Chinese optimization: Wuchang game secretly scales images even in non-scaling mode

Soulslick Wuchang: Fallen Feathers failed to launch due to poor performance at launch and numerous player complaints. The «patch is even more outrageous.

Despite the positive reviews of the game itself, its poor optimization made players angry but she had already managed «fry» at least one video card. In response to the negative reaction, 505 Games released a series of patches aimed at improving performance. However, it seems that the company crossed the line into cheating during the optimization process.

Popular hardware analyst Daniel Owen tested the game’s performance and compared the launch build with the latest 1.4 patch. He found that the internal rendering resolution is now lower than native, even when the resolution scaling slider is set to 100%.

Apparently, a game with 100% resolution scaling should render frames at the same resolution as the display, without relying on scaling tools such as DLSS or FSR. Scaling should only work when the computational resolution is reduced to improve performance. In the case of Wuchang, the game uses hidden scaling, falsely reporting the native resolution.

In the test, Owen compared versions of the game on an RTX 3060 graphics card with Ultra 1440p settings. This is important because it is low-end graphics cards that best demonstrate this discrepancy. In the initial version with the 100% setting, Wuchang demonstrated a base 29 FPS. Scaling to 67%, 59%, and 50% gradually increased performance to 45, 50, and 58 FPS.

With patch 1.4, the results seem rather suspicious. At 100% performance suddenly «magically» jumped from 29 to 37 FPS. A 28% performance increase is too much for a quick optimization patch. With 67%, 59%, and 50% scaling, the performance gains were a negligible 2-3 FPS — «native» 100% mode is no longer truly native.

Behavior with DLSS and FSR confirmed Owen’s suspicions. In the launch version, DLSS at 100% (DLAA, or native resolution anti-aliasing) provided 28 FPS with a predictable improvement as the resolution went down. But in patch 1.4, DLSS at 100% suddenly reached the performance of the DLSS quality mode from the original build (around 45 FPS), although the menu still showed 100% resolution and said that DLAA was active.

Moreover, FSR showed the same behavior. With 100% FPS after the patch, it reported 39 FPS, compared to 28 FPS at launch. However, again, performance at 67%, 59%, and 50% scaling improved only marginally, indicating a hidden resolution limitation at the baseline, around 80-85% — when players believe they are using the original unscaled graphics.

The researcher found a vague line in the notes to patch 1.3 about «adjusting supersampling resolution limits on selected GPU models». Perhaps these words indicate an attempt to hide the scaling. Such tricks seem to be a direct misleading, as players expect native resolution when it is selected — scaling always degrades the quality, even when it is barely noticeable. 505 Games has not yet responded to the investigation.

Source: Tom’s Hardware