Hello all! It's been a while since I made this video and can't thank you all enough for the support. But a thing to note and plenty have pointed this out. Xenia has a built in patch system to change the Framerate cap from 30fps to 60fps. You might want to look into that instead of using the method I used to unlock the Framerate. Although be aware because even on the Xbox Series X Sonic Unleashed suffers from tons of scripting and physics errors when the Framerate exceeds 30fps. While the game is fully playable and can even be finished at 60fps some levels (especially the DLC Levels) are much more difficult the higher the Framerate is so keep that in mind if you notice anything funky and odd going on with physics or scripting.
Sonic Unleashed to me is the last time Sonic Team fundamentally designed a new, fully original game around the idea that speed was a core trait of Sonic's character and gameplay. Generations was good but looking back I think it's status as effectively a tribute to Sonic's history makes it feel less and less like a full 3D Sonic installment as time goes on. Every game since Generations has nerfed Sonic's speed by an order of magnitude or more. It seems like more and more they de-emphasize that aspect of his character and gameplay.
I totally feel that too. It seems like Sonic Team is trying to find their identity right now on how to make a proper game. I do feel like Sonic Frontiers is a step in the right direction after coming off of Sonic Lost World and Sonic Forces. But they really did slow him down in that game. Sonic Generations always to me felt like a tribute game. But it's still got decent core gameplay to work off of. Building a Game about a Character that moves very fast definitely seems like a difficult task for the team to pull off. Especially if you want the game to continue to run smoothly in the process. Sonic Unleashed definitely has that feeling of it being the last time Sonic Team did something really big. The Series really hasn't felt the same to me since then.
The raw gameplay of Generations is truly fantastic and is a genuine improvement over Unleashed, it just doesn't have the same visual polish that Unleashed had. It fails to be the same exhilarating rush of eye candy. The lackluster, clearly rushed story certainly doesn't help. Unleashed is a worse experience from a gameplay perspective, but it's also a cinematic masterpiece and between the two has the best balance of design elements all coming together into a truly great experience. But yes, Unleashed's story and visuals is exactly what the series has been missing since. Colors is a perfectly fine sequel despite having too much 2D and Generations is even better, but they are also the start of a decade long trend of Sonic games having crappy stories and increasingly lazy visuals. Finally with Frontiers it feels like they're at least trying again, but they've still got a ways to go to get back to par and get the series back on track. The fact that Frontiers is the first genuinely good game developed by the new Sonic Team and has very few remaining members of the original Sonic Team does cause me to cut it more slack than I would if it were the old team though, these are new devs that are just starting to get things figured out after a few failures, finally just now finding their footing. Let's just hope that now that they've learned how to walk they can start learning how to run.
@@Crow_Rising I agree mostly, but I actually think that's arguable to a degree. Generations fixed a couple quirks and bugs with the way Sonic controlled in Unleashed (specifically, quick steps lock you a little harder into one of 3 lanes when used in 3 lane areas, so that there's less of a chance of you being slightly out of any of the lanes and thus getting hit, at the expense of basically removing any section with more than 3 distinct lanes like we had in Unleashed, and the drift now has a consistent radius it will follow regardless of if you're boosting as well, meaning that certain turns now work as intended unlike in Unleashed where the drift radius was much wider than intended if you were boosting or going fast), which is great, but his speed is significantly lower in Generations and the levels are on the whole way more highway esque, just look at Modern Green Hill vs Windmill Isle. Plus certain moves were changed in a way that prevents your momentum from carrying between them (stomp and air dash specifically). But yeah I mostly agree that generations has objectively better gameplay, but I think Unleashed was kinda the last game to attempt a fully 3D sonic game with 2D sections. Even generations is majority 2D on modern Sonic's side.
@@HyenaFox Unleashed's levels do a better job of making you visually feel like you're in a broader, more open world, but the levels are actually far deeper into hallway design than Generations, which has many alternate pathways. Generations is slower, but not by much. It's mostly a camera issue. Probably the most important change is that the homing attack was moved back to the jump button, so you will never accidentally air boost when you mean to homing attack, and will at worst just do a small air dash that's much easier to recover from. Generations does have a lot of 3D in the Modern Sonic levels, its main issue is that the 2D sections are designed to slow you down and make you do platforming. It's actually kinda ironic how Classic Sonic's stages feel speedier in 2D than most of Modern Sonic's 2D sections. Because of this slowing down, the 2D sections feel like they make up more of the levels than they really do. If they had been designed more like Rush stages there'd probably be a lot less of an issue.
@@Crow_Rising Oh, that's fair. That at it's core is what I dislike about 2D in Sonic games from Colors onward, because I think that was one thing Unleashed got right. Though the speed cap was usually much lower in 2D than 3D, Unleashed actually tended to let you go pretty fast all things considered in 2D, and thus still emphasized similar reaction and momentum based gameplay. No other boost game does that, they all slow Sonic drastically in 2D and remove his ability to create speed and inertia, just worsening it in every following game, until Frontiers cyberspace where you actually struggle to make some jumps that were normal in Generations. I do agree that the homing attack is less easy to fuck yourself with in Generations but I kinda think that wasn't a huge problem for me in Unleashed? And generations air dash doesn't transfer momentum, which sucks, because Unleashed and the Adventure games specifically do this. But, seeing as this air dash being associated with a homing attack with no target actually makes its last appearance in Generations, this isn't really considered an essential part of his handling and kit anymore I guess.
Cool video, some notes: - Recent Xenia Canary builds have broken Vulkan support on the Steam Deck/Linux. There is an issue open that I will link below, that has a fixed build in one of the comments. The D3D12 renderer is not viable in this case, since it runs like dogwater through Proton. - In my testing, the game can safely lock to 72 FPS and be completely playable. If Frontiers is anything to go by, I'd assume the limit is somewhere around ~80 FPS. - If you want to lock the game without external software, you can use the 60 FPS patch, leave vsync on, and then set the vsync interval manually. For example, 60 FPS updates at ~16 milliseconds, while 72 FPS updates at ~13 milliseconds. - The Vulkan renderer breaks the 720p patch. This is a patch that allows the game to render at true 1280x720, rather than anamorphic 880x720. - RPCS3 tends to be extremely CPU heavy, while Xenia is GPU heavy. Your R5 2600 is definitely the bottleneck in RPCS3, but honestly more recent hardware isn't doing much better. I have a R7 5700X and it barely maybe surpasses the actual PS3 in framerate.
