The PC rendition of Game Pass received a boost last week when it was reported that its revised ports of Platinum Games’ Nier Automata and Tango Game Works’ The Evil Within were actually improved over the Steam equivalents. It was seemingly good news for PC gamers: two critically acclaimed titles received sub-optimal PC versions, and while limiting improved versions to Game Pass only is problematic, at least it’s a step in the right direction… or is it? In our tests, we noted some content improvements on The Evil Within – albeit with a huge caveat attached – while the underlying performance issues do not seem to be any different at all on the Game Pass builds. Nier Automata also new features, but performance issues unresolved since launch remain untouched.
Let’s begin with Nier Automata, where the story is relatively simple. It’s a game designed to be ran at 60 frames per second, but the original PC version has a broken frame-rate limiter, meaning that frame drops are commonplace throughout the entire experience and a locked 60fps is impossible out of the box. On top of that, anti-aliasing is actually controlled by the ambient occlusion setting, which actually features a bunch of post-processing effects, including (bizarrely) temporal anti-aliasing.
MSAA is available separately, but it’s a performance hog that breaks the game’s LOD transitions, making them pop in rather than fading in more gently, as they do in standard the post-process pipeline. On top of that, the non-tweakable global illumination setting is inexplicably heavy on GPU performance with little visual benefit, while many other aspects of the post-process pipeline run at quarter resolution 900p – the same as PlayStation 4. Pretty much the entire laundry list of problems in this title can be fixed by the Kaldadien ‘Far Mod’, which does an excellent job in addressing the issues and boosting performance significantly by tweaking global illumination to a notional ‘high’ setting that looks pretty much exactly the same.
While underwhelming overall, the Game Pass version (ported by QLOC) does deliver some new features. AMD’s FidelityFX sharpening is added (and turned on by default) while UI texture upscaling is added. We didn’t test HDR specifically, but that’s also in. However, as far as we can tell, everything else is exactly the same as the Steam version. None of the Far Mod’s tweaks are included and the frame-rate limiter is still broken, meaning a locked 60fps is not possible out of the box. QLOC mentioned a new borderless full-screen mode in its patch notes, but based on our tests, this is functionally identical to the Steam version’s standard output. Because Game Pass titles are Windows Apps, the user has no access whatsoever to the files and therefore, mods will not work. Put simply, it’s a missed opportunity and you’re still better off playing the modded version on Steam for the best experience.