only slightly better on the Xbox One X. Both seem to be struggling from a lack of CPU overhead here, as the GPUs manage to hit 1080p and a native 4K respectively. The massive player base in a single match, coupled with draw distances, server calculations and more just bring the game to a crawl at times, especially in the opening few moments.
When you’re out and about trying to survive, things even out a bit. A locked 30FPS is a far cry for either version, but at least loot and one on one fights aren’t impacted too deeply. Driving is another sore spot though, with the frame rate diving to a point where drive-by kills seem astronomically difficult. PUBG is all about precision, so having an unstable frame rate like this just throws that out the window entirely.
Still the game is in Game Preview for a reason, but it’s rough in its current state. Rough enough that you should probably think about giving it some time before you hop aboard. It’s tempting I know, but don’t let your first experience with this otherwise great game be soured by poor launch performance.
Last Updated: December 13, 2017
Kikmi
December 13, 2017 at 12:25
A game with obvious performance issues still manages to tout a host of GOTY to its name. What a time to be alive.
Caveshen Rajman
December 13, 2017 at 13:21
“You can’t assess it fairly because it’s still in early access”
RECEIVES MULTIPLE AWARD NOMINATIONS ANYWAY.
Kikmi
December 13, 2017 at 16:19
Yeah, glad we nipped that in the bud
Admiral Chief Silver Dragon
December 13, 2017 at 12:59
TRUE 4K??? Eh @MonsterCheddar:disqus ?
Ottokie
December 13, 2017 at 13:08
True 4K 60 FPS… pffffHAHAHAHAHA
Viper_ZA
December 13, 2017 at 13:17
Ah yes, just another way of milking us for sure. I’ll pick it up on console maybe towards the end of 2018, until then, there’s steam.
Pieter Kruger
December 13, 2017 at 17:14
No chicken dinner for me yet, came as close as 5th, but holy crap it’s stressful! Love these type of games, every game is different, countless hours of entertainment for half the price of a AAA 1P game..
Deceased
December 14, 2017 at 09:48
People want to play the very thing that replaced the “But can it run Crysis” meme on console? XD
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/choofed.gif