Wow, that came out of nowhere! A couple of days ago, Respawn Entertainment surprised us by releasing a next-gen patch for its impressive Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, bringing with it specific upgrades that tap into of the horsepower provided by the trio of new consoles. It’s not a full next-gen patch as such – similar to Cyberpunk 2077, it’s simply tweaking last-gen code in order to get higher frame-rates from the new machines, leveraging the CPU in particular to give us a much closer lock to 60 frames per second.
The patch is also interesting in that Respawn Entertainment released patch notes that tell us almost everything we need to know about the technical enhancements. Frame-rates are increased across the board, post-processing quality is improved and resolutions are increased. The actual range of upgrades actually varies from machine to machine for reasons that aren’t quite clear, but we would expect that this has something to do with the capabilities of Sony and Microsoft’s cross-generational SDKs as opposed to the capabilities of the machines themselves.
Xbox Series X appears to get the more fully featured range of upgrades. Of the three consoles, it is the only one to retain both the quality and performance modes of the last-gen versions – and both are improved. Quality mode targets 30fps with a dynamic resolution window of 1512p to 2160p, delivering the cleanest image quality and highest consistency of any console version – albeit with a lower frame-rate cap. Its performance mode aims for 60fps, achieving it for the most part with a 1080p to 1440p dynamic resolution range.
By contrast, PlayStation 5 gets a single mode, targeting 60fps and doing so at a locked 1200p with 1440p post-process buffers. It’s a more limited upgrade bearing in mind that standard back-compat on the existing last-gen code delivered 1080p, but the extra pixel count and post-processing precision is certainly welcome. Finally, there’s Xbox Series S – it’s a huge upgrade over the One S version, again targeting 60fps. No resolution metrics are provided in the patch notes, but we’re seeing a dynamic resolution window in the range of 720p to 900p, leaning into Unreal Engine 4’s temporal upscaling to give the perception of a higher pixel count, most effective in more static scenes.