The developers revealed that 007 First Light was designed from the get-go around a
60 FPS target on PS5, PS5 Pro, and Xbox Series X. On
base PS5 and
Series X, players can choose between
Performance mode at 60 FPS and
Quality mode at 30 FPS, while the
PS5 Pro effectively runs the Quality mode visual profile at 60 FPS (and also leverages the new
PSSR 2.0,
as announced yesterday, while other consoles are limited to FSR 3.1.5).
Series S is the outlier: at launch, it only gets a 30 FPS Quality mode, which IO framed as a consequence of the machine's limited RAM (10 GB instead of 16 GB) and GPU headroom for this particular feature set. Of course, it's far from the first time we've heard this tune from a developer when commenting on the limitations of the smaller Xbox console.
IO's explanation for the Series S's 30 frames per second limit is straightforward: the Glacier engine is full of systems that are both
expensive and always on, especially real-time GI, volumetrics, dense crowds, and sophisticated streaming. The studio says it designed the game assuming the
minimum spec would be below a GTX 1660-class GPU and RDNA1, but that doesn't necessarily mean every console variant can maintain 60 FPS with the full feature set. Series S is simply the device where the combination of memory, GPU throughput, and the rest of the stack makes 30 FPS the only practical target. The good news is that they stressed this will be the case at launch, so
things might change with a patch later on. Anyway, it seems likely the upcoming Switch 2 version will also run at 30 FPS, though that wasn't discussed in this deep dive.
The interview also provides us with a clear picture of how IO is budgeting pixel cost across hardware tiers. On
PS5 Pro, the target is
1440p internal resolution upscaled to 4K at 60 FPS. On
base PS5, the quality mode runs at
1440p upscaled to 4K at 30 FPS, while performance mode drops to
1080p internal rendering and upscales from there. Series X is described as matching the base PS5's console-side profile, meaning the game aims for equivalent visual and performance across Sony and Microsoft's current-gen consoles, as is often the case despite the Series X's theoretical spec advantage.