Cronos: The New Dawn Has Cutbacks On Xbox Series S, But Performance Is ‘Flawless’

A week or so after its launch, Digital Foundry has delivered its tech review on Cronos: The New Dawn, which includes an analysis on both the Xbox Series X and Series S versions of the Bloober Team shooter.

We’ve thrown that DF review up above, but for those of you that want to read rather than watch, we’ll go over a bit of what’s been covered here. First off, there’s not too much to say about the Series X version – it contains both a 30FPS and a 60FPS mode, and figures across the board line up similarly to the PS5 version, and are generally as you’d expect.

However, as is becoming the norm with Xbox Series S, there’s a bit more to it. First off, that version contains just the one 30FPS mode, and Bloober has had to perform some cutbacks with the game to get there. Thankfully, the frame rate is “flawless” on Series S, suggesting that the developer has optimised well for Microsoft’s lower-end machine.

“The cutbacks on Series S run a little deeper than a drop to 720p. A few other settings take a hit, where chiefly — to accommodate its smaller pool of RAM and lower memory bandwidth — texture quality is dropped.

Likewise […] the fall-off in quality on Series S is much more apparent on shadows in the distance, leading to more flickering, pixelated shadows cast from your torchlight at range.

Finally, volumetric fog quality also takes a visible nosedive on Series S – it’s at an even lower setting than the performance mode on the other consoles, creating these visibly low resolution streaks of light from spotlights. The rest of the game is intact on Series S.”

That’s the general lowdown on visuals and performance then, and for an overview of what critics thought of the game itself, we’ll throw our recent Cronos: The New Dawn review roundup down below.