Facepalm: 505 Games, publisher of Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, has managed to pour oil on the fire of controversy surrounding the game by releasing a patch that apparently forces upscaling even when native resolution is selected. The game has been slammed on Steam for its poor optimization and forcing a lower rendering resolution even when scaling is set to 100%.
Wuchang: Fallen Feathers has a few good critic reviews, but its Steam rating is Mostly Negative, with the majority of complaints directed at its terrible performance – one buyer complains that they are getting 80 FPS with 40 FPS 1% lows using an RTX 4090 with DLSS enabled.
505 Games has been rolling out patches to try and address some of these issues – a practice that these days is pretty much expected following a game's release. But the company could be increasing the frame rates in a deceptive manner.
Popular YouTuber Daniel Owen uploaded a video comparing the 1.4 patch of Wuchang to the launch version of the game. He discovered that the internal rendering resolution appears to be set at the equivalent of DLSS quality, even when the upscaling is set to 100% (i.e., native).
Owen tested the upscaling using an RTX 3060 at 1440p using Ultra settings. He notes that in the launch version of Wuchang, TSR at 100% resolution pumped out 29 FPS. Lowering the scaling to 67%, 59%, and 50%, increased the figure to 45 FPS, 50 FPS, and 58 FPS, respectively. Nvidia's DLSS and AMD FSR offered similar figures at all levels.
With the 1.4 update, however, 100% TSR performance made a huge jump from 29 FPS to 37 FPS, while the other resolution scaling levels saw only a 2 to 3 FPS increases.
Using Nvidia DLSS was even more suspicious: DLAA had been at 28 FPS in the launch version, but the 1.4 patch pushed it to 45 FPS – exactly the same number as the launch version's 67% resolution. It was a similar story with AMD's FSR upscaling tech.
"I'm absolutely not on board with a game lying about being at native rendering resolution. Players who have hardware powerful enough to run natively simply can't anymore. It's just making the game look worse," Owen said.
The patch notes for version 1.3 of Wuchang mention "adjustments to super sampling resolution limits on select GPU models." The change could have been implemented then, though the 1.4 notes say that the patch is "Optimizing performance issues for a certain device models." That could suggest this upscaling behavior is only present in lower-end cards.
At least one person claims that the resolution scaling is just a bug, but that seems hard to believe. One has to wonder why developer Leenzee Games didn't simply make upscaling a requirement – or pretty much essential – from the start, something we saw in Alan Wake 2, Immortals of Aveum, Remnant 2, Nightingale, and others.