Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition is now available on the Nintendo Switch eShop and hopes were high for a good remaster from Square Enix of the classic PlayStation One RPG. The tech enthusiasts at Digital Foundry have taken a good look and how it runs on the three platforms, the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and PC. The main and rather important issue that Thomas Morgan from Digital Foundry has with the remaster stems from the game’s overall performance and frame rate, which he attributes to a result of Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition running as an emulated PlayStation One game, rather than being remade from the ground up. The main hope is that some of the issues could be fixed by Square Enix post-launch, but it is still not a good look for the established company and a disappointing result for a classic remaster. Here’s a few choice quotes from the article and you can read the full verdict here
“One clear trouble spot in the remaster is performance. To put it bluntly, frame-rates on PS5 and on Switch are as low as the PS1 original – and at times worse worse while the ‘new’ graphics mode is selected. Issues are apparent from the off, with the very first opening hallway dropping to 20fps compared to 30fps on the PS1 original. This isn’t as low as it can go either, as more taxing scenes can see the frame-rate cap shift to 20, 15 or even 10fps. This isn’t to say that the original release was perfect – the original PlayStation ran the game with a wildly fluctuating frame-rate between 10 and 30fps too – but it is concerning that a remaster running on modern consoles actually ends up hitting lower frame-rates in some of the same scenes.”
“Given the performance issues on PS5 and Switch, we wondered if the game might run better and be more enjoyable to play on PC. Sadly, it’s much the same from what we were able to test – the opening corridor remains at 20fps in the new graphics mode, and battles drop to 15fps and under – even on a Titan RTX machine. It’s clear that overall system horsepower isn’t a limit here, but there must be an issue of some kind with the emulation that is contributing to these glaringly low frame-rates. The only difference on PC compared to console editions is that you can press Escape to access a graphics menu, which shows that the game is running with MSAA and FXAA and allows access to higher output resolutions – not really a solution to the remaster’s issues.”
