So, hopefully someone from DTG can provide a quick easy answer to this - In light of the recent debacle with New World's menus frying certain brands of RTX 3090, a lot more attention has been on a particular curiosity of an old quirk of some games when it comes to their interactions with the pretty beefy hardware we have nowadays, and I thought I'd weigh in on how this has been bugging me for a while on Series X. There's a truly ABSURD number of backcompat games from the XBox One with which, when running on Series X and idling in the menus, the Series X's fan ramps up immensely as the console's temperature rockets. This can run to ludicrous extremes when compared to the console's virtually inaudible behaviour when running the latest raytraced games such as Doom Eternal or Metro Exodus.. Once ingame and playing, this menu thermal issue goes away fairly quickly. Best I can figure, these games have the common issue of an uncapped FPS in the menus, since nobody bothered sticking an FPS cap there. Meanwhile, once ingame, they stick to a 60fps cap. TSW2 is one of these games in which if I linger in certain menus for more than 30 seconds, the console's fan begins attempting to achieve some kind of speed record, but where it goes away the instant I start a service on one of the lines. So, might the dedicated Series X/S version be addressing this behaviour of the backcompat versions, via some kind of FPS lock on the main menu screens for routes where this behaviour is occurring?
Yeah, but this is about the opposite of issues like low FPS and stutter that tend to be the focus of such updates, it's about the console going full pelt to try and push the highest FPS it can possibly attain in a game's menus, causing the system to run way hotter than it should ever need to on a menu screen, wasting a bunch of electricity in the process while the game ought to be idling. My solution so far has been to suspend the game if I get up between services to go answer a call of nature, boil the kettle, or whatever, and then pull it back out of quick resume once I get back. Luckily the custom RX 6800-adjacent graphics hardware in the Series X doesn't yet seem to have the same flaw that batch of now-bricked RTX 3090s had when it comes to thermal runaways from this behaviour, but it's still not great how many games push the system's capabilities harder in the menu screens than the actual game does As I said, it's mostly an issue with last-gen games, and devs making titles for the new gen of consoles and modern PC hardware seem to be deliberately taking this into account and avoiding it by fps locking their menus *glances sideways at amazon*, but I just hoped for clarification from someone at DTG that this was indeed one of the things we could expect in the new console versions.
