Wuchang: Fallen Feathers gets another patch to improve performance, though the fixes appear to be nothing more than forcing on upscaling, even when it’s supposed to be off

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As a gamer, I’ve dived headfirst into the latest soulslike title, Wuchang: Fallen Feather. It seems this game has set sail on a successful launch, but not without some turbulence. On Steam, it’s currently garnering mostly negative feedback from over 25,000 players. Our guy Tyler believes that the boss fights in this game are quite engaging, offering some fresh ideas. However, he also thinks the rest of the game is a mere shadow compared to other superior titles out there.

But here’s where it gets tricky – a new performance patch has been released, and from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t seem to offer much more than a lower rendering resolution, even when you crank it up to 100%. So, opinions might take an even rockier road as we navigate through this update.

According to YouTube GPU expert Daniel Owen (as shared on Reddit), he has provided evidence for a claim he made. He compared the initial release version to the latest 1.4 patch, focusing on how the resolution scaling option influenced the performance of Wuchang: Fallen Feather when run on a GeForce RTX 3060.

The game calls it ‘oversampling resolution,’ but essentially, it’s a setting that controls upscaling. In its default state at 100%, the graphics card generates a single frame with the same resolution as your monitor (for instance, 3840 x 2160 or 4K). However, when you adjust the scaling to something like 50%, the rendering resolution drops to 1920 x 1080, making it significantly less demanding on the graphics card.

Wuchang: Fallen Feather offers multiple methods for enhancing resolution, including TSR from Epic, FSR by AMD, and DLSS from Nvidia. Owen assessed the performance of each upscaler at 100%, 67%, 59%, and 50% – these percentages correspond to DLAA, DLSS Quality, DLSS Balanced, and DLSS Performance settings respectively.

It appears that with patch 1.4, running the upscaling setting at 100% and 67% yielded nearly identical performance results. Conversely, in the original release, using 100% resulted in reduced performance as anticipated. This finding suggests that the developers are making it mandatory to use upscaling, regardless of whether it’s disabled by users.

Based on the video demonstrations I’ve watched, it appears that Wuchang: Fallen Feather heavily relies on pixel precision. This suggests that the game’s performance significantly correlates with the resolution of the frames. Essentially, increasing the resolution will proportionally decrease the frame rate, and vice versa.

Scaling up is a straightforward method to address this issue, undeniably less complex than dedicating countless hours to fine-tuning everything happening under the hood. It appears that the developers incorporated this feature in update 1.3 and subsequently improved it even more in the most recent update. The hints for this are evident in the patch notes.

Addressing performance concerns specifically for some device models: “Improving efficiency by readjusting supersampling resolutions on selected graphics processors, aiming to prevent unwanted slowdowns.” Patch 1.4

In simpler terms, Owen mentions he’s only tried the RTX 3060 card, but from his interpretation, it seems developers are pushing upscaling on many less powerful graphics cards, particularly those that rank highly in Valve’s Hardware Survey. While it’s acceptable for a game studio to use upscaling to enhance performance on certain GPUs, forcing it and then denying its usage is questionable.

Wuchang: Fallen Feather isn’t a standout game that everyone raves about initially, even among PC gamers. The patches have helped improve the game, but it’s doubtful that sly marketing tactics like upscaling will win over many more skeptics.

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2025-07-28 13:47