Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2019]

[iroboto]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-gears-5-tech-interview

A lot accomplished in 2 years.

The Coalition: On Gears of War 4, we ran only a few passes async such as reflection capture actors. We made a large investment on Gears 5 to run our entire post-process chain on async compute. This made a lot of sense given it is always running at native resolution due to the temporal upscale. This gave us a few more milliseconds to work with and achieve 60fps on Xbox One X, as well as in all MP modes on Xbox One S. There was a non-trivial amount of engineering effort to convert every post-process pass we used on Gears 5 to compute so we could then run it async. We also added a deferred present where the base pass of the next frame is started while the GPU completes the async post process pass of the current frame. These same asynchronous compute optimisations are also supported on PC.

Finger's Crossed!

Digital Foundry: DirectX 12 supports ray tracing on PC now through DXR and the Project Scarlett has announced hardware ray tracing support, UE4 has also added support for various ray traced effects. Where do you see the usage of ray tracing in Gears 5 or in future titles from The Coalition?

The Coalition: On Gears 5 we are using GPU compute-based ray traced distance field shadows which works across all platforms and does not depend on DXR or dedicated ray tracing hardware. We are excited with the possibilities of DXR and Project Scarlett's native hardware support for accelerated ray tracing. At this point, we are not ready to talk about our future plans, however we are following closely the emerging techniques and innovations in this exciting space.

 

[DavidGraham]

You should check some recent benchmarks. A 670 more often than not gets beaten handily by a 7870.

Most recently in Borderlands 3, they are a match!

 

[PSman1700]

Also Control runs quite well on a 670, for what it is. Stating that a base ps4 matches or even outperforms a 670 or higher then that seems incorrect for 90% of all titles.
Yes the 7870 aged better thanks to drivers etc, but then that gpu is most likely also faster then the ps4's gpu.
This early 2012 gpu does still well, matching 760 and even 960.

 

[techuse]

Most recently in Borderlands 3, they are a match!

UE4 is pretty close to a best case scenario for nvidia/worst case for AMD.

 

[PSman1700]

UE4 is pretty close to a best case scenario for nvidia/worst case for AMD.

I can't seem to find benchmarks proving a 680/770, or even a 670 performing the same as a base PS4, at equivalent settings. Obviously the CPU is playing a role in it too, but anyway.
A better comparison could be made if HZD or Ghost, would be ported over, and see how that runs. Would be interesting to say the least.

 

[techuse]

I can't seem to find benchmarks proving a 680/770, or even a 670 performing the same as a base PS4, at equivalent settings. Obviously the CPU is playing a role in it too, but anyway.
A better comparison could be made if HZD or Ghost, would be ported over, and see how that runs. Would be interesting to say the least.

Forza tech
Frostbite 3
Id tech
Capcoms internal engines
Codemasters engine
Apex engine
Lithtech
Crystal tools
Hitman engine
Rebellions asura engine

All are going to be a very poor experience on a 670/760. You can check jermgaming on youtube where he compares various games on ps4 and a 670 which i believe he even overclocks. Ignore what he says and just look at the video footage comparison. A stock 670 also has nearly 50% more compute than a ps4. It shouldnt even be close.

 

[JoeJ]

All are going to be a very poor experience on a 670/760.

Makes sense, assuming those engines nowadays use more compute then when those GPUs came out. Last time i had benched 670 vs 5950 in my pretty large compute project the latter was 5 times faster (Vulkan). That's no outlier, as i've seen those results consistently over many years, many APIs and many shaders / algorithms.
In games however the 670 was better IIRC, and ofc it's more power efficient.

 

[Dictator]

UE4 is pretty close to a best case scenario for nvidia/worst case for AMD.

Well except when they are not (Gears5 and 4 do Very well on amd).

 

[techuse]

Well except when they are not (Gears5 and 4 do Very well on amd).

Highly customized UE4 there. It also looks and performs better than every UE4 title on PC by some margin.

 

[Jay]

Regarding gears 5.
We assumed but it was nice to hear just how much the different studios are actively sharing tech and helping each other.

This shows its been happening for at least a few years, when many thought/hoped it would just start to happen after the influx of new studios.

Also sounds like from recent comments that it's been formalised as well as adhock.

 

[see colon]

Forza tech
Frostbite 3
Id tech
Capcoms internal engines
Codemasters engine
Apex engine
Lithtech
Crystal tools
Hitman engine
Rebellions asura engine

All are going to be a very poor experience on a 670/760. You can check jermgaming on youtube where he compares various games on ps4 and a 670 which i believe he even overclocks. Ignore what he says and just look at the video footage comparison. A stock 670 also has nearly 50% more compute than a ps4. It shouldnt even be close.

+1 for Jermgaming. He has a whole series of videos where he built a PC for about PS4 prices and benched it against the console, upgraded the GPU to compare to the pro, and also did a similar thing with One X.