Xenia is honestly not that demanding in my eyes. As someone who is rocking a GTX 1060 and an 8th gen intel i5 CPU, I actually get 60 frames and over 60 frames quite easily. My point being that you probably don't need a super high end setup worth thousands of dollars. :)
5:55 You just don't have the patches enabled for RPCS3. Here's how to do it 1. Update Sonic Unleashed to version 1.02 2. Go to CPU settings and enable the following: PPU Decoder - Recompiler SPU Decoder - Recompiler (LLVM) SPU Block Size - Mega 3. Go to GPU and enable the following Renderer - Vulkan Default Res - (Recomended) Shader Mode - Async (multi threaded) ZCULL Accuracy - Approximate and Enable Asynchronous Texture Streaming 4. Go to Advanced and enable the following Accurate DFMA, PPU Non-Java Mode Fixup PPU/SPU LLVM Precomp and Silence all logs 5. In Advanced, go to Firmware Libraries and enable the following libgem.sprx, libsysutil_np.sprx and libssl.sprx 6. While still in Advanced, set RSX FIFO Accuracy to "Atomic" And you should get better performance!
Sega sees fans porting Sonic 06 to PC from scratch. Sega sees fans porting the Sonic Unleashed stages to Generations. Sega decides to port Sonic “wait for platforms to move” Colors. 🤦♂️
for me unleashed pretty much ran flawlessly apart from some crashes here and there using dx3d12, I used the Unleashed mod manager for all my settings changes. Running the night stages at a higher resolution doesnt glitch out the graphics
I'm honestly shocked my i5-3570, GTX 750 PC can now play all the way through Unleashed using xenia canary with vulkan at 480p + FSR to achieve 30-40 fps minus shader stutter. It runs as good if not better than xbox 360, which is great as I used to play the game on PS3.
The thing is, according to some leaked roadmap there's going to be a new Sonic game in 2024, along with Knuckles and Sonic Prime running in Q1 of 2024. I highly doubt it'll be a new 3D installment which means it's either going to be a remaster or a new spin-off. What kind of spin-off could there be though? On the other hand, what kind of remaster/remake could there be?
I wouldn't be surprised if Sonic Generations is the next game they remaster. I really don't want that to happen because I know they will pull the Original Version completely off Steam. But I can see that exactly happening.
As someone who has been playing on Xenia for the past year, I should mention that mods are available for the game. I know it was mentioned in the video, but the modding community for this game is getting bigger and bigger and mods can fix a lot of the issues with the emulator or the game overall. There are mods to fix the issues with the framerate breaking sequences, mods where you can play as other characters, etc. I personally also never found the shader compiling that annoying. Sure seeing a dip in frames suck but it usually goes back to normal after that. Overall way better than playing it on the actual xbox 360 and defiently better than playing on the ps3. great vid!
I do wish I dived more into mods when making this video I was aware of a couple mods but never realized the modding community for the game kinda exploded. Shader Compilation Stutter is really something that just bugs me. I don't like it when games stutter. I can get over it sure but ugh it's really annoying. Yeah I would definitely play this on Xenia over Xbox 360 or PS3.
@@JazzyTheRabbit Mods really do improve the game quite a bit in a lot of aspects. Especially QoL mods that for example makes the werehog faster, skips the day and night cutscene thing. 👍
My PC has an i9-12900K with the E-cores disabled and AVX-512 enabled. I built this PC in the summer of 2022. I can play Unleashed on RPCS3 from start to finish at a stable 60fps.
Did you tried the configs the RPCS3 wiki says to use for Unleashed? those configs usually help the games to run much better, sly cooper thieves in time works almost perfectly for me thanks to them.
If you only care about playing the main stages (minus the night time stages) and not the story and other content and happen to own Generations, there's actually quite a lot of of mods that bring the experience closer to Unleashed, even going so far as to replicate the controls and physics of the original game, as well as a fully functional Unleashed HUD. It's probably even better than playing the actual game in an emulator at this point if that one specific purpose is all you care about. Other than that though, us PC players are still kinda screwed. It's still entirely possible we might get a PC port of Unleashed, but by the same token it's also entirely possible that the port we get is actually a port of a remaster that bumps up the required hardware to play it putting it out of accessibility range of anyone who's not loaded enough to have a high spec PC, and potentially gets the Colors Ultimate treatment of introducing a myriad of issues that weren't in the original game at launch. Who knows though, maybe we'll actually get a straight port some day. In the meanwhile, the game remains one of the most sought after and inaccessible Sonic games these days. You'd think considering the demand for this game there'd already be a PC port up on Steam so SEGA can start milking that cash cow, but... Who knows what's going through the minds of SEGA executives and those who are in the marketing and publishing departments?
Yeah. If anyone only cares about playing the Day Stages. Generations with the millions of Unleashed Mods it has is the way to go. I personally don't think a Remaster would make the system requirements too steep. I've looked at the System Requirements for Colors Ultimate and they aren't steep at all. As for why the game hasn't been ported over. Due to the games age and critical reception I wouldn't be surprised if Sega got rid of the game's Source Code the moment it bombed and without that Source Code the game could be extremely difficult and time consuming to port over and they just might not be interested in doing that. There's a ton of demand for a Remaster but I think Sega knows it's not gonna sell as much copies as Sonic Fans think it will.
Hey you should uh...definitely edit that *ahem* Roms part out. Your basically telling people where to go to get them, and its preferably better for this to be as lowkey as possible in the first place.
Yeah. I'm not doing that. You'd be shocked by how dumb people can be when you tell them directly where to go. I've already had people asking me for a link to the ROM.
@JazzyTheRabbit You do know that sharing roms is illegal right? That's basically what your doing. Your viable to get affected by this. The best thing you could have done is just let the viewers decide where to get it, or better yet, actually do what you did and rip it from their own *LEGALLY* owned copy. But whatever. Just trying to help you dude.
I'm not technically sharing the ROM because I'm not the one who uploaded it to said location. But ehh I can just cut it out and people would continue to ask for the ROM. But it's to save a 15 year old game from being downloaded off the internet.
