I recently invested in a new 1440p monitor to partly use with my Xbox (Series S). One of the games I was most excited to try was Train Sim World. Unfortunately it’s only made it worse. There’s 2 options to choose from in the TSW settings; ‘HD’ or ‘4K’. Well, HD I’m presuming is locked at 1080p, which for some reason looks atrocious when I’m running the screen in 1440p. Everything has a slight blur, it’s like looking into the world without my glasses. So, try 4K then. Wow, that looks very nice, but now my game is sat at 20fps and the stuttering is unbearable (ok that’s a preference thing but regardless, it’s far from a pleasant experience in this day and age). Does anyone else have experience with 1440p on Xbox? Does it always look this awful? Am I going to have to switch back to 1080p every time I want to play TSW? (every other game I play looks fantastic now, and that’s without me having to fiddle around with settings within the game). Definitely a little disappointed, and has quashed my excitement for tomorrow’s release.
I've been saying forever that the console version needs a 1440p option. Series consoles have supported VRR out of the box for the last four years. PS5 eventually got it added. A 1440p option could run with dips into that VRR window on Series X and look much nicer than the 1080p setting.
I have a 1440p. The 4K mode shouldn’t be an issue. The Xbox detects the 1440p monitor and downscales to that. Regardless of what the games internal resolution is. Any stuttering or fps issues are the general issues that come from TSW being poorly optimized. 1080p when I tried it (albeit not for long) looked terrible and didn’t seem to run any better than 4K.
Most games on modern consoles scale resolution up and down as you play to target an optimal performance level. Very few games run at internal “4K” resolution even when the console is technically outputting 4K. Especially not 60fps games. I am not sure if TSW does this but I have a feeling no considering how terrible the performance can be. It runs worse than any other game I have on my PS5 and Series X.
Are you sure? On 1080p I get a solid 60fps most of the time, I can’t believe that switching to 1440p can tank the game so badly. It really feels to me like TSW is still running itself in 4K, regardless of what the screen is showing me
It’s a shame to see that the game is clearly horrendously optimised, whatever the reason for that is. And i agree, nothing else comes close to the poor performance of TSW. Even flight sim holds 30fps on the little Series S, regardless of what you throw at it.
TSW does not to my knowledge have any kind of dynamic resolution scaling. On PC you can manually set a percentage of your full selected resolution to render at, be that less than or greater than 100%, depending how much you want to push your GPU, but part of the reason the game has such notable FPS drops is probably in some small part down to a lack of anything like this when it starts putting a heavier load on the system, it cannot claw back some performance by reducing the output resolution like many games do. It's probably also why consoles have increasingly been seeing LOD pop issues as the system has fewer outlets for reducing that load temporarily. When you choose the performance or quality mode on Series X you are picking 4k or 1080p. So on a 1440p display on the Quality setting on XBox, you're getting what effectively amounts to SSAA due to rendering at a greater resolution than your display has, while on performance, you get a very obviously lower resolution than your monitor's resolution and a framerate that (mostly) stays at 60.
Flight Sim is actually a pretty impressive title on XBox, as it will detect if your system is running on a display with VRR enabled and if so, allow you to uncap the framerate, it can go pretty high in the right conditions. While it will still struggle buzzing low over the rooftops of downtown Manhattan, it can easily exceed 60 when flying high taking in the Australian outback. I find 45-50 is a pretty common average for me in Flight Sim on XBox, which looks a lot better than having a 30 cap, but obviously would be no good on a Non-VRR display. This neatly explains just how much headroom it has on 60Hz displays for sticking above that 30fps cap.
