Dead Rising 3 Averages 20 Frames Per Second On Xbox One

The frame stutter that attacked a Joystiq writer when they were previewing Dead Rising 3 for the Xbox One was somewhat of a one-off encounter. ShackNews also made mention of the frame stutter, but the rest of the Doritocracy played it mum... until today. Digital Foundry dropped a truth bomb that helps bring back the lighter fluid to the console flame wars.

Previously we wrote about the frame stuttering in Dead Rising 3, noting that even outside of vehicles the game was dropping frames, though doing so without screen tear. Many readers noted it was potentially just a streaming issue, but as Digital Foundry notes, it's a heck of a lot more than buffer speeds failing to stream the content in an efficient manner.

What we have with Dead Rising 3 is a game that has been labeled by the kings of console gaming pixel counting as something that fits the ilk of a frame purger. The game drops more frames than Tupac drops albums postmortem.

According to Digital Foundry...

“Boss fights and side-missions here tend to be much less of a strain for the hardware, but once again, exiting a building to be met with an undead parade still gives us that unwanted drop to 20fps.”“It's also unfortunate that the game runs at far from the promised locked 30fps - rather a chugging 20fps during the zombie action while out in the big city. Compared to the shaky E3 build seen just months ago this is still a respectable step forward, and of course many of the game's technical shortcomings come with the unique circumstances of meeting a hardware launch.”

20 frames per second? That's like the geriatric speeds in which GTA IV ran on the PlayStation 3. That's just unacceptable... though, again, it has been said that the Xbox One is the PlayStation 3 of this generation, and meeting the demands of the new generation with a launch title barely maintaining 20 frames – and at times, Digital Foundry admitting the game dips down to an embarrassingly low 16 frames per second – is an embarrassment to the term “next-gen”.

One of the first comments on the article sums up a lot of thoughts that spawn from the revelation of Dead Rising 3's poor performance, noting...

“Now the inevitable questions will centre around how much better it would of run if it had been on the PS4.... “

Well that's a good question... it would probably run the way it was supposed to.

As noted in our article about Xbox One games running on Nvidia-powered PCs at E3, it speaks volumes when gamers see a title at E3 and then realize it's not quite like its grand-stage presentation when they get it home, unwrap it from the plastic and start chugging through the play experience at 20 poverty-ridden frames per second.

The good part about this news is that gamers have an honest take on the performance of Dead Rising 3 for Digital Foundry. Props for Eurogamer telling it like it is. Also, despite this news confirming the poor performance Dead Rising 3, at least it's offset by the Xbox One version of Call of Duty: Ghosts receiving some positive criticism from the Doritocracy.