Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2024]

i can confirm that PS5 has often camera stutter, i don't mind 30fps in that kind of games, but the stutter is annoying.
With "camera stutter" you mean drops under 30 fps due to the bad dynamic resolution or just good old stutters when you walk over a zone in the map?
 
I have seen that silent hill 2 on PC has some traversal stutters, and I was wondering if PS5 has them too. From the DF review Tom didn't mention stutters, just GPU drops.

I'm trying to decide if I want to buy it now on PS5 or wait when I have a new PC and get it then.
while I don't have the game, as I mentioned earlier, I follow a youtuber who is a very neurotic guy observing every little detail and has a RTX 2080 along with an Intel CPU from a few years ago and he mentioned that the games is well optimised and also it just takes up 34GB of space. It's Polish wizardry
 
yeah drops but it's worse than just some traversal stutter as it happens more often.
Hmm, hopefully it should be possible to adjust the dynamic res to fix the framerate. Don't have as much faith in them fixing the traversal stutters since this is unreal engine. At least it seems that they are not in the PS5 version.

If they fix those dynamic res drops I'm buying their game.

Also, still UE 5.1... maybe in 2027 we will get some UE 5.3 games at this pace.
 
while I don't have the game, as I mentioned earlier, I follow a youtuber who is a very neurotic guy observing every little detail and has a RTX 2080 along with an Intel CPU from a few years ago and he mentioned that the games is well optimised and also it just takes up 34GB of space. It's Polish wizardry
The game performs alright compared to the visual output, but there is nothing worse that brings me out of an experience than stuttering. I'd take 30 fps stable with no stuttering over 120 fps with stutters any day of the week.
 

DF Direct Weekly #183: Until Dawn Has Issues, Nintendo Ryujinx Takedown, UE5 MegaLights, FF16 Xbox?​


0:00:00 Introduction
0:00:53 News 1: Nintendo takes down Ryujinx
0:17:28 News 2: Until Dawn remake tested!
0:33:20 News 3: Unreal MegaLights tech demoed
0:48:26 News 4: Square Enix wants FF16 on Xbox
0:57:39 News 5: Next Guerrilla game reportedly Horizon online
1:06:04 News 6: God of War Ragnarök gets PC patch boosts
1:14:02 News 7: STALKER 2 documentary shows war torn game development
1:22:20 Supporter Q1: Was Strix Halo designed for a new Steam Machine? Could Steam Machines match the performance of a PS5 Pro at the same price?
1:28:56 Supporter Q2: What is Naughty Dog working on?
1:35:04 Supporter Q3: Will Switch 2 support the newest UE5 features?
1:38:43 Supporter Q4: Can the Switch 2 compete performance wise with the Steam Deck? Does it need to?
1:42:34 Supporter Q5: The PS5 Pro hasn’t sold out, so is this a sign of underperforming sales?
 
I hope Alex obliterates Silent Hill 2 on PC in his video.. because this constant stuttering is not good, and locking to 30fps doesn't even help. It constantly feels like James lags every few seconds on my PC.

I haven't tried messing around with much because I'm tired and want to go to bed, but yea.. they've got to do something about this.
 
It does look like a PS3 game reminding me some PS2 games. The most shocking results of the gen IMO. Those guys should all stop what they are doing and learn to use a proper engine like UE.
I think they lost the documentation of the engine during the PS3 era and have been afraid to touch the code ever since.

Getting a 94 on metacritic with those visuals is a bit insulting. Gameplay is king, but visuals are still incredibly important.
 

Clearly, current gen consoles aren't enough for this next gen game to run well.
The amount of 5Pro marketing is getting a bit much here, I'm usually pretty okay with a normal amount of promotion of the hardware when being granted exclusivity content, but I don't think this particular title falls into the 5Pro pre-purchase evaluation content that's been going out, and its getting uncomfortable. I see 5pro marketing clips in nearly all of their recently released videos - and now seeing them on game reviews when 5Pro hasn't launched yet.

This is a poorly optimized title, Ollie shouldn't be afraid to straight up call it out on it. He already discussed the that it's got rendering features from the PS3 generation, there's nothing here complex that should be killing these 10+ TF consoles.

