Skyrim Special Edition runs at only 30FPS on consoles

It has been five years since Bethesda released The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but now the developer has their remastered version of the game on current-gen consoles, and while it looks better than it did when it was released, it's only capable of 1080p 30FPS.

Skyrim Special Edition runs at 1920x1080 on the PS4 and Xbox One at a targeted frame rate of 30FPS, with Digital Foundry noting in its technical analysis of the game that the Xbox One hits 1080p with "some degree of overhead left over", meaning it could run at anywhere up to 60FPS, but they added it's "almost certainly not enough to sustain 60fps frame-rates, necessitating the 30fps cap".

The newly polished version of the game looks "pretty solid" according to Digital Foundry, with Bethesda using some of the temporal anti-aliasing that was used in Fallout 4, also released by the developer. The report says: "It can be viewed as an enhanced PC port for the current-gen platforms and in comparison to the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions, there's a night and day improvement in terms of performance and stability, not to mention resolution, art quality and overall levels of detail".

But, Skyrim is a five-year-old game that looks slightly better than the original PC release from half a decade ago. Between 2011 and now, we've seen countless mods from some amazing people on the internet - free mods that make Bethesda's work in Skyrim even better than the developer itself. This new 'remastered' release doesn't look anywhere near as good as those mods.

However, the PS4 Pro is receiving some special attention, with Sony's latest console capable of pumping out Skyrim Special Edition at 4K with an improved framerate. Digital Foundry adds: "Bearing in mind that this is a 4x resolution boost over the base PS4 version, using a GPU with around 2.3x the processing power (plus other enhancements), there is the suggestion that the standard PlayStation 4 hardware may be somewhat under-utilised here".