Going in-depth with Bloodborne, Digital Foundry posted their performance analysis for the title today, mirroring the positive points we highlighted in our review of the game, but adding that, “as with [From Software’s] previous games, there are also obvious technical issues that go alongside its ambition.”
Playing offline with update 1.01 installed, Digital Foundry says “Bloodborne struggles to run at a smooth frame-rate.” While tests in Central Yarnham and the Hunter’s Dream hub area were met with infreqeuent drops from the 30fps From Software was aiming for, they did experience brief lows of 24fps when there was lots of action happening on-screen.
Going further in-depth, they say the bigger issue is with frame-pacing, with an incorrect ordering of frames causing a stuttering:
Though its 30fps average is technically correct, Bloodborne often produces two unique frames followed by two duplicates – rather than one after another – creating a perception of frame-rate drops throughout. It’s not smooth in motion at all as a result, and frame-time updates swing erratically between 16ms and 66ms – and sometimes higher. It’s an unfortunate oversight by From Software. However, we have seen both Bungie [with Destiny] and EA Gothenburg [with Need for Speed: Rivals] react to the issue in each case, correcting their games soon after launch. We hope this will be the case for Bloodborne as well.
Another issue with Bloodborne is the lengthy load times, which From Software and Sony have admitted they’ll explore fixing in the future. In the spirit of testing, Digital Foundry swapped out the stock PS4 hard drive for a Sandisk Extreme Pro 480GB SSD, and found loading times reduced by about 25% overall.
Here’s their report on Bloodborne loading times based on the PS4 hard drive vs. the SSD:
- First Arrival at Hunter’s Dream – 13.9 seconds (PS4), 10.7 seconds (SSD)
- Warping to Iosefka’s Clinic – 36.9 seconds (PS4), 26.6 seconds (SSD)
- Warping to Central Yarnham Lamp – 41.2 seconds (PS4), 29.9 seconds (SSD)
- Respawn at Central Yarnham – 44.4 seconds (PS4), 31.1 seconds (SSD)
- Return to Hunter’s Dream From Central Yarnham – 12.1 seconds (PS4), 9.6 seconds (SSD)
How has Bloodborne been performing for you?
[Source: Eurogamer]
