How does Destiny’s Xbox 360 release compare to the Xbox One version?

By Adam Rosenberg September 9, 2014

Read our full Destiny review.

There are some beautiful sights to be seen in Destiny, but most every one you’ve gotten to peer at up until now has come from the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One version of the game. Now that Bungie’s latest is finally upon us, we can get a proper sense of how it looks on the last-gen consoles by comparison.

The Xbox 360 release takes a considerable hit on the presentation side of things. Probably the PS3 version too, but we only ran this video comparison on Xbox consoles. None of this should be coming as a surprise. The PS4 and Xbox One have much more powerful hardware inside, after all. A step down on the last-gen was to be expected.

Related: Bungie speaks to the challenge of bringing Destiny to four different consoles

How does it shake out specifically? In terms of overall performance, the current-gen release is just smoother overall, maintaining a near-constant 30 frames per second. As you can see in the video, the Xbox 360 release is much choppier, especially when you’re swinging the camera around quickly in a large environment.

The current-gen release also sports much sharper textures. They’re noticeably blurrier on the last-gen machines. There’s also a fair amount of pop-in on the earlier hardware, again, most particularly in the larger open world spaces. You’ll notice, however, that for any performance or visual differences, the load times appear to be very similar (as we see in the video when Old Russia loads up).

None of this is to say that the last-gen version of Destiny is unplayable. On the contrary, it’s an achievement that a game filled with so much detail could be made to run at all on comparatively underpowered machines. But if you’ve been curious to see what the two versions look like running side-by-side, here’s your chance.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Previously, Adam worked in the games press as a freelance writer and critic for a range of outlets, including Digital Trends…

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