 

[PSman1700]

The 8th gen was the first where you don't have to spend so much more to outperform the consoles. Yes a 670 is about as expensive as a PS4 but it is also one and a half year older

 

[techuse]

The 8th gen was the first where you don't have to spend so much more to outperform the consoles. Yes a 670 is about as expensive as a PS4 but it is also one and a half year older

It will be interesting going forward. With tech advances slowing down dramatically the power gap is likely to decrease. This may be what finally ends Nvidia’s insane price gouging.

 

[PSman1700]

It will be interesting going forward. With tech advances slowing down dramatically the power gap is likely to decrease. This may be what finally ends Nvidia’s insane price gouging.

Tech slowed down alot already for last gen, yet the gap got bigger. By late 2013 a 7970ghz and a fast i7 were over a year old. Those components by far outperform the base consoles still.
When tech was moving fast, during the 6th and 7th gen, i think the consoles where closer atleast.

 

[techuse]

Tech slowed down alot already for last gen, yet the gap got bigger. By late 2013 a 7970ghz and a fast i7 were over a year old. Those components by far outperform the base consoles still.
When tech was moving fast, during the 6th and 7th gen, i think the consoles where closer atleast.

When ps4 launched the fastest single gpu was almost 3x its performance. And the next generation offering 5-6x performance was right around the corner. The cpu gap was even bigger. Its looking like the new consoles will be around 270 level performance. That means that when the next line of high end gpus launch they will only be twiceish faster than the new consoles. Cpu situation will be even worse. On top of this, since we are so close to the end of sillicon scaling, theres no real path forward to substantially increase performance in the first several years of the console cycle. I also suspect the poor uptake/usage of low level APIs willl need to majorly improve. More and more titles have such poor cpu performance scaling relative to consoles. Whats going to happen with the massively increased object counts of next gen games.

 

[PSman1700]

When ps4 launched the fastest single gpu was almost 3x its performance. And the next generation offering 5-6x performance was right around the corner. The cpu gap was even bigger. Its looking like the new consoles will be around 270 level performance. That means that when the next line of high end gpus launch they will only be twiceish faster than the new consoles. Cpu situation will be even worse. On top of this, since we are so close to the end of sillicon scaling, theres no real path forward to substantially increase performance in the first several years of the console cycle. I also suspect the poor uptake/usage of low level APIs willl need to majorly improve. More and more titles have such poor cpu performance scaling relative to consoles. Whats going to happen with the massively increased object counts of next gen games.

We do not know at all what kind of performance we can expect from the next gen consoles, but if it is anything like a RTX 2070, they will be kind off mid range, today the fastest is a RTX Titan, by late 2020 nvidia probably have a new line, same for AMD. No idea on the cpu side though, the gap should be much smaller. But i doubt any console is going to get 12+ cores at 4ghz or more next year.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

RTX Titan and its ilk are super-high-end. PC has always had the option of insane amounts of money being thrown at it. If you're wanting to compare console performance to PC performance, it should be at a given price point. Otherwise you can spec a $10,000 PC with liquid cooling, overclocked up the wazoo, insane amounts of RAM, SLI'd GPUs, dual many-core server CPUs, etc.

 

[PSman1700]

RTX Titan and its ilk are super-high-end. PC has always had the option of insane amounts of money being thrown at it. If you're wanting to compare console performance to PC performance, it should be at a given price point. Otherwise you can spec a $10,000 PC with liquid cooling, overclocked up the wazoo, insane amounts of RAM, SLI'd GPUs, dual many-core server CPUs, etc.

True, on a pure hardware level the consoles can not match. I expect the gap to be less then current gen experienced, since that gap was arguably the widest.

 

[techuse]

We do not know at all what kind of performance we can expect from the next gen consoles, but if it is anything like a RTX 2070, they will be kind off mid range, today the fastest is a RTX Titan, by late 2020 nvidia probably have a new line, same for AMD. No idea on the cpu side though, the gap should be much smaller. But i doubt any console is going to get 12+ cores at 4ghz or more next year.

IMO 2070 level performance is a very reasonable prediction of the GPU power in next gen consoles WRT rasterization. Titan RTX is about 50% faster than a 2070. I think a 50% improvement over Titan RTX is reasonable for the 7nm high end Nvidia GPU. that puts it a little over 2x the speed of the consoles/2070. I expect it will be very slow performance improvements after that for quite some time.

 

[PSman1700]

IMO 2070 level performance is a very reasonable prediction of the GPU power in next gen consoles WRT rasterization. Titan RTX is about 50% faster than a 2070. I think a 50% improvement over Titan RTX is reasonable for the 7nm high end Nvidia GPU. that puts it a little over 2x the speed of the consoles/2070. I expect it will be very slow performance improvements after that for quite some time.

You could be totally right. That would also mean at the same time we are getting a mid range RTX product from 2018 in a late 2020 console. No idea how important RT will be, but differences are bigger there between RTX variants atleast. If the over 2 times the gpu performance is true by then, that won't put it too far behind the 3 times power difference in 2013.
Anyway, we will have to see what kind of hardware we get in both next gen consoles and the pc. Next gen console/pc games are going to look a whole lot better atleast, and i will most likely get both.