Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2024]


RDNA 2 struggles in this game. The PS5 outperforms a PC equipped with an RX 6800. Also of note that the 2700X completely falls apart.
- Using the 120fps mode on PS5 (1440p) and 1440p quality DLSS on 2070 with settings matched, PS5 outperforms 2070 by about 50%.
- Using the same mode with same settings / resolution (+FSR3 on PC), PS5 still outperforms RX 6800 on average by 22%.
- He shows assets still need some time to be fully loaded on PC even with a 4090. Thinks that PC can performs worse because of asset streaming and decompression. But aren't the assets already uncompressed on PC?
- Game is mostly GPU bound but can be have CPU problems at some moments (singlethreaded) explaining some frame drops not seen on PS5.
- Shadows on PS5 quality have higher quality than any settings on PC.
- In quality mode PS5 has hardware raytraced cubemaps + bvh proxy geometry. More accurate reflections than on PC. In perf mode PS5 uses same reflections as PC ultra settings.

This is directly from Santa Monica Studio talk (which I completely missed to be honest, I thought this game didn't use HW RT, happy to be wrong).

SNcS8sU.jpeg
 
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- Using the same mode with same settings / resolution (+FSR3 on PC), PS5 still outperforms RX 6800 on average by 22%.
I don’t think he said this? Performance seems similar but he did say the PS5 outperforms the 6800.

Edit: Never mind. It does show a 22% increase.

The performance profile leaves a lot to be desired. This game runs almost worse on a GTX 1060 than on a PS4. Yet, the 1060 is over twice the performance of the PS4 GPU. We can’t use the CPU and IO as excuses either with the PS4’s tablet CPU and HDD.
 
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As much as I would like them to make Ragnarök run better on the GPU (or even CPU) it will never run like it arguably could and should. The game has 4 people working on it - 4 people. That pales in comparison to the team working at SMS. Yes, a 1060 should not be performing that badly. Sony shoe string budgeted this title on PC pretty hard and it is kind of a wonder that jet pack got it to the quality it did all things considered. If Sony gave their PC games bigger budgets, we would get higher quality than what we get. Instead, the games ship with pretty noticable issues day 1 and performance issues.
 
As much as I would like them to make Ragnarök run better on the GPU (or even CPU) it will never run like it arguably could and should. The game has 4 people working on it - 4 people. That pales in comparison to the team working at SMS. Yes, a 1060 should not be performing that badly. Sony shoe string budgeted this title on PC pretty hard and it is kind of a wonder that jet pack got it to the quality it did all things considered. If Sony gave their PC games bigger budgets, we would get higher quality than what we get. Instead, the games ship with pretty noticable issues day 1 and performance issues.
Agreed. As much as hardware optimization, slimmer APIs, and a console environment make a difference, having a full team vs 4 guys is the single biggest factor in the quality of the PC vs PS5 versions. $200M budget vs probably less than $2M. There's only so much 4 dudes sitting in an office can do and pick up on. It's possible they weren't even aware of the tessellation issue in the Realm Between Realms because they might have not even QA'd there properly. It's also very possible they didn't notice the missing effects (I sure as heck didn't notice the missing fog until you pointed it out).

I also think that they don't really care if PS4-level hardware can run this game like a PS4 or not since this hardware is so old that people playing on it will be happy playing a recent AAA game at 1080p/30fps because this is what they're accustomed to on their 1060. Most gamers have no idea that their 1060 should run this game easily better than a PS4, so the current performance looks good to them when a game like Black Myth: Wukong runs at 15fps on the same hardware.
 
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As much as I would like them to make Ragnarök run better on the GPU (or even CPU) it will never run like it arguably could and should. The game has 4 people working on it - 4 people. That pales in comparison to the team working at SMS. Yes, a 1060 should not be performing that badly. Sony shoe string budgeted this title on PC pretty hard and it is kind of a wonder that jet pack got it to the quality it did all things considered. If Sony gave their PC games bigger budgets, we would get higher quality than what we get. Instead, the games ship with pretty noticable issues day 1 and performance issues.
How do you convince Sony to invest more in the PC market? Or will it always be an after-thought to extract low-cost extra returns on the original game investment? Or is it a side-effect of the transition and, moving forwards, all games will be cross-compatible and reasonably PC tested during development?
 
