Xbox One X dual modes vs. PC modes, what am I missing?

So I play most of my FH4 on a 4K HDR set at 30fps, and because its a horizon game I’m fine with that. But sometimes I get crazy and go into 1080p/60 mode. Other than the slightly noticeable dip in resolution I find it hard to notice a ton of differences in the pictures, except that…to me…the lighting looks better on the 4k/30 version, or perhaps its the contrast, or perhaps its my imagination…

So for comparison I plugged in my PC which has FH4 in 4k/60 with all options maxxed…and I swear the thing I’m reacting to isnt the drop to 1080p from 4k but really the fact that 30fps is smooth enough but feels cinematic with more motion blur versus 4k’s crisp Soap Opera Effect happening.

This got me wondering…did anyone ever come out and say what is actually different between the 4k/30 and 1080p/60 modes on xbox one x? Or what those settings would be on a PC?

I read once that in 4K mode the details on cars are set higher and that car headlights cast shadows at night (an effect, I might add, which sometimes looks terrible as shadows don’t render properly and can sometimes appear like blacked-out 3D objects) but honestly figured someone here would know the straight dope.

While I can always play at 4k/60 the truth is it’s just a little easier in my setup to run via the Xbox One X so 4k/30 or 1080p/60 are perfectly viable. Sure 4k/60 is great but the question still remains for me…does anyone know the actual differences in-game besides the resolution change and, perhaps, a turning-off of the Motion Blur <short/long/off> setting in PC terms?

Thanks.

I think I saw something in the past that said what settings on PC give you the same quality as Xbox, you might be able to find it if you search the web.

For me, having had an Xbox One X and now playing on PC:

Xbox One X 4k/30 = unplayable. I just found it absolutely horrible.

Xbox One X 1080p/60 = perfectly playable, but the aliasing and lack of resolution were always very noticeable to me, though it was probably less than ideal that I was using a 4k screen, so something somewhere might have been upscaling poorly.

PC 1080p/60 on a 1080p screen. I can do this with maxed out settings, i.e. beyond the Ultra preset, and it looks a lot better than I remember it looking on the Xbox One X. I have even run it in 4k using AMD virtual resolution so the game runs in 4k, but the graphics driver downsamples to 1080p, and it then looks even better, giving a nigh on perfect 1080p image that is much better than the Xbox One X’s 1080/60 mode.

PC 4k/60 on a 4k screen. This looks absolutely amazing, even with just High image quality. Xbox Series X should be able to do 4k/60 with Ultra, or even better than Ultra, settings, and I think people are going to be blown away by how good FH4 will look on a 4k screen with the Series X.

Yeah I was looking but I guess I haven’t seen it…ideally I’d like to know what changes between the 4k/1080p 30/60 modes on Xbox One X. It’s more than just the resolution that changes I think, DF did a video on it but it was vague and high level from memory…

I disagree that 4k/30 is unplayable, but everyone has a different threshold here and if you are accustomed to PC gaming at 60fps I totally get it, going from 60 to 30 takes a few minutes of adjustment but after that few minutes its as smooth as every other locked 30fps game is…and I prefer the (naturally) 4k render to the 1080p render, but I wish I could figure out why…its not just distance graphics cuz those are just trees and mountains anyhow in most cases, its something else, which I can’t yet put my finger on.

The more Post Processing a game uses for blur, etc, the less resolution tends to matter…but in the end I wish I could still get a definitive answer on the differences between the 4k/1080p modes on X…if it IS just resolution then my mind is playing tricks on me.

It’s not so much the smoothness as the blurriness that I couldn’t stand. I don’t know if the game is actively adding blurring that can’t be turned off, but I just found it absolutely awful in both FH3 and FH4 in 4k on Xbox One X.

I don’t actually understand why Xbox One X can’t do 4k/60 for both FH3 and FH4. Xbox One X has 6 TFLOPS, but a GTX 1660 Super has only 5 TFLOPS and can hold 4k/60 in high quality (averages 75fps for the benchmark).

We already know that the performance mode uses lower quality settings, but I can’t tell you exactly what those are. At a guess, somewhere around medium to high equivalent on PC.

In my opinion there is not a very significant difference between the different quality settings, and more to the point, when you are racing and playing and experiencing the game rather than ‘looking at it’ like it’s an oil painting, you don’t notice these differences much or at all. The framerate on the other hand is night and day.

This is another reason that I’m not excited about ray-tracing. You don’t notice these things when you’re playing. In fact when you drive in real life, you don’t notice those type of things either. Other cars aren’t shiny glossy mirrors, real life isn’t like that. These effects are exaggerated to justify them being there, so the marketers can play them up to get you to think you’re getting something special when you aren’t.

Search for the Digital Foundry analysis. However, I will say that Performance Mode in FH4 on the Xbox One X isn’t very graphically impressive, as you can run the game with better quality in lesser GPUs. It’s at 4K that the Xbox One X truly shines. IIRC the Quality Mode is more or less equal to High PC settings, a little less in certain things and a little more in others.

It’s the cpu holding it back. I tried the 1080/60 mode for a day or so and I actually prefer 4k/30. The lower frames don’t bother me and it looks much nicer.

I play on an Xbox One S, on a 720P 32" TV

Picture quality never really bothered me, so will be happy with an Xbox Series S and keeping the same TV for another couple of years.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The main difference between 4k mode and performance mode is the lighting quality.

60 fps is smooth but after 4k mode on a 4k HDR TV it feels like loading up a 360 game, obviously its not it’s still reasonable but it is noticeably of worse quality.

If you don’t have a 4k HDR TV it’s probably not as noticeable but the lighting seems like old PC games I used to play where the car headlamps didn’t shine they were a flat texture designed to look like a shining headlamp. When you pressed the brake a different brighter texture would be swapped in for rear lights. It’s not that low quality but definitely feels flat and 2 dimensional. Lights don’t seem to shine, also you lose the very cool real time lighting effects from the headlamps when you pass a fence or other object and it’s shadow appears in the beam.

The other bit is night is quite poorly represented in none HDR in my opinion because there’s not the range of blacks. As result the lowest level of light is quite high. In HDR night is darker but because there is a good range of blacks you can still see and effects like moonlight, and sunrise/sunset are extremely nice indeed.

The other thing I miss in none HDR is that each season seems to have it’s own quality of light which doesn’t come across.

So er TL:DR, the main difference moving to X1X is the lighting quality which you lose in 60fps…as it doesn’t support the full range of HDR effects.

I always get a kick out of people calling a smooth realistic frame rate “the soap opera effect” lol. A game isn’t a movie, it’s trying to emulate how you see things in real life. Could you imagine walking around and everything was moving as if it was 30fps. Slightly fast slideshows aren’t my idea of how anything should be viewed. Movies only get away with it because they have a natural blur but even they look way more realistic once you get used to them at 60fps. Games just look messy and unrealistic at 30fps. I can literally only watch them for about 2 minutes max before I have to turn them off at that frame rate.

You realize the term was created to easily summarize the difference between 24-30fps versus 60, right? Many casual gamers, to this day, don’t understand why some games look ‘different’ than others…but if they are of a certain age they know that Soap Operas on TV look “Live” while everything else looks “like TV”…so its a quick analogy.