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As it stands, the only thing we know for sure is that all Xbox versions of PUBG will run at 30fps when it enters into early access on the Xbox platform on December 12th. We do not yet know the resolution that the game will run at on either the base Xbox One hardware, the slightly more powerful Xbox One S, nor the far more powerful Xbox One X hardware.
Recently, Linus Tech Tips put up a video that asks if it's possible to spend just 500 dollars on a new PC in order to reach the same level of performance of an Xbox One X or PlayStation 4 Pro. Their $500* PC includes a Core i3-7100, GTX 1050TI, 1TB HDD, and 8GB of RAM. It should be important to note that the price suddenly jumps to $600 if you need to purchase a fresh copy of Windows.
The team tested a handful of games that included Forza Motorsport 7, Assassin's Creed Origins, and Middle-earth: Shadow of War at 4K resolutions. When it comes to Forza, the team found that the Xbox One X managed to show off additional graphical details while running at smoother framerates compared to the $500 PC.
Score one for the Xbox One X.
Middle-earth: Shadow of War found the Xbox One X and the PlayStation 4 Pro standing tall above the competition. The $500 PC only hit playable framerates when the settings were turned all the way down at 4K resolutions. The thought here is that video memory limitations of the 1050Ti were to blame. When bumped down to 1080p resolution, the budget gaming PC was able to more closely match the quality of its console brethren.
The Xbox One X takes two. It's not looking too great for the $500 gaming PC right now. If the 500 dollar gaming PC can't handle something like Middle-earth: Shadow of War, it's not looking too great for something like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.
The same results were found with Assassin's Creed Origins. Both the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 made use of checkerboard rendering to simulate 4K resolutions. Performance between the two consoles was also very close to each other. Just as with Shadow of War, the PC had to be set to the low presets at 4K. However, the PC release of Assassin's Creed Origins has been notorious for its poor performance, perhaps due to its multiple layers of DRM at work.
With a clean sweep of the tests, it sounds as though $500 for a gaming PC may not be enough to keep up with the similarly priced Xbox One X platform. The fact that PUBG on the PC requires some beefy hardware in order to maintain stable performance, even at 1080p, It's obvious that the 500 dollar PC needs some improvements at least in the GPU department.
With a small bump up to a 700 dollar gaming PC, you move to the AMD Ryzen from Intel. This gives you two additional cores to work with compared to the Intel counterpart. The GPU also gets a bump up to a GeForce GTX 1060. The extra cost will also net you a 128GB SSD and a 2TB HDD. The SSD will provide significant gains in everyday use along with a couple of smaller games. The SSD also provides significant performance loading time reductions in games like PUBG. The 2TB drive also provides plenty of additional storage space on top of the 1TB drive found in the Linus Tech Tips video.
These seemingly small but significant bumps should help any would-be PC gamer get a good foothold on the console-like experience. Naturally, you may only be looking at a locked 30fps experience when it comes to PUBG, but that will put you in line with the Xbox One platform's initial release performance. Pushing to a locked 60fps will almost certainly require major bumps to the CPU and possibly GPU that will easily put you in the realm of 60fps and above for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. It's also very possible that you will be able to bump some graphical settings to values higher than what you will see on the Xbox One and possibly the Xbox One X.
With PUBG still considered to be "early access" on PC, the real test of performance will come when the game is officially launched on December 12 on PC. Xbox One players only begin their own early access about a week later on the 20th. The non-early access release for PUBG on the Xbox platform does not yet have a set release date. Many things can change in the coming months and it will be very interesting to see what sort of performance the Xbox One X version of PUBG will ultimately land on once all is said and done.
