Ghostwire: Tokyo was recently released on the Xbox Series X/S after being a timed exclusive on Windows and PlayStation 5. But, while Ghostwire: Tokyo is now technically an Xbox Game Studios title, the game's performance on the Xbox Series S/X is inferior compared to the PS5 version.

Digital Foundry’s Oliver Mackenzie revealed on the DF Direct podcast that Ghostwire: Tokyo performs "quantifiably worse" on the Xbox console when compared to the "not great to begin with" PS5 version. This is based on the initial findings on the game which Digital Foundry broke down in detail in a recently released video on Youtube.

"In general, it runs worse than PlayStation 5, and Series S is a bit of a mess," Mackenzie said. "So it’s a really weird situation and not really what you would expect from what is now a Microsoft first-party development studio."

He adds, "The ray-traced reflections are somewhat lower quality, there are shadow alignment bugs with the ray-traced shadows. Resolutions are pretty similar for the most part but the quality mode has a moderately lower resolution than PlayStation 5, it looks like, and performance is typically 5-10% lower than PlayStation 5 [when comparing] the same scene."

According to Mackenzie, there are two graphics modes on the Xbox Series S: Performance and Quality. Neither of the two modes has ray tracing enabled. He adds that the Performance mode on the Xbox Series S runs less than 60 frames per second.

Digital Foundry reveals that the frame rates for Ghostwire: Tokyo are lower on the flagship Xbox Series X when compared to the PS5. The ray-tracing quality modes suffer from visual issues and appear worse on the Series X. There are also alignment issues on the Xbox console which are not present on the PS5.

Mackenzie notes the PS5 version, which came out last March, suffered performance issues as well but this isn't an excuse for the problems with the Xbox version of the game. He said, "My hope, frankly, was that they would fix some of the issues from PlayStation 5 that John [Linneman] and Alex [Battaglia] observed last year, and if anything it’s gone in the opposite direction."

Ghostwire: Tokyo arrived on the Xbox consoles and Xbox Game Pass last week. It was released alongside a major update to the game called Spider’s Thread.

Ghostwire is one of two PS5 exclusives by Zenimax’s Bethesda Softworks alongside Deathloop. The agreement between the studio and Sony was signed before Microsoft acquired Bethesda and Tango Gameworks.  

Ghostwire: Tokyo is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.