I believe it actually does. But I just wanted to show off the method that I already knew. Considering the game doesn't work super well in the Emulator to begin with.
the RPCS3 is CPU intensive R9 5900X is okay its playable but some spots got low FPS i uploaded 2 videos that you could take as benchmark but really might as well just get the Xbox Series X and be through with it. UNLESS you are interested in Mods that will change everything.... Shadow mod Dark sonic Super sonic Sonic Riders I mean LOTS OF MODS
Hi, I have an HP Victus with a Ryzen 7 6800H and an Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti GPU. The game runs mostly smooth for me, but the FPS drops at certain areas like Rooftop Run and Jungle Joyride into the 30s, even though my system resources are not fully used. Do you have any advice for this?
Laptop CPUs and GPUs are slower than Desktop Variants. I would use a tool to monitor usage and confirm that the resources aren't being fully used also checking temperature might help laptops tend to get toasty. Outside of that and making sure your laptop is set to it's high performance mode I wouldn't know. I don't use laptops.
@@JazzyTheRabbit I used MSI Afterburner and confirmed that resources were not fully used. By the way, I found that if I disable the 1280x720 patch, my fps greatly improves in Rooftop Run, but Jungle Joyride still dips into the 30s.
@@bluecubegaming1535 Does your laptop have Switchable Graphics? (Aka Integrated GPU+Nvidia GPU?) if so I would check if Xenia is using the dedicated GPU or the Integrated one. You can probably check via NVIDIA Control Panel.
@@JazzyTheRabbit Xenia Canary is set to High Performance in Nvidia Control Panel, AMD Adrenalin software and in Graphics Settings. I tried disabling Shadow Maps and Depth of Field in the patches, but the FPS still does not increase, meaning that this could be a CPU bottleneck. Another thing I noticed while benchmarking is that the power consumption of the CPU is only about 25W, when it should be close to 45W. Is there some setting I have to change in the application?
I'm not sure. Outside of checking Windows Power Settings and making sure the laptop is set to High Performance I wouldn't know. I don't use Gaming Laptops. But if framerate is struggling due to high gpu usage I would recommend running the game without any graphics patches. If it's struggling on the cpu side. The cpu simply might not be enough to run the game.
@@JazzyTheRabbit Personally I'm still holding onto hope of a straight port. I don't know what it is with this mindset lately that games that originally didn't come to PC require the remaster treatment to do so later, but my inner preservationist hates it. The original game is perfectly fine as is and holds up fantastically. If they really want to give it that "Premium" treatment, toss the PS2/Wii version in as a bonus and call it "Sonic Unleashed Collection". To be clear though, I don't hate remasters in and of themselves, they can sometimes be great enhancements to the experience. I just don't want the originals they are based on to be shoved under the rug because of them. Quake II recently got the remaster treatment as a free update and still allows you to play the original as an option, that should be more of a standard in the industry instead of this awful trend lately of delisting originals and replacing them with remakes and remasters.
I think its not possible because Sonic has amazing Michael Jackson vocalizations in the game, "WOOOO"! so for a re-release SEGA would have to pay up a mountain of cash to his estate now?
@@StarRain6 Are you drunk? Unleashed has nothing to do with Micheal Jackson. Sonic is voiced by Jason Griffith in the game. The Jackson Estate doesn't own every time someone's said "Wooo!"
@@Crow_Rising hmm but they probably got permission from Mr. Jackson to use that clip, i dont think its in any other Sonic game? Unleashed released in 2008 and Mr. Jackson passed away in 2009, for all we know he could of uncredited but helped SEGA master that particular clip and out of respect they wont reuse it now or maybe its only contracted for that particular release?
2:15 It’s weird that you called it a crappy port when you have footage of the game which should tell you that it’s not the same game. Sonic Unleashed on the Wii and PS2 isn’t a worser version of Sonic Unleashed or a port. It is a different game with different levels. The story, music, and level themes are the same but everything else is different. Werehog levels are similar but instead of being one long level, it’s 3 to 4 shorter levels. The gameplay is watered down from the HD versions of the game. These are worse than the Werehog stages on Xbox and PS3, unless you really hate the length of them on HD systems. Day stages are way different, not even playing the same. Instead of the boost being a gauge that drains as you hold boost, it’s split up into increments and one bar goes down when you boost. As you get rings and destroy badniks, you unlock more bars of boost you can use. Stages are still very linear, but less of tight corridors and more open paths. S Ranks are based on time instead of points. These aren’t worse than the HD boost stages, it’s just different. Medals get given to you when you beat a stage. Werehog has challenges like beating the stage in a specific time that are in every level and completion of one gets you a medal. Day stages are given to you by rank, S being 3, A being 2, and B is 1. The villages and capitals being 3D hubs is gone and they’ve been turned into flat images where you can talk to people. Entrance Stages have been replaced by Gaia Gates which instead of being big areas to access levels from, it’s a small room where you just open the doors to the levels with your medals. 3:08 Sometimes the frame rate does get a bit iffy at points, but saying it’s unplayable 80% of the time is a huge stretch. Of course you point at Jungle Joyride Act 1 and point out how poorly it runs when the towers are collapsing, and it does get pretty bad at some points in the level, but it’s a few sections in one level. For me on my 360, the game would run well for most of the game. Maybe it can’t stand on its own 2 feet on PS3, I wouldn’t know, but it has definitely been pretty stable for me. Some points do lag for no reason like Empire City’s village, but it never has been that bad for 80% of the game.
1. I'm not reading all that. I played the Wii Version all the way through. I know what it is. I'm still calling it a port I don't give a shit. 2. The 360 Version is Sub 30fps a majority of the time. Sounds pretty unplayable to me.
Thanks for the video. It was very informative. Watching this after struggling with RPCS3. Guess I'm going to just give up or try Dolphin. For now I got no motivation to go through all the Xenia thing lol.
I got the emulator and the game downloaded and it works only thing is I don't know how to cap the fps to the preferred 60 fps, an I don't know how to put the 100% save file thing can anyone help on that?
Trashing on 2D Sonic isn't gonna get you any support, it's just unnecessary. Sonic 1, 2, 3&K, and Mania are legendary games, and the classic trilogy is what made Sonic popular in the first place.
I'm just not into 2D Sonic. Nothing more nothing less. I'm sure they are fine ass games. I've even played through all of the 2D Games. I'm just not super into them. 1 2 and 3&K are all fine games (never played Mania before) but the Game Gear Games are still trash.