Secondly, we don't have a 5pro and we don't know a 45% bump will do anything to get to 60 without knowing where the bottlenecks are, the recommendation feels hollow here where normally DF would wait to run the title on said hardware before saying, hey if you want 60fps, get the 5pro. Which loops me back to point one, feels unnecessary, I dare say possibly in the realm of invasive. The 5pro version should hella add a lot more than just getting the game to lock 60.
 
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The amount of 5Pro marketing is getting a bit much here, I'm usually pretty okay with a normal amount of promotion of the hardware when being granted exclusivity content, but I don't think this particular title falls into the 5Pro pre-purchase evaluation content that's been going out, and its getting uncomfortable. I see 5pro marketing clips in nearly all of their recently released videos - and now seeing them on game reviews when 5Pro hasn't launched yet.

This is a poorly optimized title, Ollie shouldn't be afraid to straight up call it out on it. He already discussed the that it's got rendering features from the PS3 generation, there's nothing here complex that should be killing these 10+ TF consoles.

Secondly, we don't have a 5pro and we don't know a 45% bump will do anything to get to 60 without knowing where the bottlenecks are, the recommendation feels hollow here where normally DF would wait to run the title on said hardware before saying, hey if you want 60fps, get the 5pro. Which loops me back to point one, feels unnecessary, I dare say possibly in the realm of invasive. The 5pro version should hella add a lot more than just getting the game to lock 60.
The pro is going to run the game better in some way. If someone has already pre-ordered it, it would be smart to wait a month and play it then.

This is digital foundry, they were saying that the pro felt useless months before the reveal.
 
The pro is going to run the game better in some way. If someone has already pre-ordered it, it would be smart to wait a month and play it then.

This is digital foundry, they were saying that the pro felt useless months before the reveal.
I would disagree with that sentiment. It’s the role of any writer to be concise especially on the message that needed to be conveyed.

The message should be, this is a poorly running game period. It’s dx9 level of feature set.

But when he brought up the topic of 5pro, he indicates it should run better, sure, but will it actually hit 60? We don’t know. More
Compute units and more bandwidth won’t improve things, we don’t see XSX scaling this way above ps5. If it’s a clocking issue it’s the same as PS5. If it’s a geometry issue the 5pro doesn’t have more ROPS or geometry professors. If it’s RT, well there’s none present.

If it’s DX9 level of coding it’s not likely to even bother with compute shaders so there’s no way it’s going to take advantage of dual submit 32.

PSSR won’t perform or look any better, it’s a cel shaded anime game.

And then following he concedes he doesn’t know if there will be a 5pro variant where they could be forced to run higher resolution thus not get to 60fps anyway.

So in the end it’s a sidebar conversation literally showing me clips of 5pro marketing while the losing the message that the game actually needs to be optimized way better than it is, both base consoles have not hit their hardware limit!

I don’t really mind if they have been told explicitly that thry should promote 5pro in certain ways now that they are owned by ign or have gained access to content in exchange for this. But showing up here in this video just comes across as invasive because the thought about it isn’t even well executed.
 
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0:33:20 News 3: Unreal MegaLights tech demoed
Btw the speculation about specular (pun... moderately intended :p) on console seemed weird to me so I checked the content. The sequence shown in the live demo animates those lights in a ring both up and then back down to get the whole rotation effect. It's maybe not obvious at the exposure levels that are shown in that shot but only the first few lights are still on brightly after the sequence ends while the others are dim. In the live kiosk mode (which is where I presume the PC screenshot/video that was shown was taken), they are just all on.

In any case there's no difference between PC and console there, and no limitations on specular from those analytic lights; just the way the content was set up.
 
Btw the speculation about specular (pun... moderately intended :p) on console seemed weird to me so I checked the content. The sequence shown in the live demo animates those lights in a ring both up and then back down to get the whole rotation effect. It's maybe not obvious at the exposure levels that are shown in that shot but only the first few lights are still on brightly after the sequence ends while the others are dim. In the live kiosk mode (which is where I presume the PC screenshot/video that was shown was taken), they are just all on.

In any case there's no difference between PC and console there, and no limitations on specular from those analytic lights; just the way the content was set up.
Thanks for the clarification (y)
 
The amount of 5Pro marketing is getting a bit much here, I'm usually pretty okay with a normal amount of promotion of the hardware when being granted exclusivity content, but I don't think this particular title falls into the 5Pro pre-purchase evaluation content that's been going out, and its getting uncomfortable. I see 5pro marketing clips in nearly all of their recently released videos - and now seeing them on game reviews when 5Pro hasn't launched yet.

