Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2021]

[Seanspeed]

Game design decisions outweigh graphical decisions. You cut away draw distance, you get massive pop-up issues. It's not so simple at all. There is a lot of verticality in this game.

You can try and find some aspect of the game that Halo Infinite is doing different to some other games and say that's the one, single thing that totally explains away why the whole game looks so lackluster, but I think this is plainly a reaching and desperate argument.

Again, there are ways to optimize such a thing to where it's not hitting demands so hard(especially on the GPU). There is just no way on Earth this is such a critically extreme demand that it's destroyed the visuals of the rest of the game so significantly. And if it is, then they've messed up badly all the same through lack of being able to optimize it to some reasonable level and letting it hurt things so much.

 

[iroboto]

You can try and find some aspect of the game that Halo Infinite is doing different to some other games and say that's the one, single thing that totally explains away why the whole game looks so lackluster, but I think this is plainly a reaching and desperate argument.

Again, there are ways to optimize such a thing to where it's not hitting demands so hard(especially on the GPU). There is just no way on Earth this is such a critically extreme demand that it's destroyed the visuals of the rest of the game so significantly. And if it is, then they've messed up badly all the same through lack of being able to optimize it to some reasonable level and letting it hurt things so much.

Look in the PIP. He's literally killing shit with his rocket launcher while abusing his flight speed. Find me another twitch based shooter that is capable of a map this large, traversing this speed, spawning enemies well in advance, being able to hit them, while maintaining the graphics and frame rate so that nothing fails.

The closest you'll get to are battle royale games and Battlefield. You guys make this seem like BF2042 is next gen and Halo Infinite is from the 360 days
Nothing could be further from the truth. Aside from lighting and shadow differences and PBR values which they pull from photogammetry, Halo Infinite is actually fairly competitive and in some cases has higher settings than 2042 and the console is responsible for running the AI in the game as well.

 

[Scott_Arm]

extreme lag in any player response. Things took nearly 0.5 seconds to register. Sniper zooms were no where close to the instant flick of Halo.
They definitely didn't have 2 AIs battling it out either.
I'm not saying there wasn't development hell, as there is a lot more this game could have reached in terms of heights. But to make it seem like any engine could pull this off without massive backend changes is unlikely.

Think about how slow PUBG ran on release. Even after years of patches it's still garbage in response time compared to Halo. Let's not even get into how much denser and better Halo looks in every way. There are animals, fauna, wind, volumetric fog, day/night cycles, enemy AI battling user AI. Vehicles of all sorts, travelling at high speeds.

Is the argument here really that the player in Red Dead Redemption 2 had a lot of animation delay because there were too many types of vegetation on screen? Also PUBG was a nightmare on console. Not sure I'd use it as an argument for or against anything. If PUBG console is the standard. There's a long list of open and semi-open world games on Xbox One. I just picked one.

 

[iroboto]

Is the argument here really that the player in Red Dead Redemption 2 had a lot of animation delay because there were too many types of vegetation on screen? Also PUBG was a nightmare on console. Not sure I'd use it as an argument for or against anything. If PUBG console is the standard. There's a long list of open and semi-open world games on Xbox One. I just picked one.

It's a 30fps title with insane latency, you're given way more time to stream in assets. I'm not sure how else to see that. There are obvious HDD limitations on last gen consoles in terms of a selection of variety of assets to pull from. You either buy the hard drive more time to retrieve assets, or you reduce repeat the assets that are already in memory.

 

[Scott_Arm]

It's a 30fps title with insane latency, you're given way more time to stream in assets. I'm not sure how else to see that. There are obvious HDD limitations on last gen consoles in terms of a selection of variety of assets to pull from.

Isn't Halo Infinite 30fps on Xbox One? RDR2 ran off HDDs as well. All I'm asking for is an outdoor environment that's more natural looking.

My recollection of latency in RDR2 is it's mostly because of the physics-based animation system they use. Turning the camera seemed just about the same as any other console game.

 

[iroboto]

Isn't Halo Infinite 30fps on Xbox One? RDR2 ran off HDDs as well. All I'm asking for is an outdoor environment that's more natural looking.

