Digital Foundry has analyzed the video of the “AAAA” game (the more A’s, the higher the development costs and expectations…) presented at the Xbox Games Showcase.

According to Microsoft, we got to see real gameplay in the video, but it’s a highly edited vertical slice of Perfect Dark, which we don’t know if it ran on PC or Xbox Series X. Digital Foundry believes it was on PC, but the performance and resolution of the trailer could also indicate that it could have run on more limited hardware (Xbox Series X), but possibly still on PC since Perfect Dark is not yet optimized. Last possibility: it was run on PC, but with settings that give the same visuals and results as the Xbox Series X.

According to Digital Foundry, the Unreal Engine 5 toolkit is used by The Initiative and Crystal Dynamics. The Lumen lighting technique has been recognized and can be software driven (hardware Lumen is used by few games). There are performance issues. The frame rate is unstable, and after counting pixels they concluded that it was running at around 1440p, and further analysis suggests that what may have happened is that the game scaled up to 1440p and was somewhere between 720p and 960p native resolution.

However, this could be an early vertical slice, so the game is still several years away from release. The changes could be significant by the time Perfect Dark reaches players, and Unreal Engine 5 could also undergo some major changes in the meantime. However, it should be remembered that there is usually a lot of graphical dumbing down between the vertical slice and the store version (ask Ubisoft about this; just think of Watch_Dogs), so it is possible that this will happen here as well.

Perfect Dark is coming to Xbox and PC. No release date is known (and we dare not speculate), but it will be on Xbox Game Pass.

Source: WCCFTech