Slow-down on FFXIII (Xbox 360)

[MikeyW]

Hey guys

I've managed to get up to Archylte Steppe but I'm experiencing a drop in frame rate in this area. I've read that it's the case with most people, but I've not found anyone with any suggestions as to how to fix it, if there's a way. Would installing it to the hard drive or clearing the cache help at all?

[MrPopo]

I would imagine installing to the HDD would help, as fetching from the HDD is faster than fetching from the disk.

[AznKhmerBoi]

yea and i heard their is more than one disc for 360 , oh well im gonna get it for ps3 anyways no slow down and one disc.

[MikeyW]

Well I'm guessing that sinse I'm up to to the last disc, installing that one disc would suffice as I won't need the previous two for this play-through. I'll try that out and let you know.

[Niode]

I doubt installing it to HDD will change the frame rate issues. It just improves loading times.

The 360 version is terrible, you can totally tell that Square Enix just ported it in the cheapest/quickest way possible. The use of the BINK video codec (for game so reliant on FMV sequences) should be punishable by death. BINK is fucking awful. There just is no excuse for using it when the 360 can do H.264 natively. Compare the uncompressed videos from the PS3 version and the ones re-encoded into h.264 and you can hardly tell the difference (there's VERY slight black crush on H.264 but is only noticeable when you're staring closely at single frame comparisons). When you look at the bink videos in motion they just look like vomit. Huge compression artefacts and loads of colour banding.

The most annoying thing? If they had seriously spent a small (and I mean a couple of man hours, MAXIMUM) tweaking the compression settings to get the highest quality and the smallest file size they would have improved the quality of the 360 port ten-fold. The fact that the PS3's alpha transparencies look like shit (it's a limitation of the nvidia hardware, all nvidia hardware is like it) and they haven't fixed them on 360 (something that ATi graphics hardware is very good at, that's why image quality is always higher on ATi cards) just shows how little they cared about porting the game. It's such a shame because this should have been a game that looks identical on both platforms.

[tin foil hat]I think that there's more to this than meets the eye, especially with Square's strong relationship with Sony since the Playstation era. I believe that Sony had some influence in the 360 version looking noticeably worse than the PS3 version, It's very obvious that the 360 version looks worse than the PS3 version and no other game has ever looked this bad on 360 compared to PS3. Even looking at it the other way, at other games ported from 360 to PS3, the games on PS3 appear slightly cosmetically worse. Such as being slightly washed out, more texture pop-in and in a few cases slightly lower performance. It's never been to the point where you feel a game is a significantly worse experience than the alternative. FFXIII 360 feels worse than a lazy port, it feels intentionally crippled to make one platform look superior. It just screams of Sony propaganda to me.[/tin foil hat]

[AppleQueso]

Seems to me OP that you're dealing with a rushed port, nothing more.

[Gamerforlife]

I truly hate mutli-platform games. I wish to live in a magical land where every game is exclusive to one console and people don't have to worry about which version of a game is better and we don't have to see huge system fanboy wars spin out of control all over the internet and companies don't screw over gamers by making content exclusive to one version of a game rather than another(like Batman:Arkham Asylum's Joker content and Tomb Raider Underworld's downloadable content).

Damn, reality sucks.

[Devezu]

I doubt installing it to HDD will change the frame rate issues. It just improves loading times.

The 360 version is terrible, you can totally tell that Square Enix just ported it in the cheapest/quickest way possible. The use of the BINK video codec (for game so reliant on FMV sequences) should be punishable by death. BINK is fucking awful. There just is no excuse for using it when the 360 can do H.264 natively. Compare the uncompressed videos from the PS3 version and the ones re-encoded into h.264 and you can hardly tell the difference (there's VERY slight black crush on H.264 but is only noticeable when you're staring closely at single frame comparisons). When you look at the bink videos in motion they just look like vomit. Huge compression artefacts and loads of colour banding.

The most annoying thing? If they had seriously spent a small (and I mean a couple of man hours, MAXIMUM) tweaking the compression settings to get the highest quality and the smallest file size they would have improved the quality of the 360 port ten-fold. The fact that the PS3's alpha transparencies look like shit (it's a limitation of the nvidia hardware, all nvidia hardware is like it) and they haven't fixed them on 360 (something that ATi graphics hardware is very good at, that's why image quality is always higher on ATi cards) just shows how little they cared about porting the game. It's such a shame because this should have been a game that looks identical on both platforms.

[tin foil hat]I think that there's more to this than meets the eye, especially with Square's strong relationship with Sony since the Playstation era. I believe that Sony had some influence in the 360 version looking noticeably worse than the PS3 version, It's very obvious that the 360 version looks worse than the PS3 version and no other game has ever looked this bad on 360 compared to PS3. Even looking at it the other way, at other games ported from 360 to PS3, the games on PS3 appear slightly cosmetically worse. Such as being slightly washed out, more texture pop-in and in a few cases slightly lower performance. It's never been to the point where you feel a game is a significantly worse experience than the alternative. FFXIII 360 feels worse than a lazy port, it feels intentionally crippled to make one platform look superior. It just screams of Sony propaganda to me.[/tin foil hat]

Well, sort of on the flip side and in a tl;dr format from what I've heard:

XBox 360 <-> PC = due to similar architecture
XBox 360 --> PS3 = :S due to not-so similar architecture (and memory management, think Sega Saturn and PSX
PS3 --> Xbox360 = because of having to deal with differences in architecture, but not so much as the other way around

The main reason that the ports come out sort of wonky comes down to memory management. They really are the same (like REALLY the same, not even funny). Whenever you see this kind of stuff, just remember that the X360 has one "storehouse" of memory for both processing and graphics, and the PS3 has two "storehouses" - one for graphics, one for memory. Their "storehouses" hold the same amount when combined (2=1 lol) BUT is inconvenient in the PS3's case, thus, shittier graphics on ports.

[MrPopo]

I truly hate mutli-platform games. I wish to live in a magical land where every game is exclusive to one console and people don't have to worry about which version of a game is better and we don't have to see huge system fanboy wars spin out of control all over the internet.

I knew a kid who got an arm broken because he claimed that Sonic was better than Mario.

[Gamerforlife]

I truly hate mutli-platform games. I wish to live in a magical land where every game is exclusive to one console and people don't have to worry about which version of a game is better and we don't have to see huge system fanboy wars spin out of control all over the internet.

I knew a kid who got an arm broken because he claimed that Sonic was better than Mario.

Wow, that's sad and funny at the same time.

He was right though