Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]

[mrobotnic]

Direct storage removes a large portion of overhead that the OS applies typically on drive access. But there’s no current method of going from SSD directly to VRAM. Technically consoles are the same, they removed the driver and OS overhead for maximum IO speed, the only difference is that they have a shared pool Of memory.

outside of cache scrubbers Xbox and PS5 io solutions are fairly interchangeable, the difference owing to PS5 choosing kraken and Xbox staying with LZ. Both have access to additional texture encoding to make texture smaller, PS5 supports licensing for Oodle, and Xbox supports licensing for BCPack. Whether engines use them seems is up to the engine it seems. Both platforms offer them free of charge but that doesn’t mean developers will use them.

kraken and bcpack decompression aside ps5 has alot of io hardware not present on xbox or pc its not interchangeable really, not much has been shown or seen on xbox hardware besides direct storage api and buzz words like velocity architecture and sfs.. not to mention i recall a couple of developers saying its nowhere similar

 

[iroboto]

kraken and bcpack decompression aside ps5 has alot of io hardware not present on xbox or pc its not interchangeable really, not much has been shown or seen on xbox hardware besides direct storage api and buzz words like velocity architecture and sfs.. not to mention i recall a couple of developers saying its nowhere similar

It’s the same. Prior to kraken both last generation consoles had their own decompressor units as well. Architecturally you’re not seeing a massive change, they changed the decompression block and allowed for inter file patching.

Marketing feature is about differentiating. They aren’t going to say me too, but our choices are inferior. We’ve had a lot of those hardware back then. DMA engines etc. none of this is new.

 

[mrobotnic]

It’s important to separate art from technology. With baked lighting, you have lighting artists go in and create dramatic lighting for each area they know a player will visit. They can add lighting in there that doesn’t visibly exist for artistic effect.

For all purposes, baked lighting that a whole team works on will look better than real time lighting and run better too. The only problem is that things don’t change, which is fine if you make a game where nothing changes, but not fine if you make a game where things do. See movie lighting: real lamp posts versus movie lighting

https://www.reddit.com/r/Moviesinthemaking/comments/eskexd

Dynamic lighting, shadows and reflections opens up game design to support changes in the world, and it also means being able to support lighting for procedurally generated content as well.

That’s the trade off. Eventually we will get to the point where things look fairly realistic, but the reality is most things like photography and cinema seldom are. They are very controlled and that’s what artistry is supposed to be about.

well said and done but i still fail to see the importance of the advanced gi on starfield outside or in confined spaces that renders it far advanced from what ive seen on ps4, thats the issue you can use all graphics techniques and tools but if it looks and performs the same or worse as a 10 year old game then whats really the purpose, this is crysis 2 tesselating a flat road block again just to show that it can but to no visual gain.

 

[iroboto]

well said and done but i still fail to see the importance of the advanced gi on starfield outside or in confined spaces that renders it far advanced from what ive seen on ps4, thats the issue you can use all graphics techniques and tools but if it looks and performs the same or worse as a 10 year old game then whats really the purpose, this is crysis 2 tesselating a flat road block again just to show that it can but to no visual gain.

Well that’s because you can’t model every planet that every player will visit. You want the game to be a pseudo sandbox that looks good, then it has to be dynamic. It’s impossible to bake all these worlds, the time requirement would be too large. Quite literally they would never finish making the game.

 

[mrobotnic]

It’s the same. Prior to kraken both last generation consoles had their own decompressor units as well. Architecturally you’re not seeing a massive change, they changed the decompression block and allowed for inter file patching.

Marketing feature is about differentiating. They aren’t going to say me too, but our choices are inferior. We’ve had a lot of those hardware back then. DMA engines etc. none of this is new.

ok now since you claim they are similar without showing evidence, why havent we seen any game load as fast on xbox as it does on ps5 not even microsofts big titles, weve seen games almost half the size on ps5 compared to xbox, streaming stutters on some games on xbox compared to ps5, developers coming out and saying the xbox solution is nowhere near what the ps5 is doing so whats going on here id expect microsoft big titles to have no loading screens but this happens every time and if there was any special io on xbox we would have seen it by now... the overall talk on xbox io hasnt reflected the marketing material where as on ps5 it has proven to be facts and not hot air.

 

[mrobotnic]

Well that’s because you can’t model every planet that every player will visit. You want the game to be a pseudo sandbox that looks good, then it has to be dynamic. It’s impossible to bake all these worlds, the time requirement would be too large. Quite literally they would never finish making the game.

problem is any average gamer can notice global illumination in multiple games but it takes an experienced gamer to notice it on starfield procedural or dynamic planets i didnt notice it when playing until i heard about it using RTGI when i went through the web, if it takes me to google search a games graphics techniques to know its present then it was a mediocre implementation.