I think i have some sort of beefed up ps3 because i have never received frame drops on unleashed the worst it ever was is of course in jungle joyride act 1 day but even then it never gets to a “unplayable” rate
acttualy sonic colors ultimate was bad port but it wasnt segas fault the remaster was in hands of blind squirrel entertainment wich they worked on bioshock collection, borderlands goty edition port of sunset overdrive they even worked on god of war port for pc (they were co workers but still) but somehow they fucked up sonic colors ultimate. sega even gave them source textures and all other things so they can re-create cutscenes but instead they just badly upscaled it
I'm assuming it happened because Sega didn't give them enough time. Sega is very well known for rushing their teams to finish a project on a deadline. There's a reason Colors Ultimate and Origins Plus shipped the way they did.
@@JazzyTheRabbit Yeah, Colors Ultimate is definitely a rushed game, there's a lot in the port that just obviously lacks polish. It's been memed to death but the Metal Sonic Rivals UX/UI is a great example-- it looks like they literally did not have time to make it look nice lmao
@@JazzyTheRabbit yeah i do get that. With mods on it becomes very stable but obvi issues are still there like crashes. Wish xenia was more stable like every other em
I really love sonic unleashed, i personally like the ps2 version, it runs pretty well, especially on PC using pcxs2. There's no stuttering, no frame drops, and short load times, on a dog shit office computer from 2012.(shorthand, it plays better than console, very stable etc etc) You dont have to edit any settings(ie renderers, fps stuff, etc) either. (I was running this game while playing Spotify/screen sharing on discord/and having Clip open on the side, call that a stress test) You can probably run it on a mid laptop, haven't done that yet tho, I don't want to sacrifice my laptop to the emulation gods just yet
I had a potato laptop before that handled the Wii Port in Dolphin with no issues. I'm assuming for Low End Machines the Wii Port is the way to go. It's the same as the PS2 Version it just looks a tad nicer.
Hey man, maybe it's time for a cpu upgrade? I feel like that 2600 could be bottlenecking your 1660 ti. Also, it's very simple to rip xbox 360 games, especially in comparison to ps3, since xbox 360 does not require a modded system to rip games. All you need is the game and a flash drive to copy it to
Your CPU is bad for Sonic Unleashed in RPCS3 emulator, you really need an upgrade From my experience, the best option (for now) is RPCS3, to play SU from start to finish, yeah is true, even the performance is shit, but the stability is very good (if you use the right settings from the rpcs3 wiki), even if Xenia runs good, but the stabiliity is shit, you can't complete the game I can tolerate bad peformance, but not the crashes Keep in mind, RPCS3 is CPU intense, not much in GPU, in my i7 8700 I got a decent experence, not good or bad, just decent, but I enjoy it, soon I'm gonna to upgrade to i7 13700K
I'm well aware my CPU is bad for RPCS3. I even mentioned so in the video. I do need to upgrade I simply just cannot afford it at the moment. The i7 8700 is miles faster then my current processor and I'm sure more people have a processor on my level then the level of the 8700. I do plan on upgrading my CPU and GPU to something much faster. I just need the cash. You are absolutely correct about RPCS3 being more stable than that of Xenia. RPCS3 even renders the graphics correctly unlike Xenia.
If I recall the 1660 Super is faster than the 1660 Ti (not much but it's probably enough to resolve the minor drops I get) plus after the December Patch the game does run better.
Unleashed on the Wii is not a port. It's basically it's own game with it's own mechanics. It matters just as much as the next gen version in it's own way.
I disagree. The Wii Version is just a shittier version of Unleashed with worse mechanics. It hardly matters if the HD Version can be played instead imo.
hey man very nice vid, I haven't assured my experience with these other steps on the xenia config but I did try sonic unleashed on xenia and it was pretty dogshit so maybe I will try what you did and see if that fixes anything but completely vanilla out of the box, fresh digital copy, the game on the normal xenia runs like poo poo
I found switching to the Vulkan Render made the game to be playable. I still wouldn't play it on Xenia if an Xbox Console is still an option. Xenia just isn't mature enough yet. But compared to just a year ago. It's gotten much better.
But Xenia is also not stable and still completely broken with it's render that can't even render the graphics correctly. Playing it on Xbox Series X is still the preferred method.
@@JazzyTheRabbit Its renders just fine for me and i dont get any stutter, the only problem is flashing in 4K so you have to settle for FSR and 720p, its def worth playing thru the story for 60fps cut-scenes by the way! Unfortunately i dont have a current xbox but that is locked to blurry native res anyway.
Hello all! It's been a while since I made this video and can't thank you all enough for the support. But a thing to note and plenty have pointed this out.
Xenia has a built in patch system to change the Framerate cap from 30fps to 60fps. You might want to look into that instead of using the method I used to unlock the Framerate.
Although be aware because even on the Xbox Series X Sonic Unleashed suffers from tons of scripting and physics errors when the Framerate exceeds 30fps. While the game is fully playable and can even be finished at 60fps some levels (especially the DLC Levels) are much more difficult the higher the Framerate is so keep that in mind if you notice anything funky and odd going on with physics or scripting.
There's actually a mod that fixes all of those 60 fps issues on the gamebanana mod page it's called SU fixes and patches most of what you said.
Sonic Unleashed to me is the last time Sonic Team fundamentally designed a new, fully original game around the idea that speed was a core trait of Sonic's character and gameplay. Generations was good but looking back I think it's status as effectively a tribute to Sonic's history makes it feel less and less like a full 3D Sonic installment as time goes on. Every game since Generations has nerfed Sonic's speed by an order of magnitude or more. It seems like more and more they de-emphasize that aspect of his character and gameplay.
I totally feel that too. It seems like Sonic Team is trying to find their identity right now on how to make a proper game. I do feel like Sonic Frontiers is a step in the right direction after coming off of Sonic Lost World and Sonic Forces. But they really did slow him down in that game. Sonic Generations always to me felt like a tribute game. But it's still got decent core gameplay to work off of. Building a Game about a Character that moves very fast definitely seems like a difficult task for the team to pull off. Especially if you want the game to continue to run smoothly in the process. Sonic Unleashed definitely has that feeling of it being the last time Sonic Team did something really big. The Series really hasn't felt the same to me since then.
