NetEase, the team behind Marvel Rivals, have revealed the reason behind major optimisations that have come to Marvel Rivals over the past year: the game’s surprise port to the last-generation PlayStation 4.
By optimising the game for the last generation machine, the Marvel Rivals team managed to roll out a number of boosts across other platforms. While many devs are moving away from Sony’s last gen console, with titles like Spider-Man 2 releasing exclusively on current-gen, NetEase continues to see the console as a means to both reach a wider audience, and improve the overall game’s performance to squeeze Unreal Engine 5 onto Sony’s 12-year-old console.
Speaking to FRVR, game director Guangyun Chen said that despite Marvel Rivals’ high hardware requirements, the team has ‘been working on hard’ on performance optimisation to ‘lower the hardware threshold’ to ensure those on older hardware have the best experience possible.
“Given that the PS4 was released over ten years ago, we implemented numerous customized optimizations specifically for the PS4 platform,” he told us. “For instance, we adjusted the thread scheduling strategy based on the PS4’s CPU characteristics to better leverage its multi-core architecture.
“We implemented numerous customized optimizations specifically for the PS4 platform”
Marvel Rivals game director Guangyun Chen
“We also utilized special instruction sets to accelerate various computational tasks within the game. And also, we tried to enhance the scalability of the game system. By preserving the core gaming experience, we found a balance among graphics quality, stability, and performance, enabling the game to adapt more effectively to different hardware configurations.”
Chen revealed that the optimizations for system scalability were not limited to the PS4, saying, “We also applied them to other platforms, particularly PCs”. He added: “Overall, the experience of porting to the PS4 has been incredibly rewarding. We not only brought the game to a wider audience but also gained invaluable development experience for multiple devices. We are also closely looking at social media and player feedback, with the goal of enhancing the gaming experience for our players.”
Marvel Rivals is not the only competitive multiplayer game on Unreal Engine 5 to make the jump to last-gen machines. Last year, Embark Studios’ The Finals also received a PlayStation 4 port which saw numerous performance improvements, such as a 120fps mode, arrive on the current-gen PS5 and Xbox Series versions of the game.
While the last-gen machines are getting on in age, they are still decently powerful consoles, and lower-income countries such as Brazil still game extensively on the last-gen devices as new hardware only gets more expensive as time goes on.
Despite being over a decade old, Marvel Rivals on the PlayStation 4 does run above 30fps, although it struggles to hit 60fps during gameplay. Nevertheless, for gamers who can’t jump to the current generation of hardware, studios like NetEase are providing great gameplay experiences to players, and it ends up benefitting everyone.
