The recently released remake of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons reportedly struggles with performance on consoles, especially on Xbox Series S.
A detailed analysis by Digital Foundry notes that the game’s dynamic resolution has the ability to drop much lower than each console is capable of, with no versions ever hitting their maximum resolution.
Like many games, the Brothers remake’s Quality mode – which locks the frame rate to 30 frames per second to increase visual detail – makes use of dynamic resolution, which allows the game to drop its resolution in particularly busy scenes to keep it running smoothly.
Digital Foundry’s analsysis finds that the Xbox Series X and PS5 versions have a dynamic resolution in Quality mode that ranges between highs of 1620p and lows of 1260p, notably lower than the native 4K resolution (2160p) both systems can achieve.
“4K may be the target here, but it’s rarely if ever in sight,” Digital Foundry’s Thomas Morgan says.
Meanwhile, the Xbox Series S version has a resolution that ranges between 454p and 720p, meaning at times it can render at lower than standard definition, though Morgan notes that “in Quality mode it does tend to rest at the upper end, at 720p”.
The game also has a Performance mode which, as in other games, attempts to increase frame rate (usually up to 60fps) at the expense of resolution.
In this mode, the Xbox Series X and PS5 versions typically render at 1080p, but despite their focus on framerate neither console hits 60fp, except for one section which takes place in a dungeon.
Morgan notes that in the game’s first town area, neither Xbox Series X nor PS5 come close to hitting 60fps, but that Series X “has a consistent frame rate lead at every point”.
The Series S version, meanwhile, maintains its same range of 454p to 720p, but this time it trends towards the lower end of the scale, and hits even lower frame rates than the other consoles (but does still hit 60fps in the dungeon).
Ultimately, Morgan recommends that players choose Quality mode for the higher resolutions, because the game’s slow pace means a drop to 30fps doesn’t make a huge difference to gameplay.
The original Brothers was released in 2013. It was written and directed by Swedish-Lebanese filmmaker Josef Fares – in what was his first game in collaboration with Starbreeze – who would later go on to found It Takes Two studio Hazelight.
The remake has been rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5, with every element “painstakingly rebuilt from the ground up for the most immersive story possible”, according to publisher 505 Games.
