Why ‘Destiny 2’ Is 30 FPS On PS4 And Xbox One Plus Has No Dedicated Servers
The Destiny 2 gameplay reveal came with several revelations about the shooter coming to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One this September with the PC version coming sometime later. While much of the news about the game is how Bungie made changes in response to community wishes, there are a couple of items fans will find disappointing.
Bungie Game Director Luke Smith and Project Lead Mark Noseworthy spoke with the IGN Fireteam podcast at the event and were asked some pointed questions about console performance and dedicated servers. The first big piece of news from the chat is consoles, even the PlayStation 4 Pro, will remain at 30 frames per second (fps) despite the PC platform being granted uncapped framerates. A lack of horsepower is the reason.
“The console, the PS4 Pro is super powerful, but it couldn’t run our game at 60. Our game’s this rich physics simulation where collision of players, networking, etc, and like, it wouldn’t run,” Smith explained. “Not enough horsepower there yet.”
“But there’s tons of GPU power in the PS4 Pro,” Noseworthy added. “That’s why we’re doing 4K, right? It’s on the CPU side. Destiny’s simulation, like we have more AI, more monsters in an environment with physically simulated vehicles and characters and projectiles, and it’s part of the Destiny magic, like that, like 30 seconds of fun, like coming around a corner and throwing a grenade, popping a guy in the head, and then you add like 5, 6, 7 other players in a public event; that is incredibly intensive for hardware.”
Undiscussed was the Xbox Scorpio as Bungie cannot officially talk about Destiny 2 on the Xbox One successor until after its given an official name, release date, and price reveal at E3 in June. The new console will have a beefier GPU and a CPU, just like the PS4 Pro. The difference is Microsoft made additional customizations to the CPU and increased the memory to 12 GB of GDDR5 along with some other customizations. Whether that’s enough to reach 60 fps in Destiny 2 remains to be seen.
For comparison, the PC hardware used to run Destiny 2 at 4K and 60 fps during the gameplay reveal event Thursday included Intel i7-7700k CPU, a NVidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPU, and 16GB of Ram.
The second bit of disappointing news is the confirmation there will be no dedicated servers for Destiny 2 multiplayer. That means multiplayer matches will be hosted on player machines, just as they are done today.
“It’s just not an investment that we made for Destiny 2. I understand there’s certainly a desire for it,” Smith said before explaining the reasons why PVP matchmaking and network performance during matches will be better in the sequel.
“You know the smaller team format, although it’s one person bigger in the Trials case for sure here, in the smaller team format in general it’s easier for us to find tighter matches. And we’re also going to re-change the parameters for matchmaking, to refocus on connection quality instead of like Trials win matching. We’re going to change a bunch of parameters to focus on giving people a better network experience.”
Destiny fans will have to wait until the beta this summer to find out just how true that is. The issue is running player hosted Crucible matches leaves the match connection quality to the whims of connection quality of the host. Additionally, those with bad connections can ruin a match by glitching around the map, which is why some cheaters use lag switchers to induce a bad connection for themselves.
If Bungie can show Destiny 2 competitive multiplayer matches can run fine without dedicated servers, then the furor over a lack of dedicated servers to die down. The beta this summer will surely put that to a test.
[Featured Image by Bungie / Activision]
