Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2021]

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i guess 4 more GB of ram would be enough as cache to compensate any slower SSD ?
It really depends on what the demands of sustained I/O is. 4Gb isn't a lot, look at the UE5 demo and its 64Gb RAM requirement - I'd wager the greater part of that is being used as cache

edit: All wrong. :runaway:
 
This, among other things, is why PlayStation 5 users aren't so happy with GT7, GOW:R and HFW being cross-generational titles. PD, SMS, and Guerrilla just can't go nuts like Insomniac at the moment.

Really? The fur rendering is one of the simplest things to reduce in quality if you need the extra performance. GG already talked about how they pared some things down that are similar to this for HZD when going from the PS5 to the PS4 version.

What "other" things? I've already talked about in another post how you can deal with the significantly reduced IO speeds when dealing with going through a portal to another world. RT reflections obviously wouldn't work on PS4, so the dev. would obviously need lower detail non-RT reflections or effects that simulation reflective surfaces. World geometric detail can easily be reduced. Yadda yadda yadda. There isn't anything in R&C that couldn't be reduced in quality such that it would run on PS4 with the same game play.

Would it look worse? Oh yeah. Would the game play be the same? Yup. Would making a PS4 version be simple? Probably not since you'd have to redo how you do portal transfers between worlds and whatever elements rely on RT.

Would people complain that the PS5 version looked worse than it could be if this PS4 version existed even though the PS5 version would look exactly the same as the version of R&C that everyone is raving about now? Unfortunately, probably yes.

Regards,
SB
 
I wouldn't hold your breath on that, it would have such tight requirements of hardware without introducing massive stuttering, it would be a challenge to get working.

Why? GPU requirements are obviously no problem, reduce the resolution and the fidelity mode should run on everything from a 2060 upwards with ease. With RT disabled the range would be even wider. Heck I'd wager that with RT disabled you could manage these graphics on a GTX1060 at 1080p/30fps no problem.

CPU wise is straight forward. If the PS5's Zen2 can handle 60fps in performance mode then I imagine most decent quad cores could handle that at 30fps+

So I assume your sticking point here is with the IO. But this seems like a very simple problem to resolve. For any PC's that don't have an IO capability in roughly the same league as the PS5 (and many would by that point thanks to Direct Storage), you simply have longer transitions on the portal traversals and/or mitigate by caching data in RAM. That wouldn't exactly be game breaking. You can also reduce texture resolution and/or geometry detail to further reduce IO requirements as required.
 
Of course this game could run on regular hardware, mostly the same. However, the fact is selling a game that would be no fun at all on a large percentage of gaming pc hardware is a bad idea.

It's certainly not impossible but they made the levels with 1-2sec loading times in mind, and the game would not be getting 9/10 and 1/10 reviews if it was full of constant ~5-10 second loads instead.
 
The first time I've ever thought "wonder what it would look like on pc."

Probably how HZD/DS and other sony exclusives looked like on PC. We will see in the future, il be sure getting Rift Apart there aswell. Perhaps more capable ray tracing aswell.

it would have such tight requirements of hardware without introducing massive stuttering, it would be a challenge to get working.

The hardware is already there, we already have 7gb/s Nvme IO speeds, direct storage/RTX IO is going to lift those numbers quite much aswell and adjust the software side of things (next generation windows).
Huge amounts of ram can do tricks aswell, many systems already sit at 16gb main ram + 8gb vram or more. AMD's GPU's are comfortably at 16gb of fast GDDR ram. Consoles have 16GB for the entire system + shared BW.
Streaming wise the pc is going to offer even more, wonder what they can do with that. Like said, going to double dip with this one, the pc version is going to be the graphical exploring one, whilst on PS5 its for the gameplay and graphics.


 
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Of course this game could run on regular hardware, mostly the same. However, the fact is selling a game that would be no fun at all on a large percentage of gaming pc hardware is a bad idea.

It's certainly not impossible but they made the levels with 1-2sec loading times in mind, and the game would not be getting 9/10 and 1/10 reviews if it was full of constant ~5-10 second loads instead.

From what I've seen, the portal mechanic in the majority of normal gameplay is primarily a change in viewport rather than a complete world change and so the instances where the fast IO is needed for that seem much less frequent and thus likely not hugely game impacting if extended by a few seconds.

However I'm not even sure why a 5x increase is considered necessary. Assuming the minimum requirement is simply DirectStorage + SSD (not at all unreasonable 2-3 years from now) then the worst case scenario is SATA SDD at 1/10th the speed or a slow NVMe at 1/2 the speed.

But a simple reduction of say texture res from 4k to 2k plus say some more aggressive LOD should easily halve the streaming requirements bringing even the lowest end NVMe's up to par. Add on a decent caching solution to main RAM and you've brought that down even further.

I'm pretty sure the graphics could be scaled in such a way to make even a SATA drive pretty comparable to the PS5 in loading speed even if the the textures have to become a bit of a 1k blurfest. But that's not a problem if you put that as the min spec while recommending an NVMe that could provide equivalence or better.
 