Yes it is.
But it doesn't have the latency right. You've got to make a choice between twitch shooter with instant zoom, flying, etc. Game play elements. Or you can have a better outdoor environment(s) but you're going to have to find a way to buy time for streaming those new assets into a very limited amount of memory.
Latency of RDR2 on Xbox One X as tested by @Dictator
Though Alex does indicate the issue is likely with the animation system, that doesn't mean it doesn't buy them other time they could do with that. Why not take advantage of it.
Results:
PC:

• Ryzen 9 3900X
• RTX 2080 Ti

Some of the tests:

Test A (Weapon draw in 3rd person)

• 185 ms (milliseconds) on Xbox One X
• 181 ms on PC at 60 fps with triple buffered VSync

Test C (Readied weapon discharged in first person)

• Xbox One X - 435 ms
• PC at 30 FPS with triple buffered VSync - 355 ms
• PC at 60 fps with double buffered VSync - 339 ms

A petition by indie developers about Unreal 4 Engine:
Sign petition: Reduce mouse input latency for games developed with Unreal Engine 4 · GoPetition.com

High input latency for SFV makes it hard to play, requires a lot of patching:
Street Fighter 5's new input latency reduction could be a huge game changer; let's take a look at how the issue has affected the title to this point (eventhubs.com)



Halo Infinite runs really well on Xbox One. I don't think that's true about Xbox One for RDR2, IIRC it's 720p?
I think it's impressive they got this to run so well on 1.3TF and 68GB/s of DDR3.

 

[SmooTh]

 

[techuse]

Look in the PIP. He's literally killing shit with his rocket launcher while abusing his flight speed. Find me another twitch based shooter that is capable of a map this large, traversing this speed, spawning enemies well in advance, being able to hit them, while maintaining the graphics and frame rate so that nothing fails.

The closest you'll get to are battle royale games and Battlefield. You guys make this seem like BF2042 is next gen and Halo Infinite is from the 360 days
Nothing could be further from the truth. Aside from lighting and shadow differences and PBR values which they pull from photogammetry, Halo Infinite is actually fairly competitive and in some cases has higher settings than 2042 and the console is responsible for running the AI in the game as well.

Few people consider anything about BF2042 impressive. Unreal Tournament 2004 which released 17 years ago was already doing exactly what that first video demonstrates. There is nothing impressive or technically demanding about it. Crysis did it as well. The plethora of open world games dating back to PS3/Xbox 360 etc.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

Not at 4K with low latency.

It seems that they prioritized gameplay over graphics at 343 and figured they would just scale the graphics over time as technology improves. They'll probably do another optimization pass for the RT patch and then as new consoles come out they will continue to improve the graphics.

 

[BRiT]

DF Article about the campaign says updated today @ https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...nfinite-campaign-every-console-version-tested

Halo Infinite campaign: every console version tested
Can the base Xbox One really handle an open-world Halo?

Halo Infinite is finally available, bringing with it answers to a question we've been pondering ever since the initial 2018 SlipSpace engine reveal: can this game actually deliver a decent experience on last-gen Xbox hardware? And by extension, if it can, to what extent do you get additional scalability on the still brand-new Xbox Series consoles? The answers are intriguing - particularly when you consider Xbox Series S vs Xbox One X: a genuinely fascinating battle that pits the older, yet more powerful GPU in the Scorpio Engine against a more finely balanced machine in the form of the new junior Xbox.

The truth is, Halo Infinite serves up two distinct style of play that have very difficult implications in how the console hardware is put through its paces. The initial brace of missions - along with 'dungeon' style levels later on - is what you might call classic Halo. Interior-based in nature and more linear, albeit delivered with a profound improvement in graphical features and fidelity, these missions tend to be less of a stress test for the engine. That's juxtaposed with Halo Infinite's brand-new open world. It's here we see the SlipSpace engine pushed hard on every Xbox console. Trees, mountain ranges, enemy bases are rendered to the far distance. There's a rolling time of day, randomised cloud coverage, and even volumetric techniques to add depth to the scene. When it comes to assessing the base Xbox One, then - it's this expansive part of Halo Infinite that poses the biggest challenge.

...

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I'm surprised there isn't more talk of how there is seemingly only one tree model in Halo Infinite.

It's a bloody good tree, though!

 

[iroboto]

Few people consider anything about BF2042 impressive. Unreal Tournament 2004 which released 17 years ago was already doing exactly what that first video demonstrates. There is nothing impressive or technically demanding about it. Crysis did it as well. The plethora of open world games dating back to PS3/Xbox 360 etc.

Just like Infinite is an evolution of the original Halo engine, UT 2004 was once upon a time this type of engine, which eventually it moved away from.

