In context: Peter "Durante" Thoman originally gained fame for a popular mod that "fixed" the first Dark Souls PC port. He later founded PH3 Games, which has helped developer Nihon Falcom release highly optimized PC conversions of its action RPGs. The latest release, Ys X, exhibits extensive extra work that should set an example for larger companies doing game ports across platforms.
As the latest installment in the long-running Ys franchise nears its Western release, recent deep dives have revealed the radical under-the-hood changes made to the PC version by a support studio. Users can expect PC-only features like local co-op, loading optimizations, and frame rates exceeding 300 fps.
Nihon Falcom has been releasing action RPGs such as Ys and other franchises on various PC and console platforms since the mid-1980s. These days, the company works with Peter "Durante" Thoman's studio, PH3 Games, to ensure its PC ports are free of missing features and performance issues.
Durante's DSFix mod for the original Dark Souls famously added features that PC users consider essential, such as custom resolutions, unlimited frame rates, and support for multiple aspect ratios. Durante's work on Nihon Falcom's games, most recently Ys X, goes even further.
In an interview with RPGSite, Durante confirmed that he almost single-handedly built the game's local co-op mode in his free time, ensuring it supported features like customizable key bindings for both players. Other features that PH3 helped Nihon Falcom implement include enhanced draw distances, higher-quality shadows, HDR, support for Steam gameplay recording, asset caching to reduce load times, and several supersampling methods to deliver pristine anti-aliasing.
Moreover, extensive CPU optimization has enabled a maximum frame rate limit of 360 fps. Although Ys X features lightweight graphics, Durante and PH3 pushed the CPU-bound frame rate from 106 fps in a July beta to 314 fps at launch.
Testing involved a technique any CPU performance benchmarker should know: running the game's most technically demanding scenario at a low resolution on a high-end graphics card to offload as much of the computational burden as possible from the GPU to the CPU.
This, along with other techniques, allowed PH3 to identify and solve issues with drivers, parallelization, and input optimization. Ensuring stable frame times, something many big-budget games often neglect, was also a high priority.
As a result, Ys X's system requirements promise 60 fps gameplay at 1440p resolution with just an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650. Furthermore, the game only requires 7 GB of storage space.
Ys X: Nordics launched on consoles in Japan last year and will be available in English on October 25 on Steam, the Epic Games Store, and GOG. A free demo is available until Monday, October 21, with progress from the demo carrying over to the full game.
