With the Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 coming out next week I wanted to make a post to discuss what the plans are regarding these consoles and RE7 speedruns.

The first thing I think is relevant to mention is that we will NOT be accepting runs done on next gen consoles right away. At this time we do not know how the game will run on next gen hardware and for this reason we will be waiting until we have enough information to better decide how to handle runs/leaderboards with the new hardware. What we do know about the Series X|S and PS5 is that they certainly reduce loading times, even on backwards compatible games, but how much exactly we don’t know. If the load reduction is significant enough, running on these consoles could provide the ability to use previously PC only retries. We also know that some games on the next gen consoles are getting patches as backwards compatible titles or as complete overhauls and being re-released as next gen titles and in either case the games can see significant changes in performance, but we have no idea if RE7 specifically will benefit from any next gen specific treatments.

After we, the mods and the RE7 community as a whole, get our hands on the PS5 and Series X|S to test things out and we find out how things are working we will be able to make better decisions on how to handle next gen. Other RE games have handled new console generations in just about every way you can: keeping all generations of consoles in a single console category, grouping each console generation to their own generation of categories, and separating each console into their own individual category. You can see the reasoning behind the decisions that were made for most of these games, and with RE7 we will consider the specific conditions that are seen on the new consoles. Depending on what exactly the differences are, we most likely will see either all console generations in the existing Console category or they will be separated into generations with the current Console categories housing current gen and a new console group for next gen. For absolute clarity, there have been no decisions made or set in stone yet for how next gen will be incorporated into the leaderboards, we really are waiting to see what is actually necessary before any decisions regarding next gen are made. We likely will NOT have this all figured out in the first week, so please be patient during this period while we figure it all out.

We will definitely be looking to the community for help in testing things as at this time only one of the mods will have access to the Series X and PS5 on day one. If you notice something working differently please upload video of it to YouTube/clip it on Twitch and respond to this post with the link. Once we have a better understanding of how next gen consoles should be incorporated into the leaderboards we’ll make a post here and link to it on the discord.

After a few days of testing, this is what I've found:

At this time no next-gen updates/patches have been applied to RE7. Since there have been no patches, the frame rate still is capped at 60fps meaning that advantages that exist from having a higher framerate on PC do not exist on the Series X or PS5. The controllers do feel better on both PS5 and Series X whether you are using a next-gen controller or using a previous gen controller. The responsiveness feels slightly better on PS5 than it did on PS4, and much better on the Series X than it did on Xbox One. This is fairly subjective, but I've always felt that the analogue stick dead zones on Xbox One were larger making more subtle movement more difficult and this has been reduced drastically compared to even using the same controller on the Series X. Overall, the controllers on Series X and PS5 feel incredibly similar while running.

Unfortunately, there is a difference in performance between the two consoles that does affect IGT. After testing the loading abilities of both next-gen machines as well as the previous gen machines I've found that while both the PS5 and Series X overall run the game better and seemingly at a steady 60fps, the Series X does perform better overall. Loading a save takes the Series X 8-11 seconds whereas the PS5 takes 40-43 seconds. Both instances are faster than their last gen counterparts, which could take over a minute to load in a save file, but that difference in the systems being able to load leads to advantages on the Xbox Series X that the PlayStation 5 does not have. All of the PC retries are useable on the Xbox Series X, though two of them seem as though they may only provide at most a handful of milliseconds time saved but they certainly do not lose any time if used. On the PS5, two of the PC retries return results that are equal to not using the retries and the other two lose about a half of a second if used. Below is a chart detailing all 7 retries used on PC and the amount of IGT that is lost during the load before IGT can be checked again on console. On the far right side of the chart you can see how long the same actions take without using a retry. Also included in that chart are the load times for the long load on the Ship. After a lot of testing there has been shown to be no IGT advantage to any console because of the faster load speeds on the long ship load, the load from the ship tape, the loads from the tape at the start of 100% runs, or from other areas where the game loads naturally/without a retry being involved.

Roughly, the Xbox Series X has about a 7 second advantage over all of the other consoles at this time and the PS5 provides faster load times but does not have any IGT advantages over previous gen consoles at this time. Some things to keep in mind, it is possible as Sony has firmware updates that the PS4 emulation on PS5 could be affected or the developers could utilize the PS5's Game Boost feature at a later date for RE7, but at this moment neither have made any comments regarding this being planned.

Some additional performance related notes. I have never had a black loading screen occur on the PS5 in all of my testing so far, but oddly I did have the one that occurs in old house on PS4 begin to occur but quickly stop one time while testing Xbox Series X. Additionally, texture popping does still occur on PS5 but it is reduced to only a handful of areas and for significantly shorter periods before the pop in happens, I never experienced any texture popping on Series X. Both consoles still have LOD popping from objects at a distance, that would need to be changed in a patch by increasing the LOD distance which I doubt they would do as it could negatively affect performance or cause unexpected issues with game triggers.

I have not yet looked at any DLC yet, though NAH and EOZ should be the only DLC that will likely see any improvements considering they are the only DLC that have loading related issues on previous gen consoles. I can update here when I get a moment to look at those DLC's. If you have any questions or can think of any specific performance related testing that you'd like me to check out let me know. If you have any comments on this in regards to the leaderboards, leave your thoughts below.

Edit: As a side note, the base PS4 and PS4 Slim have the exact same retry IGT times as the PS4 Pro. The base Xbox One and Xbox One S hold similar retry IGT times as the Xbox One X, except that the loads for PC retries are slightly longer on those consoles. I did not include any of this in the chart above because the useable retries on previous gen all have the same times as the PS4 Pro and One X and the not-useable retries don't really matter since we already knew they couldn't be used on those platforms.