PSA - You might get better performance in The Last Guardian out of your PS4 if you do not utilize suspend/resume from Rest Mode during your playthrough and instead fully shutdown or reboot your system between play sessions.
I've brought this up once or twice before in the OT for The Last Guardian, but after some self-deliberation I've decided to give it its own thread so that I can maybe improve the first-playthrough experience for people who are about to start the game.
While I cannot conclusively prove this as of yet (due to lack of means of capturing framerate numbers from my PS4), I am fairly confident when I say that suspending/resuming TLG from Rest Mode instead of fully powering down (or rebooting) your PS4 between play sessions will result in gradually degrading performance.
On my first playthrough I was bemoaning extremely poor performance on my standard PS4 throughout the game while some others playing on standard PS4's were saying that they only noticed minor drops during heavy sequences. At first I chalked it up to some people being more sensitive to fps dips than others, but after further experimentation I started to become more and more convinced that what I was seeing was not normal performance for the game.
On my first playthrough I was always resuming from Rest Mode. On my second playthrough I have been trying different sequences after resuming from Rest Mode and then again after a full reboot. What I've experienced is a noticeable uptick in performance after a reboot that seems to persist for hours afterward or possibly indefinitely. Sections that looked like a slideshow after resuming from Rest Mode now seem to hold closer to the 30fps target. If I've been playing for a day or so and have resumed from Rest Mode several times in the process, I'll start noticing what feels like mid- to low-20 fps framerates even during less demanding scenes. It's not hard to notice, and you can even feel it in the decreased responsiveness of the controls when the framerate drops.
I've actually reached out to Digital Foundry about this to see if they could capture framerates and test my theory, but I wanted to get this message out there ASAP for those of you who are going to experience this wonderful game on standard PS4 for the first time. In the event that I'm right, you'll have a much better experience with the game your first time through.
To those of you who have the game on a standard PS4 and have already completed the game, would you mind doing this same comparison yourselves to see if you notice the performance increase after a reboot that I seem to be seeing? I'm thinking that maybe there's a memory leak in the game that worsens over time, and since resuming from Rest Mode just keeps the memory alive from previous play sessions that might result in gradually worsening performance.
I've brought this up once or twice before in the OT for The Last Guardian, but after some self-deliberation I've decided to give it its own thread so that I can maybe improve the first-playthrough experience for people who are about to start the game.
While I cannot conclusively prove this as of yet (due to lack of means of capturing framerate numbers from my PS4), I am fairly confident when I say that suspending/resuming TLG from Rest Mode instead of fully powering down (or rebooting) your PS4 between play sessions will result in gradually degrading performance.
On my first playthrough I was bemoaning extremely poor performance on my standard PS4 throughout the game while some others playing on standard PS4's were saying that they only noticed minor drops during heavy sequences. At first I chalked it up to some people being more sensitive to fps dips than others, but after further experimentation I started to become more and more convinced that what I was seeing was not normal performance for the game.
On my first playthrough I was always resuming from Rest Mode. On my second playthrough I have been trying different sequences after resuming from Rest Mode and then again after a full reboot. What I've experienced is a noticeable uptick in performance after a reboot that seems to persist for hours afterward or possibly indefinitely. Sections that looked like a slideshow after resuming from Rest Mode now seem to hold closer to the 30fps target. If I've been playing for a day or so and have resumed from Rest Mode several times in the process, I'll start noticing what feels like mid- to low-20 fps framerates even during less demanding scenes. It's not hard to notice, and you can even feel it in the decreased responsiveness of the controls when the framerate drops.
I've actually reached out to Digital Foundry about this to see if they could capture framerates and test my theory, but I wanted to get this message out there ASAP for those of you who are going to experience this wonderful game on standard PS4 for the first time. In the event that I'm right, you'll have a much better experience with the game your first time through.
To those of you who have the game on a standard PS4 and have already completed the game, would you mind doing this same comparison yourselves to see if you notice the performance increase after a reboot that I seem to be seeing? I'm thinking that maybe there's a memory leak in the game that worsens over time, and since resuming from Rest Mode just keeps the memory alive from previous play sessions that might result in gradually worsening performance.