 

[iroboto]

ok now since you claim they are similar without showing evidence, why havent we seen any game load as fast on xbox as it does on ps5 not even microsofts big titles, weve seen games almost half the size on ps5 compared to xbox, streaming stutters on some games on xbox compared to ps5, developers coming out and saying the xbox solution is nowhere near what the ps5 is doing so whats going on here id expect microsoft big titles to have no loading screens but this happens every time and if there was any special io on xbox we would have seen it by now... the overall talk on xbox io hasnt reflected the marketing material where as on ps5 it has proven to be facts and not hot air.

Can you show me a list of a titles where PS5 games are 1/2 the size of Series X titles? I suspect there to be outliers but this is not a trend.

As to why PS5 performs so well, it is a lead platform to develop for. We have seen many titles on Series consoles that after launch continue to improve stuttering performance to be eventually as smooth as ps5. And secondly stuttering is not likely a result of asset loading challenges, but instead API call problems that need additional sorting.

no loading screens is something a developer would have to aim to do. It’s not something that the hardware isn’t capable of. PS5 titles can get away with it because they don’t need to ship to PC. They can code optimally knowing full well what hardware spec will be performing it. If you attempted to do no loads on PC, the challenge is significantly greater.

Starfield runs on 4GB of VRAM even at 4K with a great deal of higher texture quality than most games. And you can carry your stuff and dump them off everywhere. I think you would be wrong to say that aren’t using streaming technologies to lower the VRAM usage and that streaming be dependent on IO to ensure the game continues to run as you drop more trash there. If I recall correctly most PS5 titles has trouble fitting in anything less than 12GB of VRAM

 

[iroboto]

well said and done but i still fail to see the importance of the advanced gi on starfield outside or in confined spaces that renders it far advanced from what ive seen on ps4, thats the issue you can use all graphics techniques and tools but if it looks and performs the same or worse as a 10 year old game then whats really the purpose, this is crysis 2 tesselating a flat road block again just to show that it can but to no visual gain.

Because it opens up dynamic options which opens up gameplay options. And that’s more important than trying to iterate further on things they don’t move. If you want to increase the interactivity between the player and the world, like we do with VR, baking is going to have to fall off.

 

[pjbliverpool]

yes that aswell but wasnt it a specific workaround from nixxes to speed up the process similar to miles morales where even without direct storage a large pool of ram also works,

R&C doesn't seem to do any special pre-caching to reduce the dependency on IO. It just uses standard Windows file caching.

anyhow what importance is it to xbox cause i can see the benefit on pc but i dont understand what importance is it to a unified memory architecture like on console since ps4 and xbox one also had decompression hardware isnt what microsoft did here was only to add a nvme ssd only cause without the other stuff that sony put on ps5 i cant see much difference here.

Direct Storage is primarily about making the IO API itself work more efficiently with high speed SSD's. The previous Win32 IO API was designed around much slower HDD's and thus puts a large overhead on the CPU when dealing with the high throughputs of moderns NVMe's. On the PC side it also has a GPU decompression component which is dealt with by the hardware decompressor on the Xbox. But it's still critical to the efficiency of IO in termsof it's CPU overhead on the Xbox, regardless of the HW decompression.

But there’s no current method of going from SSD directly to VRAM.

Strictly speaking there is -AMD's Smart Access Storage. It just requires specific game integration and only works on modern AMD only platforms. And no game has implemented it yet.

kraken and bcpack decompression aside ps5 has alot of io hardware not present on xbox or pc its not interchangeable really,

No it doesn't. DMA controllers, 'IO co-processors', on chip RAM... these are all just standard components on any decent SSD controller. Sony is just really good at taking standard components, and marketing them as if they are some sort of unique Sony innovation. See: PS4 Move Engines.

 

[iroboto]

Strictly speaking there is -AMD's Smart Access Storage. It just requires specific game integration and only works on modern AMD only platforms. And no game has implemented it yet.

Hey is that the GPU with the SSD built onto it? Or is this something else entirely

 

[Nesh]

PS5 titles can get away with it because they don’t need to ship to PC. They can code optimally knowing full well what hardware spec will be performing it. If you attempted to do no loads on PC, the challenge is significantly greater.

