Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2024]

The economies of using your own engine are very different though. Particularly, if you need new staff and no-one knows your system, you have entire training process for everyone, versus hiring experienced UE developers. Plus maintaining your engine with top-tier engineers who then want to leave and you have to find replacements. It was far more plausible back in the day when 1) there wasn't a de facto engine everyone knew and 2) engines were simpler to develop and maintain. Edit: 3) Also often they were single platform! No maintaining cross-platform compatibility and just targeting one single hardware config; not even a Pro version.

I think a bunch of people are longing unrealistically for a reality that can't exist. May as well take a horse-drawn carriage to travel into town - even if you like the idea, it just won't work on current roads with current traffic. (Subverted car analogy FTW!)
 
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The economies of using your own engine are very different though. Particularly, if you need new staff and no-one knows your system, you have entire training process for everyone, versus hiring experienced UE developers. Plus maintaining your engine with top-tier engineers who then want to leave and you have to find replacements. It was far more plausible back in the day when 1) there wasn't a de facto engine everyone knew and 2) engines were simpler to develop and maintain.

I think a bunch of people are longing unrealistically for a reality that can't exist. May as well take a horse-drawn carriage to travel into town - even if you like the idea, it just won't work on current roads with current traffic. (Subverted car analogy FTW!)
I think would be easier trying to solve traversal stutter than making that all new engine and keeping it up to date.

Seeing less and less advantages to building your own engine unless there are features there that just don’t exist elsewhere.
 
Bring back custom engines ! people can complain about custom engines like TLOU Part 1, GoW Ragnarok or Spider-man on PC (but it runs worse than PS5 with this GPU so the port is bad!) but at least those games are less buggy and run with less problems / stutters (when you have a powerful CPU) than those UE5 games.

Spending $3000 dollars and still have you favorite games plagued with unavoidable stutters is awful.
The companies that made the games you mentioned also have a lot of engineers, some of which are veterans with 10+ years of experience. Those are the people that you need to remove stutters from your game. Companies jumping on UE are often smaller and have a different ration of artists vs engineers (e.g. the makers of kena bridge of spirits was a company that mainly made commercials). Those companies often can't make a custom engine, and if they did you will get a game with outdated graphic features that still has stutters. And they sure lack the experience to make a stutter free game of UE. I think that if it was not for UE (or unity) those companies wouldn't make games at all.
 
Bring back custom engines ! people can complain about custom engines like TLOU Part 1, GoW Ragnarok or Spider-man on PC (but it runs worse than PS5 with this GPU so the port is bad!) but at least those games are less buggy and run with less problems / stutters (when you have a powerful CPU) than those UE5 games.

Those 3 games ran like ass on PC and were plauged with problems so maybe not the best examples to use.
 
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0:01:42 News 1: Red Dead Redemption announced for PC
0:14:42 News 2: Nintendo announces alarm clock, mysterious online playtest
0:27:03 News 3: Alien Isolation 2 announced
0:36:18 News 4: John’s PS5 Pro impressions
0:48:20 News 5: Diablo 4 is getting PS5 Pro enhancements
0:54:23 News 6: Intel Arrow Lake processors revealed
1:13:29 News 7: John Japan trip recap!
1:27:30 Supporter Q1: How powerful will the rumoured PS6 be?
1:34:49 Supporter Q2: What should we make of the rumoured God of War collection?
1:40:25 Supporter Q3: Will the RTX 5080 be priced at $1200 USD or above?
1:45:44 Supporter Q4: Thoughts on the new version of Lollipop Chainsaw?
1:53:39 Supporter Q5: What wishes would you have for a remaster of Assassin’s Creed Unity?
1:58:32 Supporter Q6: Is John building a CRT museum?

 
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Maybe not so much "bring back custom engines" as "long live custom engines."

Their existence in the industry, even if increasingly rare, helps to cast a light on the shortcomings of industry standard engines such as UE5. Hopefully this can play a part in killing the mindset of "well, this is just the way it is and there's nothing we can do" which can all too easily plague any industry or culture.
 
Johns call out on I Butter The Bread With Butter will be assumed by many to be a joke, seems John may have a taste for the heavier stuff ;) Wonder if he does Japanese metal, someone should get him an X Japan shirt to wear on a video. I'm sure it wont end up with him being accused of some xbox bias ;)
 
Johns call out on I Butter The Bread With Butter will be assumed by many to be a joke, seems John may have a taste for the heavier stuff ;) Wonder if he does Japanese metal, someone should get him an X Japan shirt to wear on a video. I'm sure it wont end up with him being accused of some xbox bias ;)
*We
Gets even better when you mix it with some Eskimo Callboy
 
PSSR doesn't seem to be as good as first thought, especially in this game at least.

Definitely a ways away from DLSS and not as close as I thought it would be.

And I wouldn't call it a solid port myself, image quality issues and lagging RT reflections.
 
PSSR doesn't seem to be as good as first thought, especially in this game at least.

Definitely a ways away from DLSS and not as close as I thought it would be.

And I wouldn't call it a solid port myself, image quality issues and lagging RT reflections.
Old game that didn't sell all that much to begin. Slapped PSSR over IGTI and moved on.
 
professional.png

Looks pretty good to me
 
I didn't go dig through the article, but my perception of the picture above is positive. Are there some corner cases which are crap, and would someone be so kind as to link them or post them up? Always good to see both sides.
 
Don’t make the same mistake I did by watching that video on a phone. It makes the current performance mode look better than it actually does 😅

Watch this on a 4K display of decent size. The new mode looks considerably better.

I did watch it on a large TV, it's good, but not without faults and certainly not as good as I was expecting.
 
Expecting it to be at least on par with the current version of DLSS seems a bit of a stretch IMO, in no small part due to the age and related maturity of DLSS itself. I had to go Google it quickly to refresh my memory, but DLSS is essentially six years old at this point -- back when the 2x00 series was released. I'm not saying someone couldn't do better, and nor am I saying other competition isn't welcome, but I feel like expectations should be tempered just a bit.

More competition is good competition :)
 
I'm of two minds when it comes to the Ratchet PRO upgrade. On one hand, within reason, it makes some decent improvements to some areas like temporal stability and improvements to the resolve of the RT reflections, as well as the improved handling of particle effects, but has very apparent downsides as well, such as loss of detail in some areas, less background characters in the stands, and the laggy/smeary update of the RT reflections. The PS5 base version is very clearly WAY oversharpened, so that's another improvement on the side of the PS5 Pro. Basically, the improvements are there, but I'm not impressed with the concessions which come with PSSR. Yet to me, this is within expectations of a basic patch to add PSSR functionality... which leads me to the other hand..

This is an update completely held back by the scope of the patch. They're not (in my opinion) spending very much resources to pretty these games up for the PS5 Pro with patches such as these... at least not to my expectation.. or at least not at this point anyway. They allude they might do something with RT in a future patch, which is good, because I think it's clear that PS5 Pro is capable of even better RT reflections than what's being presented here. So it's good to hear that they might be updating it to take better advantage of the hardware.. but that should have been front and center right off the bat, IMO.

So overall I'm very mixed on it. I'm not sure it's enough currently to make PS5 gamers feel like they're missing out on too much.
 
less background characters in the stands

That’s comparing it with the current 30fps mode, compared to the current 60fps mode the crowds are the same.

It would have been great to have the settings of the 30fps mode at 60fps, maybe it’s just not possible or would be too much work just for a Pro patch.
 
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