Comparing adventure titles features which are done on a small scale and saying they scale up wards to the size of these new titles is not realistic. It's like sayiing we can create twitter and run it on our desktops; easy; until you need to allow for millions of tweets per second (hard).

We have a mod here who worked on Days Gone who had an extremely challenging time trying to get a motorcycle to work. The amount of challenges Unreal has to what they finally came up with, you can ask him. I'm not sure if he still posts here, but it's not easy.

Certain genres of games often look like the others, there is a reason for that, it's because they have similar features and constraints in which they build their titles.

When Halo 4 came out, people were really surprised that it was a 360 title, today people are still surprised. But all they did was constrain the game from it's wide linear to a corridor shooter, and that was all it took. It was the same engine, it's still the same engine, just rebranded as slipspace.

 

[techuse]

Just like Infinite is an evolution of the original Halo engine, UT 2004 was once upon a time this type of engine, which eventually it moved away from.

Comparing adventure titles features which are done on a small scale and saying they scale up wards to the size of these new titles is not realistic. It's like sayiing we can create twitter and run it on our desktops; easy; until you need to allow for millions of tweets per second (hard).

We have a mod here who worked on Days Gone who had an extremely challenging time trying to get a motorcycle to work. The amount of challenges Unreal has to what they finally came up with, you can ask him. I'm not sure if he still posts here, but it's not easy.

Certain genres of games often look like the others, there is a reason for that, it's because they have similar features and constraints in which they build their titles.

When Halo 4 came out, people were really surprised that it was a 360 title, today people are still surprised. But all they did was constrain the game from it's wide linear to a corridor shooter, and that was all it took. It was the same engine, it's still the same engine, just rebranded as slipspace.

Why do you keep picking some of the lowest quality bars to compare Halo against? Unreal Engine 4 is good at simplifying development for less skilled developers. It isn't a benchmark to which other titles should be compared. Particularly not a platform exclusive, AAA title with tons of development time and a massive budget. GTA V does everything on a larger scale than Halo infinite on hardware several orders of magnitude slower.

 

[iroboto]

Why do you keep picking some of the lowest quality bars to compare Halo against? Unreal Engine 4 is good at simplifying development for less skilled developers. It isn't a benchmark to which other titles should be compared. Particularly not a platform exclusive, AAA title with tons of development time and a massive budget. GTA V does everything on a larger scale than Halo infinite on hardware several orders of magnitude slower.

I disagree with that. GTA V is a very capable and large scale game, but it can't do the most basic core element of Halo or other twitch shooters, which is perform fast enough to support the speed at which players can react at.

 

[techuse]

I disagree with that. GTA V is a very capable and large scale game, but it can't do the most basic core element of Halo or other twitch shooters, which is perform fast enough to support the speed at which players can react at.

Neither can Halo on the hardware equivalent to what GTA V had to run on for its release.

 

[iroboto]

Neither can Halo on the hardware equivalent to what GTA V had to run on for its release.

it absolutely does for a 30fps shooter.
GTA V, remastered or not, the engine has a ton of input lag. I can't see a situation in that game as it is running on any hardware setup, where players are strafing back and forth head shotting each other through barely visible angles at high movement speeds.
Comp below.

X360 Halo 3: FFA Tournament / Prelims (Archive #6.1 - Longplay x 4) @ 2021 - YouTube

Destiny on 360
Destiny 1 On Xbox 360 In 2020... - YouTube

 

[davis.anthony]

Find me another twitch based shooter that is capable of a map this large, traversing this speed, spawning enemies well in advance, being able to hit them, while maintaining the graphics and frame rate so that nothing fails.

The closest you'll get to are battle royale games and Battlefield. You guys make this seem like BF2042 is next gen and Halo Infinite is from the 360 days

It's because next to BF2042 it looks last gen, it it had next gen visuals to match BF's would it still be able to play the way it plays?

 

[Scott_Arm]

I’d actually like to see some input lag test for halo. On pc it’s very bad compared to other shooters. I recommend capping your frame rate so you gpu is 96% or less at all times. Console might be a different story.

 

[eastmen]

I am interested in what they do with the Series S with the next gen ray tracing patches. I am wondering if they can get a higher resolution and more image quality features.

 

[iroboto]

I’d actually like to see some input lag test for halo. On pc it’s very bad compared to other shooters. I recommend capping your frame rate so you gpu is 96% or less at all times. Console might be a different story.

I'm pretty snappy. But I'm on gsync, so I'm not sure, I've never checked vsync on.