Fallout 4 has some issues running on Xbox One, but it’s possible to get around them.
Both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of Bethesda’s new role-playing game Fallout 4 struggle to consistently maintain their target frame rates. But Xbox One players also have to cope with a strange stuttering effect that can cause the game to pause when entering a new area or switching weapons. It’s possible to lessen, or even eliminate this stuttering, though, as long as you have a faster hard drive and an external caddy at hand.
Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry reports that mounting a solid-state drive (SSD) to an external caddy and copying the game across from your Xbox One console completely eliminates the stuttering problem. Even using a faster 7200rpm as opposed to the stock 5400rpm one improves the stuttering issue, but it won’t get rid of it completely. These findings reinforce Digital Foundry’s initial opinion that assets are struggling to stream from the Xbox One’s HDD, despite a weighty 28GB game install.
Moving Fallout 4 to an external drive isn’t an ideal solution, of course, and console gamers shouldn’t have to go to such lengths to get a new game to work properly. It’s really up to Bethesda to work out a fix for these problems that doesn’t require new hardware, and it’ll be interesting to see if future patches can address the stuttering issue successfully.
Digital Foundry also tested an internal SSD on the PlayStation 4 (which doesn’t accept external storage solutions), but this didn’t affect performance greatly, only really improving load times.
“We suspect that we’ll have to wait for an upcoming patch to resolve the stutter issue in the Xbox One version of Fallout 4,” said the report. “But from a technological standpoint, we don’t see any reason why it can’t be done: PS4 and Xbox One have very similar storage solutions, and the Sony platform is unaffected. Our only concern here is that Xbox One loading times from the stock internal drive are consistently longer than they are on PS4’s, suggesting that in the case of Fallout 4, there is an inherent PS4 advantage here that may extend to the background streaming tech.”