Playstation 4 - Frame Rate Issue Problem

[JonLuso]

I've noticed this, too, and this is the only explanation I could come up with given the nature of the game:

The PS4, compared to the PS3, is rendering most assets at a higher quality. Given that, it can also render most locations with a much larger draw distance (discarding the need for fogging to "hide" the surrounding location); that means that it also renders part, if not a lot, of that terrain.

Regardless of the population in a given area, the game still is rendering said area, and although the PS4 is a step above the PS3, it still struggles to render these areas simply due to the load it's getting from the current situation as well as background areas.

I notice this a lot in Urth's Fount and Coerthas. These areas are big compared to most, but it's not just that; moving the camera and getting the FPS is dependent on the player location. So if you moved closer to the background area and looked back to where you were, you may still get the same FPS drop. However, looking towards an area exit won't produce these effects. That's because beyond the exit there is nothing much else to render, hence the FPS being stable.

Really just has to do with the fact that the PS4 actually renders mostly everything in its totality; unlike the PS4, the PS3 is customized to the point to where it doesn't render most of the assets in a given area until you step within a few yalms of them. Even then, it loads a low-res texture of the object until you get even closer. The PS3 chooses what to load based on location whereas the PS4 just loads everything flat-out (one thing on the PS4 that is adjusted is the shadows of players on PS4. If you zoom out while standing next to lots of players, only your shadow stays whole, for the most part, while everyone else's turns into a low-res version of themselves/a standard shadow placeholder. If you zoom back in, it returns to normal for everyone around you; this is due to the fact that the PS4 is experiencing a lot of load because the more one zooms out, the more it needs to render, which means its essentially rendering everything "on-screen" at once and then rendering everything else off-screen as cached assets, which implies a lower quality.).

However, I think that the PS4 is still a bit lacking in terms of hardware performance; 8 GB of RAM doesn't mean anything if the CPU and/or GPU are bottlenecking it. It's good enough for this game, but because of its nature to render most of the assets as-is without any adjustments, you'll get those unavoidable FPS drops. The PC version is the same way, except nothing in the game is adjusted; meaning that no shadows are toned down or all terrain is rendered immediately when the zone loads. I've experienced these drops ever since I've gotten the game on PS4 on its launch day; nothing has changed since then.