The Evil Within is a good game, possibly even a great one, but what's clear after a few days' testing is that it suffers from technical issues which prevent it reaching its full potential. Despite being built using id Tech 5, an engine conceived to deliver 60fps on all formats, the game has genuine issues even hitting 30fps - and that's factoring in the mammoth 'cinematic' borders that vacuum up almost 30 per cent of the screen real estate.
As we observed in our performance analysis, the game essentially operates at a native rendering resolution of 1920x768 on PS4 and 1600x640 on Xbox One, which is really just 1080p vs 900p with those large black bars inserted. The dynamic resolution scaling seen in Rage and Wolfenstein: The New Order is gone, so we're looking at a fixed framebuffer on both consoles backed up with what appears to be standard FXAA to tackle aliasing.
The basic anti-aliasing technique does a reasonable job eliminating edge aliasing, but on Xbox One the combination of an upscaled image with FXAA and heavy post-processing results in a rather blurry experience. A soft-focus depth-of-field effect is also utilised throughout, which also cleans up distant pixel shimmering. Its intensity varies scene to scene, but the effect creates an interesting juxtaposition between high-contrast foreground objects and soft-focus background elements. Combined with the narrow field of view, the game does indeed deliver on its cinematic aspirations with some beautifully framed sequences but, unfortunately, this comes at the expense of playability.
