14 DAY TRIAL // The standalone expansion from developer Sucker Punch, Infamous First Light, apparently runs a little faster than the original game, Infamous Second Son, on the PlayStation 4 computer entertainment system.
Infamous Second Son was released on March 21, and the standalone expansion was launched on August 26. A recent performance analysis performed by Digital Foundry revealed that the DLC ran quite a bit faster than the base game, with an overall 12 percent boost in framerate for the duration of the test.
The team wanted to find out why this was, whether the smaller scale of the action adventure video game helped the engine boost performance or whether the development team worked on optimizing the engine, which would mean that the improvements could also translate into the original title.
Improvements in Infamous First Light
"For First Light, we made some optimizations in our shaders that did accelerate things. The two most notable improvements were made in our water ripple compute shader, and the way we encode/decode normals in the g-buffer. In addition, the absence of the heavy DUP fortifications from Second Son has a measurable impact," the developer explained.
The improvement in lighting rendering led to more resources being available for improving framerate, with an average difference of 5 extra frames being rendered per second, and an overall average framerate of 40fps.
The stats provided by the analysis show that Infamous Second Son's lowest point was measured at 28fps, while in First Light's case, it was 33fps. Similarly, the high point of Second Son was at 45fps, while in the case of First Light, the maximum was 49.
The Digital Foundry team explains that there are parts where the improvements are pretty noticeable, but generally speaking, they're not that obvious. The impact of the 5fps boost is felt the most in the areas where the engine is under heavy load.
Will Infamous Second Son run better?
The developer explained that while technically possible, implementing the changes into the original game would be highly unpractical for several reasons.
"As for patching these into Second Son, that's unlikely as the resulting patch would be about 60 per cent the size of the full game - many gigabytes. This is the result of us embedding shaders inside the city content they apply to - meaning we can't simply patch the engine to pick up these changes," Sucker Punch revealed.
As it would take a huge amount of work and essentially re-downloading the game in the new form, and not merely patching a few things here and there, the boost in frames per second will not make its way into the original game.
However, it serves as a very good example of the kind of performance improvements that can be obtained by properly optimizing code, as well as to showcase how quickly talented development teams are adjusting to the new hardware of the PlayStation 4.