The game has 4 people working on it - 4 people
To make matters worse, they switched to DX12! That number of people is never going to be enough to properly optimize the DX12 path and to compensate for the DX12 tax. They couldn't even get their DXR code working and had to do research to fix the tessellation performance bug.

Amazing job none the less for a 4 man team.
 
How do you convince Sony to invest more in the PC market? Or will it always be an after-thought to extract low-cost extra returns on the original game investment? Or is it a side-effect of the transition and, moving forwards, all games will be cross-compatible and reasonably PC tested during development?
I'm not even sure if they actively want to. They are interested in dragging the console business out for as long as possible. These appear as though non-committal moves to grow their market, as they are likely saturated already on their console side, but they are unlikely wanting to destroy their console business, and that is understandable and appropriately conservative given their position in the market. The last thing they want to do, is accelerate things towards PC + Cloud.
 
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How do you convince Sony to invest more in the PC market? Or will it always be an after-thought to extract low-cost extra returns on the original game investment? Or is it a side-effect of the transition and, moving forwards, all games will be cross-compatible and reasonably PC tested during development?
The game flopped on PC BTW. They have no incentives at doing better on PC. And this is God of War Ragnarok, the sequel of their best game on PS4 and the best IP they've got after TLOU.
 
The game flopped on PC BTW. They have no incentives at doing better on PC. And this is God of War Ragnarok, the sequel of their best game on PS4 and the best IP they've got after TLOU.
It would be pretty hard to flop with such small budget. From the insomniac leaks, the porting cost are very small, I think I remember under 4 millions.

But surely it underperformed compared to their expectations. Half of the concurrent users of the prequel.
Kind of based, the drop in narrative quality will not be forgiven :whistle:
 
A frame analysis of Metaphor Re Fantazio.


Relatively simple fixes would make the game run at around twice the framerate.
The general conclusions seem mostly correct, but some of the details are a little misleading.

The main thing I wanted to note though is that the article makes this statement:
At the top, we have the wavefront occupancy view. This is a global chart of the “usage” of the GPU.
Occupancy is important, but it is not a measure of "how much of the GPU is being used". Even if we are only talking about shader units and not all the fixed function bits, low occupancy shaders can fully utilize the resources, while high occupancy shaders can sit around stalled on memory the whole time (as we see here late in the frame). Occupancy is more directly a measure of the ability of the machine to hide latency (usually from memory operations) at a given point, but whether or not a shader is sensitive to memory latency depends entirely on what it is doing. It can sometimes be an indirect measure of bottlenecks elsewhere in the system (as it is for the shadow map rendering part of the frame here), but you really need to look at other counters for that, not shader-based stuff.

All things being equal, higher occupancy is better, but occupancy is not really a measure of compute resource utilization or performance.
 
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The game flopped on PC BTW. They have no incentives at doing better on PC. And this is God of War Ragnarok, the sequel of their best game on PS4 and the best IP they've got after TLOU.

I mean it's a self fulfilling prophecy.

1) Establish a trend of weak ports at launch that require several weeks/months of patches to address significant bugs.
2) Charge the release price for 2+ year old games.
3) Do absolutely no advertising.
4) Introduce a forced login/overlay, that also restricts the game from being played in countries the original could, and introduces new hurdles to playing it on the Steam Deck.

I was impressed when Sony started releasing their games on GoG, hiring Nixxes etc - aside from HZD's awful launch, the early signs were they were taking the PC market seriously. Welp...
 
As much as I would like them to make Ragnarök run better on the GPU (or even CPU) it will never run like it arguably could and should. The game has 4 people working on it - 4 people. That pales in comparison to the team working at SMS. Yes, a 1060 should not be performing that badly. Sony shoe string budgeted this title on PC pretty hard and it is kind of a wonder that jet pack got it to the quality it did all things considered. If Sony gave their PC games bigger budgets, we would get higher quality than what we get. Instead, the games ship with pretty noticable issues day 1 and performance issues.

Wow, did you really just come in here to kill the ssd streaming sauce and coding to the metal war cries? How rude.
 
At this point, I wouldn’t care if they stopped porting their games to PC. Plenty of games to go around and if you’re just going to do lazy and barebone ports, why bother? Just keep them on PlayStation.
 
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