Fans who purchased Nier Automata on Steam can finally look forward to the patch that came with the Game Pass version of the game, fixing the game’s performance on PC.
Last night it was announced that the Steam patch for Nier Automata would finally drop on July 15th, bringing with it the following features:
• Borderless Video Settings
Borderless video settings have been implemented.
• Fidelity FX
A Fidelity FX CAS feature has been added.
• HDR
The system will now detect whether HDR has been activated in the Windows display settings, and automatically boot the game in HDR mode if it has.
• Anti-aliasing
Adjustments to the anti-aliasing functionality
• UI textures (4K)
Approximately 270 UI textures for icons, backdrops and UI elements etc. now support 4K resolutions.
• Cut scenes
The bit rate has been improved and all pre-rendered cut scenes adjusted, so they will now play in 60FPS and display in the correct aspect ratio without stretching the picture.
• Global illumination
A new “Global illumination” feature has been implemented. This can be set to three different levels; High, Medium or Low.
• Ambient occlusion/ bloom
The rendering targets for ambient occlusion and bloom effects have been changed to dynamic resolution based on the game’s resolution.
On top of that, Square Enix has also highlighted several bug fixes with the patch:
• It is now possible to switch between recently selected display modes for screenshots, such as between full screen and windowed mode or between borderless and windowed mode, by pushing the Alt + Enter keys together.
• The mouse cursor is no longer displayed when using a game pad controller.
• The frame rate has been stabilized at 60FPS under default settings.
Other stability related fixes have also been implemented.
Story of the Patch
Nier Automata has always had a tenuous presence on PC, when the Steam version faced many issues. Many of these were fixed by the modding community, with Square Enix seemingly showing no interest in fixing the game themselves.
However, when the game launched on Xbox Game Pass for PC, it was revealed that version of the game had a patch that fixed the many performance issues. This lead to angry customers review bombing the game on Steam, since the patch wasn’t sent out there.
Square Enix has not commented on the reason for the delay between the two versions of the game.