I don't see how this has impacted the game in an effective or positive way. It was sold as a important gameplay improvement feature. It feels exactly the same albeit slightly quicker to load up if I'm honest. still the tiresome frame drops exist during actual gameplay. Am I missing something? This brings me to another side note. Do the volumetric skies weigh heavily on system usage? can anybody inform me as it feels as though they have a significant impact on tsw 3 routes in particular.
...the addon manager was developed mainly for the purpose of managing addons. In addition to the 64GB limitation of the PS5, such has revealed that the PS4 also has a 70 addon (or something like that) limit. DTG's ingenious move was to circumvent this through clever programming. Of course, since the system performance of the PS4 is not increased and the same CPU and GPU are still installed, the performance or frame rate also remains the same. But the 8GB RAM is relieved, since less is loaded into the main memory, which also ensures fewer system crashes and shortens the loading times a little. That was it for the PS4 by and large, since I still have a PS4 Pro myself, I was able to test it too. In addition, if you have installed a lot of addons, it can easily take 5 minutes for TSW3 to start on the PS4. Volumetric skys: compared to a PS5 or high settings on the PC, the volumetric skys on PS4 have actually been minimized so far in detail that they don't bring 8th gen consoles to their knees. It goes without saying that volumetric skys also devour graphic resources, even on high-end PCs and in high-end settings. One way of relieving the graphics would be to only drive in blue skies and sunshine or in rainy gray in gray, which also minimizes shadow rendering.
What Sparmi said above, and I add: The publisher - for obvious reasons - won´t tell you: Your PS4 can barely handle TSW2, let alone TSW3 with it´s resource hogging gimmicks. The addon manager on my PS4 brought indeed some performance improvements. But at the cost of several layers being eliminated, so that rolling stock e.g. could only be run on its "home route". Added to the already limited train length, AI traffic, drawing/shadowing distances, asset limitations.... etc. There was no way to fire up BML in example. It was unplayable for its heavy traffic table. As much as I hate to write this: Your PS4 is on its knees already. The jump to PS5 is nothing short of a quantum leap. Take my word for it. It´ll cut through BML like a hot knife the butter, even delivering 4k. And for PS5 the addon manager was originally developed. And there it works quite well, disregarding the occasional "beheaded mutant trains". But where there´s light, there´s shadow: You won´t get completely rid of stutters and frame drops here and there, it´s already a TSW feature.
I am a little confused as to why they can't work this knowledge of older systems into the development process in some way given that the older generation console owners and customers do still make up a reasonable percentage of they're custom base. I can play Dirt Rally in ps4 at a flat 60fps that literally flies along and that was made in 2019 and is by no means low resolution graphics. I feel as if it's a lazy narrow minded approach to not figure work around solutions to satisfy the customer base.
...of course it's always the goal to have a happy customer base. But the only effective way to deal with older consoles is to downgrade the graphic options, like volumetric clouds, lower resolution textures, less AI trains or active layers as Pipe has it described. There maybe also missing time to do more optimization work for Playstation consoles, because the TSW player base is made up of one third PS, one third Xbox and one third PC players. Another reason maybe that the most beta testing is done by Xbox consoles and PC.
Good points...I've noticed on the most recent Peak Forest route that there's a noticeable improvement on fps and also better graphic detail but with a slight downgrade on other aspects of ie some trees and telegraph lines. For me this works and is a worthwhile trade off. I definatly think on reflection they are moving in the right direction. Thanks for the response it was helpful to have this extra information.