The raw gameplay of Generations is truly fantastic and is a genuine improvement over Unleashed, it just doesn't have the same visual polish that Unleashed had. It fails to be the same exhilarating rush of eye candy. The lackluster, clearly rushed story certainly doesn't help. Unleashed is a worse experience from a gameplay perspective, but it's also a cinematic masterpiece and between the two has the best balance of design elements all coming together into a truly great experience.
But yes, Unleashed's story and visuals is exactly what the series has been missing since. Colors is a perfectly fine sequel despite having too much 2D and Generations is even better, but they are also the start of a decade long trend of Sonic games having crappy stories and increasingly lazy visuals. Finally with Frontiers it feels like they're at least trying again, but they've still got a ways to go to get back to par and get the series back on track. The fact that Frontiers is the first genuinely good game developed by the new Sonic Team and has very few remaining members of the original Sonic Team does cause me to cut it more slack than I would if it were the old team though, these are new devs that are just starting to get things figured out after a few failures, finally just now finding their footing. Let's just hope that now that they've learned how to walk they can start learning how to run.
@@Crow_Rising I agree mostly, but I actually think that's arguable to a degree. Generations fixed a couple quirks and bugs with the way Sonic controlled in Unleashed (specifically, quick steps lock you a little harder into one of 3 lanes when used in 3 lane areas, so that there's less of a chance of you being slightly out of any of the lanes and thus getting hit, at the expense of basically removing any section with more than 3 distinct lanes like we had in Unleashed, and the drift now has a consistent radius it will follow regardless of if you're boosting as well, meaning that certain turns now work as intended unlike in Unleashed where the drift radius was much wider than intended if you were boosting or going fast), which is great, but his speed is significantly lower in Generations and the levels are on the whole way more highway esque, just look at Modern Green Hill vs Windmill Isle.
Plus certain moves were changed in a way that prevents your momentum from carrying between them (stomp and air dash specifically).
But yeah I mostly agree that generations has objectively better gameplay, but I think Unleashed was kinda the last game to attempt a fully 3D sonic game with 2D sections. Even generations is majority 2D on modern Sonic's side.
@@HyenaFox Unleashed's levels do a better job of making you visually feel like you're in a broader, more open world, but the levels are actually far deeper into hallway design than Generations, which has many alternate pathways. Generations is slower, but not by much. It's mostly a camera issue. Probably the most important change is that the homing attack was moved back to the jump button, so you will never accidentally air boost when you mean to homing attack, and will at worst just do a small air dash that's much easier to recover from.
Generations does have a lot of 3D in the Modern Sonic levels, its main issue is that the 2D sections are designed to slow you down and make you do platforming. It's actually kinda ironic how Classic Sonic's stages feel speedier in 2D than most of Modern Sonic's 2D sections. Because of this slowing down, the 2D sections feel like they make up more of the levels than they really do. If they had been designed more like Rush stages there'd probably be a lot less of an issue.
@@Crow_Rising Oh, that's fair. That at it's core is what I dislike about 2D in Sonic games from Colors onward, because I think that was one thing Unleashed got right. Though the speed cap was usually much lower in 2D than 3D, Unleashed actually tended to let you go pretty fast all things considered in 2D, and thus still emphasized similar reaction and momentum based gameplay. No other boost game does that, they all slow Sonic drastically in 2D and remove his ability to create speed and inertia, just worsening it in every following game, until Frontiers cyberspace where you actually struggle to make some jumps that were normal in Generations.
I do agree that the homing attack is less easy to fuck yourself with in Generations but I kinda think that wasn't a huge problem for me in Unleashed? And generations air dash doesn't transfer momentum, which sucks, because Unleashed and the Adventure games specifically do this. But, seeing as this air dash being associated with a homing attack with no target actually makes its last appearance in Generations, this isn't really considered an essential part of his handling and kit anymore I guess.
Cool video, some notes:
- Recent Xenia Canary builds have broken Vulkan support on the Steam Deck/Linux. There is an issue open that I will link below, that has a fixed build in one of the comments. The D3D12 renderer is not viable in this case, since it runs like dogwater through Proton.
- In my testing, the game can safely lock to 72 FPS and be completely playable. If Frontiers is anything to go by, I'd assume the limit is somewhere around ~80 FPS.
- If you want to lock the game without external software, you can use the 60 FPS patch, leave vsync on, and then set the vsync interval manually. For example, 60 FPS updates at ~16 milliseconds, while 72 FPS updates at ~13 milliseconds.
- The Vulkan renderer breaks the 720p patch. This is a patch that allows the game to render at true 1280x720, rather than anamorphic 880x720.
- RPCS3 tends to be extremely CPU heavy, while Xenia is GPU heavy. Your R5 2600 is definitely the bottleneck in RPCS3, but honestly more recent hardware isn't doing much better. I have a R7 5700X and it barely maybe surpasses the actual PS3 in framerate.
Xenia is honestly not that demanding in my eyes. As someone who is rocking a GTX 1060 and an 8th gen intel i5 CPU, I actually get 60 frames and over 60 frames quite easily. My point being that you probably don't need a super high end setup worth thousands of dollars. :)
Maybe? Are you ok?
5:55 You just don't have the patches enabled for RPCS3. Here's how to do it
1. Update Sonic Unleashed to version 1.02
2. Go to CPU settings and enable the following:
PPU Decoder - Recompiler SPU Decoder - Recompiler (LLVM) SPU Block Size - Mega
3. Go to GPU and enable the following
Renderer - Vulkan Default Res - (Recomended) Shader Mode - Async (multi threaded) ZCULL Accuracy - Approximate and Enable Asynchronous Texture Streaming
4. Go to Advanced and enable the following
Accurate DFMA, PPU Non-Java Mode Fixup PPU/SPU LLVM Precomp and Silence all logs
5. In Advanced, go to Firmware Libraries and enable the following
libgem.sprx, libsysutil_np.sprx and libssl.sprx
6. While still in Advanced, set RSX FIFO Accuracy to "Atomic"
And you should get better performance!
