Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2015]

[Deleted member 11852]

Because do you really expect a 56% resolution increase in the final game ?

I would not be surprised. The beta is really for stress testing the network infrastructure and perhaps a little game balancing. In all likelihood the build is dated and was locked down some time back. Plenty of games see tremendous performance improvements only at the end of development when stability is nailed down and optimisation is the focus.

 

[Recop]

I would not be surprised. The beta is really for stress testing the network infrastructure and perhaps a little game balancing. In all likelihood the build is dated and was locked down some time back. Plenty of games see tremendous performance improvements only at the end of development when stability is nailed down and optimisation is the focus.

I have never seen such an improvement in any game...

A more stable framerate in the final game ? Certainly.

 

[iroboto]

Because do you really expect a 56% resolution increase in the final game ?

No lol.
I just don't know if it'll end up being 720p, or the equivalent vertical based resolution or something akin to 792p. Where did expectation of jumping up to 1080p come from in my post? I don't see anywhere in my post suggesting that claim.

Reports have PS4 at 900p and Xbox One at 720p. That's been the cycle for DICE games for some time now, if they wanted to break ground PS4 would have been at 1080p and XBO at 900p

 

[turkey]

I have never seen such an improvement in any game...

A more stable framerate in the final game ? Certainly.

Halo 5 had a 720 beta and by the looks might be 1080 for launch (dynamic).

granted some slight difference between in the time between the beta and launch but its an example.?

the 900 / 720 split was there from launch titles BF4, but we know Xbox SDK and available resources have improved since then so I think people are hoping we might finally see some of that.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I have never seen such an improvement in any game...

Assassins Creed 4 went from 900p to 1080p on PS4. I believe Destiny on Xbox One also got a last minute resolution bump. Just off the top of my head.

 

[Recop]

No lol.
I just don't know if it'll end up being 720p, or the equivalent vertical based resolution or something akin to 792p. Where did expectation of jumping up to 1080p come from in my post? I don't see anywhere in my post suggesting that claim.

Reports have PS4 at 900p and Xbox One at 720p. That's been the cycle for DICE games for some time now, if they wanted to break ground PS4 would have been at 1080p and XBO at 900p

Lol, +56% means 900p.

 

[Recop]

Assassins Creed 4 went from 900p to 1080p on PS4. I believe Destiny on Xbox One also got a last minute resolution bump. Just off the top of my head.

Ok, but in both cases it's a 44% resolution increase.

900p has 56% more pixels than 720p.

Also, those games already had a stable framerate at their lower resolution.

Desitny :

AC 4 :

 

[iroboto]

Lol, +56% means 900p.

lol haha.. oh man. I need to do math.

 

[turkey]

Assassins Creed 4 went from 900p to 1080p on PS4. I believe Destiny on Xbox One also got a last minute resolution bump. Just off the top of my head.

if you include patches I believe Ghosts went from 720p to 1080p on ps4 so its not totally unheard of.

 

[djskribbles]

Battlefront XB1 beta analysis:

720p and slightly worse performance compared to PS4.

 

[Clukos]

Hopefully the final code will be more stable. Sub 50 drops and 720p and really disappointing for the X1 version though, you'd think with only multiplayer focus, 24 less players in the biggest maps and less interactive/destructible environments than Battlefield 4 things would have improved in the last 2 years...

 

[pjbliverpool]

Solid 60fps in the Hoth level here at 1080p on all High settings on my GTX 670. DF seems to think the PS4 may have Geometry set to Ultra though so I'll see what I can push up to Ultra while maintaining the 60fps lock throughout that level.

 

[Clukos]

I am thinking they could just lower down some settings for the X1 version and match the Ps4 resolution. But if it struggles to keep up at 720p that's out of the question. It's best that X1 users simply forget Battlefront exists, with Halo 5 right around the corner i bet that's a lot easier.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Hopefully the final code will be more stable. Sub 50 drops and 720p and really disappointing for the X1 version though, you'd think with only multiplayer focus, 24 less players in the biggest maps and less interactive/destructible environments than Battlefield 4 things would have improved in the last 2 years...

To be fair, they have. Compare vids of this game to BF4 or Hardline, and this game looks much much better. It's not even a contest. I'll have to play it to see how the image quality really looks on a fairly large screen. I'm curious, to say the least. As a PC gamer, I always tended to set graphics settings high, and then adjust resolution accordingly, where other people prefer higher resolution with medium-type settings. This game is kind of a good experiment for that. They've obviously traded resolution for other improved visual aspects on both consoles. The question is whether it's too much of a tradeoff on Xbox One.

 

[iroboto]

Solid 60fps in the Hoth level here at 1080p on all High settings on my GTX 670. DF seems to think the PS4 may have Geometry set to Ultra though so I'll see what I can push up to Ultra while maintaining the 60fps lock throughout that level.

This seems to be inline with my theory of available memory bandwidth as being the possible bottleneck for these frostbyte games. Or at least something to do with the textures. GTX670 comes in with a dedicated 192GB/s. PS4 has a contended 176GB/s. And if we're streaming textures from DDR3 - we're looking at a paltry 60GB/s maybe with some tricks with sram you can probably bring that up. But I think this appears to be a pattern emerging. Forza may have gotten away with 60fps locked at 1080p but I think the number of textures is relatively low. Games like this, or games with a lot of high quality textures seem to really hurt both consoles. And appears to be inline with the resolution drops we're seeing across both platforms.

 

[Recop]

This seems to be inline with my theory of available memory bandwidth as being the possible bottleneck for these frostbyte games. Or at least something to do with the textures. GTX670 comes in with a dedicated 192GB/s. PS4 has a contended 176GB/s. And if we're streaming textures from DDR3 - we're looking at a paltry 60GB/s maybe with some tricks with sram you can probably bring that up. But I think this appears to be a pattern emerging. Forza may have gotten away with 60fps locked at 1080p but I think the number of textures is relatively low. Games like this, or games with a lot of high quality textures seem to really hurt both consoles. And appears to be inline with the resolution drops we're seeing across both platforms.

Several Frosbite games have a higher resolution on both consoles : NFS Rivals, Dragon Age, Plants vs Zombies.

 

[iroboto]

Several Frosbite games have a higher resolution on both consoles : NFS Rivals, Dragon Age, Plants vs Zombies.

The nice thing about 60fps games is that the frame time is limited. So only PvZ can be applied in this scenario and the question becomes how heavy are the textures in that game when compared to the textures the battlefield series.

 

[Recop]

The nice thing about 60fps games is that the frame time is limited. So only PvZ can be applied in this scenario and the question becomes how heavy are the textures in that game when compared to the textures the battlefield series.

That is why i think the main reason for the lower resolution is the 60fps target.

 

[chris1515]

Several Frosbite games have a higher resolution on both consoles : NFS Rivals, Dragon Age, Plants vs Zombies.

All 30 fps games. The game looks much better than BF4. And during advanced real-time Rendering SIGGRAPH presentation wee see example of unified volumetric lighting and other effect calculated at 900p on PS4 they were not cheap effect...

 

[Barbarian]

It's fairly easy to see that the volumetric effects in SWBF are screen space based, which suggests they are not using what was presented at Siggraph for this game.