Wuchang Fallen Feathers patch reportedly forces on upscaling to boost frame rate

The latest Wuchang Fallen Feathers patch 1.4 appears to be secretly lowering the game's render resolution to boost frame rate, instead of fixing the root cause of its post-launch performance issues. Resolution upscaling is a well-established technique for boosting frame rates but this is the first time we've encountered a developer seemingly hiding that it's using the technique, and relying on it to provide a post-launch performance increase.

As our Wuchang Fallen Feathers system requirements guide shows, we were already concerned by the game's somewhat vague use of upscaling. The fact Wuchang Fallen Feathers isn't optimized come its release date isn't a surprise in 2025 - plenty of games get post-launch patches to make them run better. However, misleading gamers about how the game runs is a whole different matter. Even if you've got a PC with one of our best graphics card recommendations installed, this won't be enough to get around this issue, either.

This report of apparent Wuchang Fallen Feather resolution scaling trickery comes from a recent video by YouTuber Daniel Owen. In the video they're shown putting the game to the test, comparing its launch build to the most recent 1.4 update, using an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 running at 1440p with Ultra graphics settings enabled.

Their tests appear to show that the developers Leenzee have set an internal rendering resolution limit of around 80-85% of the reported resolution, even when the setting is at 100%. So even if your system can quite happily run the game at full resolution, it's simply not able to.

The conclusions were based largely on comparisons of frame rate, rather than pixel-peeping the image quality of the game, so it's far from conclusive. However, the comparisons do strongly suggest that Leenzee may have just used a quick fix to show an apparent increase in performance, rather than actually solving underlying problems that are leading to the very poor performance of the game at launch.

Resolution scaling or upscaling, is when a game renders the 3D portion of the game at a lower resolution than the resolution of your monitor. The game then renders the 2D HUD and other parts of the game, such as menus, at the normal full resolution of your screen. That's in contrast to simply running the game at a lower resolution, which can result in the menus and HUD appearing stretched.

Given that it's the 3D scene rendering that is the demanding part for your gaming GPU, using upscaling result in a boost in frame rate, all while the game otherwise appears to be running at full resolution. However, the lower the initial render resolution, the lower the image quality of the 3D part of the game.

Techniques like Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR are types of upscaling, with them typically offering rendering resolutions that range from 50% of the output resolution up to 100%. The reason 100% scaling is an option is that a secondary benefit of DLSS and FSR is antialiasing, so you can still render the game at native resolution but get better image quality.

However, in this case, even when the resolution scaling is set at 100%, the post-patch version of the game seems to be rendering below the native resolution. Using TSR upscaling set to 100% resolution scaling, Owen found that the launch build returned 29fps on average. That improved significantly as the scaling was changed, getting as high as 58fps with scaling set at 50%.

Repeating the test with the latest 1.4 patch resulted in a 28% jump in frame rate, from 29fps to 37fps, with resolution scaling set at 100%. However, he then found that dropping the scaling down to between 67-50% resulted in only a small 2-3fps improvement compared to previous patch. The implication, given these numbers, is that the 100% resolution scaling setting is simply misreporting that it's running at 100%.

Owen repeated the test with DLSS and FSR, and both showed similar discrepancies. Using DLSS, the launch build returned 28fps. That increased to 45fps in the 1.4 patch, conveniently matching the launch build's result when Owen tested that game with DLSS. Likewise, using AMD FSR showed 28fps on launch, with a jump to 39fps using the new patch.

The end result? Setting Wuchang Fallen Feathers to use 100% resolution scaling appears not to work anymore. Assuming this isn't a bug, this would be a hugely misleading feature for the developers to implement. Owen goes further, saying that the game is "lying about being at native rendering resolution" and making the game "look worse" as a result.

Upscaling is a perfectly proper feature for a game developer to implement into a game, as it allows the player to get the best balance of performance and image quality for their needs. However, it should always be optional to some extent and certainly should be accurately reported. Unfortunately, gamers with a top-end graphics card no longer appear to have the option to turn it off in Wuchang Fallen Feathers, as of patch 1.4.

It's entirely possible this is just a mistake on Leenzee's part or perhaps Owen has jumped to conclusions with their findings and this isn't what is happening. Either way, we hope future patches will seriously improve native performance for a game that our Wuchang Fallen Feathers review describes as a "triumph for combat and level design" that makes it a seriously fun option for gamers.

If you're struggling with how the game performs on PC or handhelds, make sure to check out our best Wuchang Fallen Feathers settings guide, to learn how to get the most from this game.

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