Sega sees fans porting Sonic 06 to PC from scratch. Sega sees fans porting the Sonic Unleashed stages to Generations. Sega decides to port Sonic “wait for platforms to move” Colors. 🤦♂️
I know right?! I wanna know why they decided to give Colors the first go for a Remaster Treatment.
for me unleashed pretty much ran flawlessly apart from some crashes here and there using dx3d12, I used the Unleashed mod manager for all my settings changes. Running the night stages at a higher resolution doesnt glitch out the graphics
I'm honestly shocked my i5-3570, GTX 750 PC can now play all the way through Unleashed using xenia canary with vulkan at 480p + FSR to achieve 30-40 fps minus shader stutter. It runs as good if not better than xbox 360, which is great as I used to play the game on PS3.
Yeah. Emulation is definitely a beast. Just gotta work out the stability a bit.
'my PC can't even run Sonic Frontiers at 60 FPS'
my Laptop running Sonic Generations at 8 FPS with 3 Low End Mods installed:
Funny enough I recorded this Voice Over before Frontiers Update 3 released. Now my Computer runs Frontiers at like 1 frame a minute now lol.
Welcome to the Slow Computers gang. Where we struggle to run 3DS games at more than 10 FPS!
We finally have someone who is remaking Unleashed for PC. Look up Sonic Unleashed Plus
You shouldn't turn off the 30 fps cap, just use the xenia canary 60 fps patch for sonic unleashed
I was not aware of Xenia's Patching System when making this video.
The thing is, according to some leaked roadmap there's going to be a new Sonic game in 2024, along with Knuckles and Sonic Prime running in Q1 of 2024. I highly doubt it'll be a new 3D installment which means it's either going to be a remaster or a new spin-off. What kind of spin-off could there be though? On the other hand, what kind of remaster/remake could there be?
I wouldn't be surprised if Sonic Generations is the next game they remaster. I really don't want that to happen because I know they will pull the Original Version completely off Steam. But I can see that exactly happening.
@@JazzyTheRabbitwell this aged beautifully
As someone who has been playing on Xenia for the past year, I should mention that mods are available for the game. I know it was mentioned in the video, but the modding community for this game is getting bigger and bigger and mods can fix a lot of the issues with the emulator or the game overall. There are mods to fix the issues with the framerate breaking sequences, mods where you can play as other characters, etc.
I personally also never found the shader compiling that annoying. Sure seeing a dip in frames suck but it usually goes back to normal after that.
Overall way better than playing it on the actual xbox 360 and defiently better than playing on the ps3.
great vid!
I do wish I dived more into mods when making this video I was aware of a couple mods but never realized the modding community for the game kinda exploded.
Shader Compilation Stutter is really something that just bugs me. I don't like it when games stutter. I can get over it sure but ugh it's really annoying.
Yeah I would definitely play this on Xenia over Xbox 360 or PS3.
@@JazzyTheRabbit Mods really do improve the game quite a bit in a lot of aspects. Especially QoL mods that for example makes the werehog faster, skips the day and night cutscene thing. 👍
@@LonikQ please just give us 4K and 60fps i want the original masterpiece.
Sega made me buy a PS3 for Sonic Unleashed.
@essayharper …shit.
Until then, the best we got is The Unleashed Project wuth a handful of other mods for Generations
My PC has an i9-12900K with the E-cores disabled and AVX-512 enabled. I built this PC in the summer of 2022. I can play Unleashed on RPCS3 from start to finish at a stable 60fps.
Well yeah lol. A 12900K is an absolute beast. Not everyone has that hardware. Killer Rig BTW.
Did you tried the configs the RPCS3 wiki says to use for Unleashed? those configs usually help the games to run much better, sly cooper thieves in time works almost perfectly for me thanks to them.
I originally played the PS2 version as a kid and now I'm playing the Xbox version. I was missing out🥲
If you only care about playing the main stages (minus the night time stages) and not the story and other content and happen to own Generations, there's actually quite a lot of of mods that bring the experience closer to Unleashed, even going so far as to replicate the controls and physics of the original game, as well as a fully functional Unleashed HUD. It's probably even better than playing the actual game in an emulator at this point if that one specific purpose is all you care about.
Other than that though, us PC players are still kinda screwed. It's still entirely possible we might get a PC port of Unleashed, but by the same token it's also entirely possible that the port we get is actually a port of a remaster that bumps up the required hardware to play it putting it out of accessibility range of anyone who's not loaded enough to have a high spec PC, and potentially gets the Colors Ultimate treatment of introducing a myriad of issues that weren't in the original game at launch.
Who knows though, maybe we'll actually get a straight port some day. In the meanwhile, the game remains one of the most sought after and inaccessible Sonic games these days. You'd think considering the demand for this game there'd already be a PC port up on Steam so SEGA can start milking that cash cow, but... Who knows what's going through the minds of SEGA executives and those who are in the marketing and publishing departments?
Yeah. If anyone only cares about playing the Day Stages. Generations with the millions of Unleashed Mods it has is the way to go.
I personally don't think a Remaster would make the system requirements too steep. I've looked at the System Requirements for Colors Ultimate and they aren't steep at all.
As for why the game hasn't been ported over. Due to the games age and critical reception I wouldn't be surprised if Sega got rid of the game's Source Code the moment it bombed and without that Source Code the game could be extremely difficult and time consuming to port over and they just might not be interested in doing that.
There's a ton of demand for a Remaster but I think Sega knows it's not gonna sell as much copies as Sonic Fans think it will.
Hey you should uh...definitely edit that *ahem* Roms part out. Your basically telling people where to go to get them, and its preferably better for this to be as lowkey as possible in the first place.
Yeah. I'm not doing that. You'd be shocked by how dumb people can be when you tell them directly where to go. I've already had people asking me for a link to the ROM.
@JazzyTheRabbit You do know that sharing roms is illegal right? That's basically what your doing. Your viable to get affected by this.
The best thing you could have done is just let the viewers decide where to get it, or better yet, actually do what you did and rip it from their own *LEGALLY* owned copy.
But whatever. Just trying to help you dude.
I'm not technically sharing the ROM because I'm not the one who uploaded it to said location.
But ehh I can just cut it out and people would continue to ask for the ROM.
But it's to save a 15 year old game from being downloaded off the internet.
Your the type of guy to remind your co-worker that they're 2 minutes late for work @KamyKam
I'm pretty sure that Xenia has a patch for Unleashed to raise the FPS cap to 60 by default.
