WFT happened?
Kicking off with a look at Stonehaven, it's immediately obvious that things are not quite right. While the game does indeed hit 60fps in this stage, frame-rates are dramatically impacted when the whole level is in view, with metrics varying between 46-60fps as we run across the landscape. As frame-rates fall below the desired 60fps target, we also see the appearance of some screen-tear, adding some judder, making drops in smoothness more noticeable.
Meanwhile, aiming down the barrel of a sniper scope can see significant drops down as far as the mid-30s - something we never encountered before in ether next-gen version of Ghosts during multiplayer. As a result of the fluctuating frame-rate we can feel a clear reduction in the responsiveness of the controls, while on a visual level the introduction of stutter impacts the smooth flow traditionally associated with Call of Duty multiplayer action.
Overall, it's clear that the experience isn't significantly broken across the multiplayer game, even though the update has impacted on the stability of the game to a noticeable degree. With that said, the fact that a patch designed to improve the game can actually significantly degrade performance and negatively affect the gameplay is clearly disappointing, and we would hope that it will be addressed. For the record, we also tested out the PS4 version of Call of Duty: Ghosts online and found no change to the performance level we saw at launch - not as smooth as Xbox One, but with a much higher rendering resolution.
Quite why the Xbox One version appears to run less smoothly than it used to remains unclear. We reached out to Activision and Infinity Ward earlier this week in the hopes of shedding more light on what might be causing these issues, but as of this writing, we've received no comment.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-performance-drops-on-cod-ghosts-patch
