He's back - again - and seemingly more popular than ever. Crash Bandicoot's N. Sane Trilogy arrived on Xbox One, PC and Switch last week, once more racking up impressive sales. Indeed, Vicarious Visions' port to Nintendo's hybrid managed to best the week one tally of the impressive Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. Clearly, demand is high for the remastered cartoon antics of this particular Bandicoot, but how does the quality of each version stack up against the baseline template set by the existing PlayStation 4 and PS4 Pro releases?
The Xbox One side of the situation can be covered very quickly. Playing the game on the base S model offers up an experience that is virtually identical to the standard PlayStation 4 game. The visual feature set is identical and resolution is the same at 1080p, with only the most minor fluctuations in performance setting it apart from its Sony counterpart. Put simply, base Xbox users can go in safe in the knowledge that they're getting an excellent experience - and that only ramps up on Xbox One X, where Crash retains its solid 30fps performance but ramps up the pixel count to a full 4K. That's an impressive 2.25x increase over the 1440p of PS4 Pro.
But the console builds are still pegged to 30fps - one of the only real disappointments we had with this remaster - and that's where the PC version can make a difference. GTX 960 or GTX 1050 Ti-class GPU hardware delivers 1080p resolution at 60 frames per second, but what was immediately apparent on our i7 test rig was that CPU utilisation barely registers. So we undertook an experiment, lashing up a PC based on the same AMD Jaguar CPU cluster as the consoles, overclocked to the same 2.3GHz as Xbox One X. Even lacking the 2.5 extra cores available to developers and even carrying the significant burden of the full-blown Windows OS, our system could run Crash 1 and 2 almost flawlessly at 60 frames per second at ultra settings with a GTX 960 (though shadows needed to drop to high), though strange bottlenecks we couldn't explain prevented us from achieving the same thing on Crash 3.