I believe it actually does. But I just wanted to show off the method that I already knew. Considering the game doesn't work super well in the Emulator to begin with.
the RPCS3 is CPU intensive R9 5900X is okay its playable but some spots got low FPS i uploaded 2 videos that you could take as benchmark but really might as well just get the Xbox Series X and be through with it. UNLESS you are interested in Mods that will change everything.... Shadow mod Dark sonic Super sonic Sonic Riders I mean LOTS OF MODS
Hi, I have an HP Victus with a Ryzen 7 6800H and an Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti GPU. The game runs mostly smooth for me, but the FPS drops at certain areas like Rooftop Run and Jungle Joyride into the 30s, even though my system resources are not fully used. Do you have any advice for this?
Laptop CPUs and GPUs are slower than Desktop Variants. I would use a tool to monitor usage and confirm that the resources aren't being fully used also checking temperature might help laptops tend to get toasty.
Outside of that and making sure your laptop is set to it's high performance mode I wouldn't know. I don't use laptops.
@@JazzyTheRabbit I used MSI Afterburner and confirmed that resources were not fully used.
By the way, I found that if I disable the 1280x720 patch, my fps greatly improves in Rooftop Run, but Jungle Joyride still dips into the 30s.
@@bluecubegaming1535 Does your laptop have Switchable Graphics? (Aka Integrated GPU+Nvidia GPU?) if so I would check if Xenia is using the dedicated GPU or the Integrated one. You can probably check via NVIDIA Control Panel.
@@JazzyTheRabbit Xenia Canary is set to High Performance in Nvidia Control Panel, AMD Adrenalin software and in Graphics Settings.
I tried disabling Shadow Maps and Depth of Field in the patches, but the FPS still does not increase, meaning that this could be a CPU bottleneck.
Another thing I noticed while benchmarking is that the power consumption of the CPU is only about 25W, when it should be close to 45W. Is there some setting I have to change in the application?
I'm not sure. Outside of checking Windows Power Settings and making sure the laptop is set to High Performance I wouldn't know. I don't use Gaming Laptops. But if framerate is struggling due to high gpu usage I would recommend running the game without any graphics patches. If it's struggling on the cpu side. The cpu simply might not be enough to run the game.
I was not expecting to hear the sims 2 music here
Very good video man I love unleashed but its ashame sega haven't re-released it
Unleashed definitely needs a Re-Release. But it needs one done with love and justice. I don't really want an Unleashed "Ultimate"
@@JazzyTheRabbit Personally I'm still holding onto hope of a straight port. I don't know what it is with this mindset lately that games that originally didn't come to PC require the remaster treatment to do so later, but my inner preservationist hates it. The original game is perfectly fine as is and holds up fantastically. If they really want to give it that "Premium" treatment, toss the PS2/Wii version in as a bonus and call it "Sonic Unleashed Collection".
To be clear though, I don't hate remasters in and of themselves, they can sometimes be great enhancements to the experience. I just don't want the originals they are based on to be shoved under the rug because of them. Quake II recently got the remaster treatment as a free update and still allows you to play the original as an option, that should be more of a standard in the industry instead of this awful trend lately of delisting originals and replacing them with remakes and remasters.
I think its not possible because Sonic has amazing Michael Jackson vocalizations in the game, "WOOOO"! so for a re-release SEGA would have to pay up a mountain of cash to his estate now?
@@StarRain6 Are you drunk? Unleashed has nothing to do with Micheal Jackson. Sonic is voiced by Jason Griffith in the game.
The Jackson Estate doesn't own every time someone's said "Wooo!"
@@Crow_Rising hmm but they probably got permission from Mr. Jackson to use that clip, i dont think its in any other Sonic game? Unleashed released in 2008 and Mr. Jackson passed away in 2009, for all we know he could of uncredited but helped SEGA master that particular clip and out of respect they wont reuse it now or maybe its only contracted for that particular release?
We need a Sonic unleashed REMAKE.
An error will appear after the game has been running for a while.
graphics device lost (probably due to an internal error)
Did you switch it to the Vulkan Render? This error usually occurs with the D3D12 Render.
@@JazzyTheRabbit I choose D3D12 Render, which often causes errors. When I use Vulkan Render, the image quality drops significantly...
2:15 It’s weird that you called it a crappy port when you have footage of the game which should tell you that it’s not the same game. Sonic Unleashed on the Wii and PS2 isn’t a worser version of Sonic Unleashed or a port. It is a different game with different levels. The story, music, and level themes are the same but everything else is different.
Werehog levels are similar but instead of being one long level, it’s 3 to 4 shorter levels. The gameplay is watered down from the HD versions of the game. These are worse than the Werehog stages on Xbox and PS3, unless you really hate the length of them on HD systems.
Day stages are way different, not even playing the same. Instead of the boost being a gauge that drains as you hold boost, it’s split up into increments and one bar goes down when you boost. As you get rings and destroy badniks, you unlock more bars of boost you can use. Stages are still very linear, but less of tight corridors and more open paths. S Ranks are based on time instead of points. These aren’t worse than the HD boost stages, it’s just different.
Medals get given to you when you beat a stage. Werehog has challenges like beating the stage in a specific time that are in every level and completion of one gets you a medal. Day stages are given to you by rank, S being 3, A being 2, and B is 1.
The villages and capitals being 3D hubs is gone and they’ve been turned into flat images where you can talk to people. Entrance Stages have been replaced by Gaia Gates which instead of being big areas to access levels from, it’s a small room where you just open the doors to the levels with your medals.
3:08 Sometimes the frame rate does get a bit iffy at points, but saying it’s unplayable 80% of the time is a huge stretch. Of course you point at Jungle Joyride Act 1 and point out how poorly it runs when the towers are collapsing, and it does get pretty bad at some points in the level, but it’s a few sections in one level. For me on my 360, the game would run well for most of the game. Maybe it can’t stand on its own 2 feet on PS3, I wouldn’t know, but it has definitely been pretty stable for me. Some points do lag for no reason like Empire City’s village, but it never has been that bad for 80% of the game.
1. I'm not reading all that. I played the Wii Version all the way through. I know what it is. I'm still calling it a port I don't give a shit.
2. The 360 Version is Sub 30fps a majority of the time. Sounds pretty unplayable to me.
Thanks for the video. It was very informative. Watching this after struggling with RPCS3. Guess I'm going to just give up or try Dolphin. For now I got no motivation to go through all the Xenia thing lol.
