However, the later Subsistence version shipped with a freecam option that brought performance down to 20-30fps, with a lot of tearing. The standard game with its default top-down view essentially delivers 30fps with just some mild dips beneath the target, accompanied by a flicker of screen-tearing. The advantage is especially pronounced in gameplay - but how smooth MGS3 runs depends very much on the version you're playing.
Perhaps ironically, bearing in mind the series' roots, the Xbox 360 remaster ran noticeably more smoothly than its PlayStation 3 equivalent, but both delivered a huge upgrade over the same game running on original hardware. In common with the PlayStation 2 original, cutscenes could often miss the target, but gameplay was generally solid enough. And for its remaster, Bluepoint aimed to bring it up to the same 60fps target as Metal Gear Solid 2 - an ambitious undertaking.īluepoint almost pulled it off too.
Overall though, MGS3 was the result of a technically brilliant development team truly pushing the PS2 to its limits in its twilight years. Adaptive sync - especially at 30fps - was somewhat uncommon in the PS2 era, but was often deployed in the generation to follow. In fact, the implementation of this decision was rather forward-looking - while cutscenes operated with v-sync (with performance often plummeting), gameplay ran at 30fps with adaptive sync, presenting occasional, though noticeable screen-tear. The original PS2 release saw Kojima's team aim to revolutionise in-game detail at the expense of trading MGS2's 60fps gameplay for 30fps instead. It's with the technologically more challenging Metal Gear Solid 3 where Bluepoint Games began to hit the limits of what they could achieve with their remaster on the last-gen consoles - and where current-gen hardware can make more of a difference.
In the main though, this game runs at 60fps more solidly than any other console version, and you do get the residual benefit of 16x anisotropic filtering on X at least, if little else. It's unusual to see no tangible increase with X hardware there, since that does seem like a more GPU-intensive scene - and even if we were CPU-limited, the X has a 31 per cent boost to performance there too. One shot sees a harsh drop to 35fps on Xbox 360, bumped up to 48fps on the newer Xbox models. That's mostly cleared up with the back-compat releases, but one spot where this surprisingly isn't the case - and where even X struggles - is on long views of the plant chapter in cutscenes. Whether it's the hangar or the later oil rig sections with Raiden, anything showing the a wider scale playable area hammers performance on original Xbox 360 hardware. The last-gen system handle this well, and so there's no surprise that Xbox One and X both follow suit.Ĭutscenes in MGS2 are a different story, however. The opening tanker area with Snake is arguably the biggest stress-test you'll find in the game, with lots of geometry and rain effects.
The end result is that the transition to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 resulted in a mostly locked frame-rate during the majority of the action.
The task facing the developer was significantly more straightforward with MGS2 in that Kojima's team targeted 60Hz gameplay for the original PlayStation 2 release. Of course, I'm talking about performance, where Bluepoint Games' original work attempts to run both MGS2 and its much more challenging sequel at a locked 60fps.
However, running on backwards compatibility takes a key advantage of the remasters and improves on it still further.
In common with all standard Xbox 360 titles running on Xbox One, rendering resolution remains at the same 720p with 2x MSAA as Bluepoint's original remaster, and aside from additional 16x anisotropic filtering added at the system software level on Xbox One X, the overall presentation on all of the titles in the package is identical to their Xbox 360 counterparts. However, there is some good news: the 2011 remaster is now backwards compatible on Xbox One, and as things stand, this is easily the best way to play these brilliant games on modern hardware.Įxpectations do need to be managed, however. The classic MGS titles have remained untouched since 2011's excellent Metal Gear Solid HD collection, with no sign of any Xbox One or PlayStation 4 re-releases - despite the emergence of MGS cutscenes apparently running on the Fox Engine on a Japan-only pachinko machine, of all places.
If there's one game franchise crying out for the full current-gen remastering treatment, it's Metal Gear Solid.