Although this sounds like a logical explanation, thats still in the realm of possibility and a guess without actual confirmation. Forespoken for example was not a first party game, it was both on PC and PS5 but exhibits almost instantenous loading. It is also a likely scenario that a MS first party game can be optimised a bit more for faster loading if they want to.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Hey is that the GPU with the SSD built onto it? Or is this something else entirely

Something else. AMD announced it around the RDNA3 launch if I recall. Details are fairly vague but based on what info has been released it would enable data to be sent directly from the SSD to the GPU presumably via point to point DMA, and so completely bypassing system memory.

 

[iroboto]

Although this sounds like a logical explanation, thats still in the realm of possibility and a guess without actual confirmation. Forespoken for example was not a first party game, it was both on PC and PS5 but exhibits almost instantenous loading. It is also a likely scenario that a MS first party game can be optimised a bit more for faster loading if they want to.

Yea. You would need to build an engine around microloading. Like for me, I’m thinking Demon Souls or SM:MM where it was straight to game and the game is microloading so the overall game is just loading faster.

But i don’t know how applicable this is for every title or engine. So far, MS has not released a title that does this. But I’m fairly confident the series consoles can if PC can.

 

[Below2D]

There's tons more CPU work to do at game load than just decompression though. I imagine that's particularly true in a big persistent open world like this.

I don't doubt this but 40 seconds seems particularly egregious and there is no mention of DirectStorage on PC either. At least, it seems to be only limited to the first load. Afterwards, they are relatively quick.

That the PC version loads 1/3 of the time it takes to load the SX version is a bit crazy, especially when Microsoft was hyping velocity architecture with the nvme drive, directstorage, sfs, and hardware accelerated decompression.

 

[davis.anthony]

problem is any average gamer can notice global illumination in multiple games but it takes an experienced gamer to notice it on starfield procedural or dynamic planets i didn't notice it when playing until i heard about it using RTGI when i went through the web, if it takes me to google search a games graphics techniques to know its present then it was a mediocre implementation.

Starfield doesn't use RTGI, and the average game doesn't know what GI is nor do they care about it.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Still watching but that's quite the scathing criticism from Alex. He's taking the gloves off on that one.

Overall imminently reasonable critique though. Those are some truly bizarre omissions and performance discrepancies between IHV's, hopefully Nvidia driver updates can provide a boost as I'm skeptical how much attention Bethesda will give to it.

Exceptional as usual, that small delay compared to other coverage nearly always is reflected in the amount of work clearly invested.

 

[cheapchips]

I don't doubt this but 40 seconds seems particularly egregious and there is no mention of DirectStorage on PC either.

It's an interesting tech comparison but on Xbox the game can load via quick resume. Time to actually get into the game will generally be quicker on Xbox.

Unless my wife takes an interest in playing, in which case I'll become quite grumpy about loading.

 

[Pete]

Starfield doesn't use RTGI, and the average game doesn't know what GI is nor do they care about it.

Real Time (as opposed to baked) GI, not Ray Traced GI, in this case. I would hope the game knows what it’s using, though that may explain the recent rash of un(der)optimized launches.

 

[function]

well said and done but i still fail to see the importance of the advanced gi on starfield outside or in confined spaces that renders it far advanced from what ive seen on ps4, thats the issue you can use all graphics techniques and tools but if it looks and performs the same or worse as a 10 year old game then whats really the purpose

1) You don't have to have a static world to have bounced lighting. In Starfield, in addition to the procedurally generated areas, you have a hub area - your ship - which is home and which you can change, adapt, add things too, remove things from. When you change things bounced lighting changes. Those changes could be where the walls are, what's in a room, what colour the lights are, how many millions of potatoes you're hoarding.

Take another look at the PS4 Fallout 4 image I quoted at you last night. It's a user created area and so can't have baked lighting (or shadows).

2) You don't have to spend time baking, re-baking, re-re-baking lighting and you don't have to store Terrabytes worth of data for all areas in all lighting conditions for all possible configurations of environmental objects. You can spend that time, that money, and that storage on stuff you can't calculate real time. Like dialogue, top level meshes, textures etc etc.

Starfield doesn't use RTGI

Do you mean RTGI ... or ... RTGI?

 

[RobertR1]

Solid dumpstering by Alex. No different to what I and others have stated but it's great to see it broadcasted to such a wide audience level:

- No fov adjustment
- Awful black levels
- No HDR
- No AF and forcing AF causes issues
- Underutilization of nvidia gpu's


Not even gonna mention RT as that's about a lifetime away given the basics are missing. Let's see how long it takes people to figure out the copy/paste encounters.