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With day one patches swiftly becoming the norm, it's easy to forget about the code pressed to the disc that actually ships to stores. Throw almost any modern single-player game into your console and it'll probably play just fine out of the box, even without an internet connection. This ease of use is what console gaming was founded upon, but the waters are becoming muddied. It's one thing to issue a patch designed to add a bit of polish to the end product, but it's something else entirely to ship a virtually broken game to store shelves. That brings us to The Evil Within - version 1.0.We already know that the frame-rate in the current 1.01 version is rather unsteady throughout the game. What you may not know is that this is actually a massive improvement over the 'gold master' that's actually pressed onto the retail disc. As our coverage last week was based on digital delivery versions of the game we bought from PSN and Xbox Live, the issue didn't really come into focus for us until our personal physical copies arrived a few days later.
However, as you'll see in our performance video below, version 1.0 actually runs 30 to 40 per cent slower than the same game running with the day one patch. Scenes that manage to deliver an even 30fps in version 1.01 lurch along at an awful 20fps instead. Dips and stutters in the current version drop all the way down into the teens. It's so low, in fact, that we needed to modify the values of our frame-time graph when creating the performance video, in order to accommodate gameplay pauses of up to 100ms (and even then, sometimes The Evil Within stalls still further). No matter how poorly something like Daylight or Thief ran on PS4, the unpatched version of The Evil Within makes those games look positively smooth by comparison.
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