Do note that the Wii Version of the Game is a completely different game from the Xbox 360/PS3 Version.
It works decently but 60 FPS made QTEs impossible (unless you spam like hell) and some graphical glitches happen.
Hello Brother
I subscribed to your channel
Can this error not occur again?xenia error graphics device lost
I got the emulator and the game downloaded and it works only thing is I don't know how to cap the fps to the preferred 60 fps, an I don't know how to put the 100% save file thing can anyone help on that?
Trashing on 2D Sonic isn't gonna get you any support, it's just unnecessary.
Sonic 1, 2, 3&K, and Mania are legendary games, and the classic trilogy is what made Sonic popular in the first place.
I'm just not into 2D Sonic. Nothing more nothing less. I'm sure they are fine ass games. I've even played through all of the 2D Games. I'm just not super into them.
1 2 and 3&K are all fine games (never played Mania before) but the Game Gear Games are still trash.
I think i have some sort of beefed up ps3 because i have never received frame drops on unleashed the worst it ever was is of course in jungle joyride act 1 day but even then it never gets to a “unplayable” rate
acttualy sonic colors ultimate was bad port but it wasnt segas fault the remaster was in hands of blind squirrel entertainment wich they worked on bioshock collection, borderlands goty edition port of sunset overdrive they even worked on god of war port for pc (they were co workers but still) but somehow they fucked up sonic colors ultimate. sega even gave them source textures and all other things so they can re-create cutscenes but instead they just badly upscaled it
I'm assuming it happened because Sega didn't give them enough time. Sega is very well known for rushing their teams to finish a project on a deadline. There's a reason Colors Ultimate and Origins Plus shipped the way they did.
@@JazzyTheRabbit Yeah, Colors Ultimate is definitely a rushed game, there's a lot in the port that just obviously lacks polish. It's been memed to death but the Metal Sonic Rivals UX/UI is a great example-- it looks like they literally did not have time to make it look nice lmao
sonic unleashed for the sd consoles was a good game, and in some cases BETTER than the hd version, why did you say barely above average??
It's cons far outweighs it's pros imo.
honestly u should have tried this game with mods. it makes a looot of the issues nearly go away.
Maybe when the Emulation gets a bit more stable.
@@JazzyTheRabbit yeah i do get that. With mods on it becomes very stable but obvi issues are still there like crashes. Wish xenia was more stable like every other em
I really love sonic unleashed, i personally like the ps2 version, it runs pretty well, especially on PC using pcxs2.
There's no stuttering, no frame drops, and short load times, on a dog shit office computer from 2012.(shorthand, it plays better than console, very stable etc etc)
You dont have to edit any settings(ie renderers, fps stuff, etc) either.
(I was running this game while playing Spotify/screen sharing on discord/and having Clip open on the side, call that a stress test)
You can probably run it on a mid laptop, haven't done that yet tho, I don't want to sacrifice my laptop to the emulation gods just yet
I had a potato laptop before that handled the Wii Port in Dolphin with no issues. I'm assuming for Low End Machines the Wii Port is the way to go. It's the same as the PS2 Version it just looks a tad nicer.
Hey man, maybe it's time for a cpu upgrade? I feel like that 2600 could be bottlenecking your 1660 ti. Also, it's very simple to rip xbox 360 games, especially in comparison to ps3, since xbox 360 does not require a modded system to rip games. All you need is the game and a flash drive to copy it to
I'm well aware it's time for a CPU Upgrade I've been meaning too for a while. It's just the cash ain't there lol.
Your CPU is bad for Sonic Unleashed in RPCS3 emulator, you really need an upgrade
From my experience, the best option (for now) is RPCS3, to play SU from start to finish, yeah is true, even the performance is shit, but the stability is very good (if you use the right settings from the rpcs3 wiki), even if Xenia runs good, but the stabiliity is shit, you can't complete the game
I can tolerate bad peformance, but not the crashes
Keep in mind, RPCS3 is CPU intense, not much in GPU, in my i7 8700 I got a decent experence, not good or bad, just decent, but I enjoy it, soon I'm gonna to upgrade to i7 13700K
I'm well aware my CPU is bad for RPCS3. I even mentioned so in the video. I do need to upgrade I simply just cannot afford it at the moment.
The i7 8700 is miles faster then my current processor and I'm sure more people have a processor on my level then the level of the 8700.
I do plan on upgrading my CPU and GPU to something much faster. I just need the cash.
You are absolutely correct about RPCS3 being more stable than that of Xenia. RPCS3 even renders the graphics correctly unlike Xenia.
Eu parei de desejar um remaster do Unleashed após o fiasco com Sonic Colors Ultimate e Sonic Origins...
bruv i have a 1660 super, runs frontiers like butter
If I recall the 1660 Super is faster than the 1660 Ti (not much but it's probably enough to resolve the minor drops I get) plus after the December Patch the game does run better.
Unleashed on the Wii is not a port. It's basically it's own game with it's own mechanics. It matters just as much as the next gen version in it's own way.
I disagree. The Wii Version is just a shittier version of Unleashed with worse mechanics. It hardly matters if the HD Version can be played instead imo.
hey man very nice vid, I haven't assured my experience with these other steps on the xenia config but I did try sonic unleashed on xenia and it was pretty dogshit so maybe I will try what you did and see if that fixes anything but completely vanilla out of the box, fresh digital copy, the game on the normal xenia runs like poo poo
I found switching to the Vulkan Render made the game to be playable. I still wouldn't play it on Xenia if an Xbox Console is still an option. Xenia just isn't mature enough yet. But compared to just a year ago. It's gotten much better.
no WAY you juts called it the best sonic game
It was just a joke. This game actually sucks.
unleashed project mod stinks its not close enough to original, xenia with its crappy upscaler is far superior!
But Xenia is also not stable and still completely broken with it's render that can't even render the graphics correctly. Playing it on Xbox Series X is still the preferred method.
@@JazzyTheRabbit Its renders just fine for me and i dont get any stutter, the only problem is flashing in 4K so you have to settle for FSR and 720p, its def worth playing thru the story for 60fps cut-scenes by the way! Unfortunately i dont have a current xbox but that is locked to blurry native res anyway.
bro is better then most sonic content creators on here and only has 794 subs🥲
Thanks! I certainly try lol.