In a world of cross-platform development, one of the key differentiating factors between console and PC releases is the ability to tweak graphical settings - a necessity when a games PC can be built from a vast array of different components. Graphics menus in console games are a rarity for obvious reasons, making this discovery somewhat curious: adjusting graphics presets in Bridge Constructor Portal on the Windows Store works just as it should, but with an added bonus - your changes transfer across to the Xbox versions too and can radically alter performance.

Friend of Digital Foundry, Alex Goh, clued us into this one when exploring the Xbox Game Pass library and remarkaby, his report checks out. Settings changes on the PC version are beamed into the cloud and transfer over to both Xbox One S and Xbox One X - presumably a factor of UWP and the 'Play Anywhere' nature of the title. In-game progress is shared between Xbox and PC platforms, and somehow, your graphics settings do too. Also fascinating is that if you play the game on Xbox first, the console settings migrate across to the PC game when you load it up.

There are three major areas for adjustment: anti-aliasing, post-process effects and shadows. By default these are set to 2x MSAA and medium quality, respectively. By far the biggest impact to performance comes from anti-aliasing, where ramping this up to a maximum 8x MSAA sees both Xbox consoles collapse to a wobbly 10-15 frames per second.

Read more