Redfall was a key 2023 Microsoft exclusive that didn’t land especially well with players or critics. Many aspects of the title were controversial, from the sparsely populated open world to the relatively basic quest design, but the title’s performance was perhaps the most obvious missed target. All preview materials for Redfall showcased 60fps gameplay, with relatively unambitious visuals, and yet the final game targeted 30fps on consoles, with occasional frame-rate issues and stutters as well. A 60fps performance mode was promised and five months later, it has finally arrived, but how well does it work, and what the rest of the game’s issues?
Before we dive into the new performance mode, I wanted to go over some of the more glaring issues that Redfall presented at launch. The title didn’t exactly ship in tip-top shape, with obvious graphical problems that probably should have been addressed before the game arrived. Perhaps the worst issue was the game’s problems with texture loading. Essentially, Redfall had issues loading in high-resolution textures, which was most obvious with decal type textures. The high-resolution asset would eventually load in, but until then you’d be presented with a texture with fidelity straight out of a PS2-era title. It looked like the lowest texture LOD was being rendered in-game, and the proper high-resolution variant would take a long time to emerge – sometimes as long as 18 seconds, based on our testing.
This has now been completely fixed, as far as I can tell. These decal textures now load in with a very high-resolution asset at a relatively far distance from the player, so you’re never exposed to these low-res textures at close range. To be clear, this was almost certainly not intended behaviour in the first place, but whatever bug was creating this problem has now been fixed. Crosswalk markings, graffiti, and painted illustrations all render without any issues whatsoever. However, some of the game’s textures are still a touch low-resolution even in their highest-quality LOD, just like the launch version of the game, so some asset issues still remain.