This is a poorly optimized title, Ollie shouldn't be afraid to straight up call it out on it. He already discussed the that it's got rendering features from the PS3 generation, there's nothing here complex that should be killing these 10+ TF consoles.

Secondly, we don't have a 5pro and we don't know a 45% bump will do anything to get to 60 without knowing where the bottlenecks are, the recommendation feels hollow here where normally DF would wait to run the title on said hardware before saying, hey if you want 60fps, get the 5pro. Which loops me back to point one, feels unnecessary, I dare say possibly in the realm of invasive. The 5pro version should hella add a lot more than just getting the game to lock 60.

At some point when a game is running poorly on consoles, I start to go deeper into different avenues to try to improve the visual experience. The basic graphical configuration on current-gen runs poorly, so I looked at the PS4 version on PS5, spent a couple hours testing VRR, and spent some time with the PC release. If the game didn't have those issues, I wouldn't have done that work as I don't think it would have added a lot of value to viewers. If you look at my coverage of most console titles, I usually don't mention the PS4 version on PS5, VRR support, or the PC version, because I don't have all that much interest there if the console versions are good, because I have limited time to do coverage on a game, and because my coverage remit doesn't usually extend to PC. In this case, I'm approaching this from the perspective of someone who wants to play the game more and is trying to work out what the best platform might be, for myself and others.

In that spirit, I thought that the typical GPU performance uplift on 5 Pro might get it to a reasonable 60, or at least substantially above 48fps, and I thought spending three sentences on 5 Pro speculation was reasonable. I think that's providing a bit of context that would be helpful to the viewer.

I don't think the fact that the game is very poorly optimized is much of a mystery, it runs badly relative to expectations and I think I make that very clear. But I'm also trying to be realistic because this is Atlus and it's unlikely that image quality will improve at all, or that performance will improve much, without the introduction of more powerful hardware.
 
In that spirit, I thought that the typical GPU performance uplift on 5 Pro might get it to a reasonable 60, or at least substantially above 48fps, and I thought spending three sentences on 5 Pro speculation was reasonable. I think that's providing a bit of context that would be helpful to the viewer.
It’s all good Ollie. You don’t have to defend your work. I think for me it was more bringing about awareness that the “everything is so much better on 5pro narrative” that is the recently flooding in YouTube is starting to feel suspicious, right after I got a complete feed of 5pro being way overly priced; it feels like forced damage control but I digress.

I have an issue with that, than me actually having an issue with your work. Just wanted to bring awareness to it, because DF is leading the charge here on it. So just wanted you to know that the message is getting out there.

I would also agree that it would make sense that it should improve, but if the 2 pieces of base kit aren’t hitting proper bottlenecks, I can’t see how 5pro will suddenly resolve it in boost mode. To me, the GPU will be just as under-utilized.

There reports that a recent PC mod fixed the problem with the code and the game is running much faster afterwards. They mention scheduling code as being an issue, the mod removes it.

4090 struggles on this game as well. Mod listed at special K portion of the video.

 
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It’s all good Ollie. You don’t have to defend your work. I think for me it was more bringing about awareness that the “everything is so much better on 5pro narrative” that is the recently flooding in YouTube is starting to feel suspicious, right after I got a complete feed of 5pro being way overly priced; it feels like forced damage control but I digress.

I have an issue with that, than me actually having an issue with your work. Just wanted to bring awareness to it, because DF is leading the charge here on it. So just wanted you to know that the message is getting out there.

I would also agree that it would make sense that it should improve, but if the 2 pieces of base kit aren’t hitting proper bottlenecks, I can’t see how 5pro will suddenly resolve it in boost mode. To me, the GPU will be just as under-utilized.

There reports that a recent PC mod fixed the problem with the code and the game is running much faster afterwards. They mention scheduling code as being an issue, the mod removes it.

4090 struggles on this game as well. Mod listed at special K portion of the video.

Atlus have patched the PC demo twice and made fairly large performance improvements, which are presumably already incorporated into the full game by now, so SpecialK is no longer needed. Atlus also said they're continuing to work on performance optimizations for a future patch, which I'm guessing might translate across all platforms.
 
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