Of course this game could run on regular hardware, mostly the same. However, the fact is selling a game that would be no fun at all on a large percentage of gaming pc hardware is a bad idea.

It's certainly not impossible but they made the levels with 1-2sec loading times in mind, and the game would not be getting 9/10 and 1/10 reviews if it was full of constant ~5-10 second loads instead.

You can have the same, even faster, world transitions with a slow ass HDD if you just used lower resolution assets. Textures with half the memory footprint (lower MIP level) would allow you to fit two "worlds" in memory simultaneously for world transitions. Pulling the world transition data directly from memory will be faster than pulling it from even the fastest SSD on the planet, however, quality will be worse as those textures will have to have a lower memory footprint. For transitions you might want to bias that towards the current world (to maintain current quality) with less for thew new world with textures becoming more detailed as you load in.

Would it look worse? Hell yeah, it's a slow ass HDD after all. Would the gameplay be exactly the same? Yup.

Move up to an SATA SSD and you'll likely not notice much of a difference. Up that to an NVME with Direct Storage and it's likely to be identical.

So, depending on your hardware, you either take a visual quality hit for slower hardware or identical or better visual quality with comparable or better hardware.

Obviously that would take some Dev work to change how world transitions load data for slower IO, but then if you're doing a port to PC, then you're going to have to do some work anyway.

Regards,
SB
 
@Dictator The wobbling effect you mentioned seems related to temporal AA and upscaling. I can reproduce it in edtior, most visible at 50% of the screen percentage value, then almost gone at 100%.
I remember similar things from games. E.g. there was a case of animated hair, and the hair seemingly dragged the whole eyes with them swinging side to side. Even the error is within a single pixel, it was very noticeable to me, probably amplified by our trained focus on peoples eyes.
In UE5 the effect is very noticeable too. I see parts of rocks seemingly scaling up and down as i move the camera very slowly forth and back. But i wouldn't had seen it without you mentioning it, and also not with practical camera speeds.

Technically the explanation is simple: Exponential average causes lag, and different brightness may generate this wobbling where the effect seemingly depends on content. I can rule out motion vectors would fail on my test case, and i assume my brain amplifies some things here. Looks like a LSD trip almost. :)
A very interesting kind of artifact!
 
Nice video DF thanks. 6800XT doing very well in this demo, over twice the PS5 performance which is around 5700XT (at same settings) before console optimizations arrive to the pc version.
 
Nice video DF thanks. 6800XT doing very well in this demo, over twice the PS5 performance which is around 5700XT (at same settings) before console optimizations arrive to the pc version.
after optimizations come to pc 6800xt will gain and 5700xt not ? ;d also in df video was 5700 not xt
 
Never said the 5700XT or any modern GPU wont recieve any performance improvements ;)
"over twice the PS5 performance which is around 5700XT (at same settings) before console optimizations arrive to the pc version" read what you wrote again ;d
 
"over twice the PS5 performance which is around 5700XT (at same settings) before console optimizations arrive to the pc version" read what you wrote again ;d

The 6800XT is performing twice as fast as opposed to the PS5 version. No surprise here as its exactly double the TF metric and sharing the same architecture, + some extra features like IC etc. Optimizations will improve performance as per DF.
The PS5 sits around or somewhat higher than a 5700XT, which also makes perfect sense.
 
The 6800XT is performing twice as fast as opposed to the PS5 version. No surprise here as its exactly double the TF metric and sharing the same architecture, + some extra features like IC etc. Optimizations will improve performance as per DF.
The PS5 sits around or somewhat higher than a 5700XT, which also makes perfect sense.
genraly yes but read again what you wrote ;d you interpolated 5700 results (not xt) as ps5 (which we don't know in this demo) and suggest now is 2x but when improvement to pc come it will be higher, problem with logic for sure :D
 
problem with logic for sure

Oh didnt know, il forgive you then ;) Il try to simplify. The 6800XT, before the missing optimizations is generally performing twice as fast as the PS5, since the PS5 keeps a 30fps/epic/1080p TSR setting, just like the 6800XT
Since a 5700 performs somewhat below 30fps, the XT is going to be really close to the PS5. Both make sense and relfect their respective specs.
 
Oh didnt know, il forgive you then ;) Il try to simplify. The 6800XT, before the missing optimizations is generally performing twice as fast as the PS5, since the PS5 keeps a 30fps/epic/1080p TSR setting, just like the 6800XT
Since a 5700 performs somewhat below 30fps, the XT is going to be really close to the PS5. Both make sense and relfect their respective specs.
we don't know what ps5 performance is with uncapped frames, there is no benchmark available only suggestions this setting are for 30fps nextgen consoles, generaly in optimal setup 6800xt can be 2x faster but here its setuped with one of fastest possible cpu and has drops below 60
 
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