‘There’s not enough horsepower there’
When it was revealed that Destiny 2 wouldn’t be 60FPS on the PlayStation Pro, it made perfect sense. I mean, with the series leaning so heavily into PVP, how bad would it be if Pro owners could benefit from an enhanced framerate while normal PS4 users were locked at 30FPS? But as it turns out, the PS4 Pro can’t even run Destiny 2 at 60FPS, period.
Speaking to Digital Foundry, Destiny 2 bosses Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy mused on the possibility, but stated that they just couldn’t get it to work: “The console, the PS4 Pro is super powerful, but it couldn’t run our game at 60. Our game’s this rich physics simulation where collision of players, networking, etc, and like, it wouldn’t run… [there’s] not enough horsepower there.”
While Noseworthy does explain that the GPU is powerful enough to push 4K upscaling, the CPU side is the one that’s lacking. He explains, “Destiny’s simulation, like we have more AI, more monsters in an environment with physically simulated vehicles and characters and projectiles, and it’s part of the Destiny magic, like that, like 30 seconds of fun, like coming around a corner and throwing a grenade, popping a guy in the head, and then you add like five, six, seven other players in a public event; that is incredibly intensive for hardware.”
As someone who played Destiny since 2014, 60FPS was on pretty much every player I met’s wishlist. When the Pro came out folks speculated that there would be an update that would allow a better framerate for just PVE, but now we know that is not even happening for the sequel, full stop. Maybe the Scorpio will have some sort of PVE proviso? Probably not, given the partnership between Bungie/Activision and Sony I doubt they’ll want any sort of disparity, or reason for fans to flock to Xbox.
Why can’t Destiny 2 run at 60fps on PS4 Pro? [Digital Foundry]
