Palworld has taken the gaming world by storm over the last week or two, with developer Pocketpair clearly delivering a mashup that's interesting players in a big way. At the moment though, the title is still in "Xbox Game Preview form" - and outlet Digital Foundry has taken a look at the technical side of things at launch.
Specifically, the team has analysed all four Xbox versions of Palworld across Xbox One, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X - and there are some surprising results here. The first of these is probably that the Xbox Series S version performs the best right now from a frame rate perspective.
"Moving over to Xbox Series S next, there are a few surprises. First, the frame-rate is significantly better than on Series X..."
"Given that we're more typically between 40-60fps, anyone using a VRR display will get some joy out of the unlocked 60fps output of the machine. Simply put then, Series S is the best performing Xbox machine of the quartet."
The Series S version has taken a steep resolution hit for this to be the case though. While Series X runs at 1620p, the Series S version of the game opts for 720p. As for the previous generation consoles, we've got 540p on Xbox One and 1080p on Xbox One X - both running at worse frame rates than their current-gen counterparts.
Overall, the DF team notes that Palworld is very much still in a preview state - and players can expect to see plenty of bugs and glitches at present, including hard crashes to the Xbox dashboard at times. Here's the outlet's summarising statement:
"That aside, the game's shock success does prove one thing: there is a demand for a Pokémon-style game on PC. A next-gen Pokémon, if you like, built on more advanced tech with a networked multiplayer element. For all its blatant borrowing, it'll be interesting to see how Palworld's fusion of ideas evolves beyond this early access state."