Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2024]
- Thread starter Shifty Geezer
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Well, no. No one called Rift Apart a bad port. The others such as TLOU were bad because of crashes, memory leaks, visual bugs, missing/broken graphical features and more.
GOWR wasn’t a terrible port but had a lot of problems such as the awful Zen 2 performance, the tessellation bug, missing effects on NVIDIA hardware, and many other issues.
The lack of bandwidth is absolutely one reason to "judge" the Pro. It's a big deal, and this won't be the only game where it suffers as a result. Its RT capability is still atrocious, too.
Performance there makes me concerned for RDNA4's RT performance improvements.
I wouldn't be concerned really. Now of it was someone like old Dice, or insomniac, then id be concerned. It's Remedy, a company well known for their notoriously horrible performance on console hardware. Control was a disaster on ps4/xb1 despite knowing well ahead of time what their target hardware was.... Quantum break, terrible on Xbox. Horrible DLSS implementation in control on pc. Then we have horrible performance and image quality for Alan Wake 2 on ps5/xbox series. I got AW2 for free with my purchase of RTX 40XX gpu. Played for like an hour, was not impressed, deleted.
I don't know what it is with Remedy but these guys love to sniff their own farts. They use so much post processing on your screen so that you cant see the game you're trying to play all in the name of "art". As of late, their stories are also junk and uninteresting also in the name of "art". They always miss their performance targets, and as of late, they are starting to miss their sales target. They need to also take a serious look at their tech team. They always release the most unoptimized games I always have the displeasure of playing. If they don't do a 180 at the studio, they'll soon close down and nothing of value will be lost.
GhostofWar
Regular
There's a very logical reason why this happened.
We are getting to the point where I think @pjbliverpool comment is justified, the good news is it's not too much longer until AMD and nvidia have to show their hands (and prices lol).
If that logical reason is epic games exclusivity, that would be almost certainly an erroneous take. Regardless, developers must learn to stay within their performance budget. It’s the beginning and foundation for the whole game. I wouldn’t say remedy is ambitious in their targets but instead very wasteful while lacking any semblance of restraint. Unfortunately for me, they make games that are neither interesting from a technical perspective nor a plot/gameplay perspective.
If they continue down this path, they’ll bite the dust soon enough and it’ll be well deserved. As for RDNA4, if it’s at Ampere levels of raytracing or greater, that’ll be a good start for them. That is as long as they price their GPUs reasonably.
"I dont like Remedy and they need to completely change everything they do to suit my preferences or else they're doomed!". lol
Seriously trying to rewrite current history as if Alan Wake 2 hasn't been a huge critical hit and a game most people who played it loved. And to imagine that 'tech issues' is what is gonna lead to the death of Remedy is particularly hilarious.
And perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to crap on Remedy here and pretending everything is just peachy with the PS5 Pro...
Subtlesnake
Regular
From what I recall, the RT "corridor of doom" in Control actually performed better on the PS5/XSX than comparable PC parts.
Overly aggressive towards another poster. Unbecoming behaviour goes against the standards outlined in the forum rules.
Instead of talking about things you know nothing about, you should stay in your lane of expertise. Go read their financial statements then lets see if your tune changes: Financial statements
The only hit that matters for any company or business is a financial "hit". AW2 is most certainly not that at all. Critics are irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the actual paying audience who purchases your games. If not for the numerous deals they had with Nvidia or Epic, this company would almost certainly be begging for a buyout from one of the big 3 or face the abyss. Remedy don't make games that the general public likes and that's reflected in their poor financials. It's not an opinion, it's a fact backed by dollars and cents. Even when they give their games for "free", people still don't want to play them.
Oh wow, a game that performs poorly on the pc, ps5, xbox series x now performs poorly on the pro? Wow I'm so shocked. Who could have not seen this coming from the devs who's previous game also performed poorly on the aformentioned platforms...... It's almost as if technical incompetency is in the studio's dna.
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Subtlesnake
Regular
Control sold 4 million copies, which doesn't seem terrible for a relatively small developer. Control and Alan Wake also have 88% and 90% user scores on Steam respectively, so the people that buy Remedy's games seem to like them. Alan Wake 2 had sold 1.3 million copies by February this year, and according to Remedy it was their fastest selling game ever. The big issue is it's an Epic Store exclusive, which we would expect to significantly limit sales. However that was a condition of the game being funded by Epic. Based on Remedy's comments, it's on track to pay back the development costs, so they should eventually see some royalties from it.
I don't want to derail the thread so I'll say one more thing and I won't comment on financials anymore.
Based on their financials, I don't consider Remedy to be a good investment. They're also not really that small per-say. They're a mid sized company but recently, every dollar you invest in Remedy yields a negative eps. Their trajectory is not good nor is it going in the right direction. Their stock trades at roughly 13.60 euro per share and imo, it's overvalued. Their new financial statement is coming out soon so we shall see but, if they continue down their current trajectory, its going to be troublesome for them. If the company is pinning their hopes on Control 2, best of luck to them as the first one wasn't particularly good. Unfortunately for Remedy, they're in a scenario where one big miss could very well bring them down. Lets hope they don't screw up the Max Payne 1&2 Remake as that could give them a serious boost in revenue.
As for true copies sold, I think the numbers are highly inflated. Their deal with Nvidia gave away AW2 with every GPU sold for a period of time. I would not have purchased AW2 otherwise as I thought it looked like a boring game. Played it and my suspicions were confirmed. Without the Epic Store deal and the Nvidia deals, I actually think their revenue would be significantly worse. I think their internal projections suggested that as well and they took those deals to be safe. Nobody would take those deals if they thought they could make more money on the open market.
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Subtlesnake
Regular
Whether Remedy is financially well managed or a good investment is a separate question as to whether they produce games that their audience likes. From my perspective their games have more of a niche appeal but still manage to sell several million copies and receive positive user and critical reviews. That to me should be more than enough to disprove the claim that nothing would be lost if they closed down.
At this stage they are funding multiple projects from only a limited royalty stream as AW2 is not generating royalties yet and Control is at the end of its lifecycle. So obviously their financial situation does not look favourable since they are taking on a lot of risk and banking on the success of their future projects. That's the problem with being an independent developer who tries to keep IPs and maintain creative control. Given how many independent developers have failed, we can see it is an uphill battle.
It is not really possible to get great like for like as RT reflections are half res on console in Control and Full res on PC
DF Direct Weekly #189: Xbox Ports: "No Red Lines", Lego Horizon Reaction, Stellar Blade 2 PC
0:00:39 Introduction
0:02:56 News 1: Phil Spencer: no “red lines” on Xbox ports
0:27:21 News 2: Lego Horizon Adventures impresses on consoles
0:36:40 News 3: Halo 2 E3 demo resurfaces in Master Chief Collection
0:51:30 News 4: PS5 Pro sales reportedly not impacted by price
1:01:35 News 5: Stellar Blade developer considering PC release
1:08:35 News 6: Intel plans Arrow Lake performance fix
1:17:47 News 7: ModRetro Chromatic impresses
1:28:37 Supporter Q1: How will the next Xbox achieve the “largest technical leap” in a console generation?
1:35:46 Supporter Q2: If the next Xbox doesn’t have a disc drive, how will disc backwards compatibility function?
1:42:15 Supporter Q3: Are you excited to see the rumoured Nvidia ARM-based laptop chip?
1:48:22 Supporter Q4: Will we see support for ultrawide aspect ratios on consoles?
1:56:56 Supporter Q5: Can we give Epic credit for allowing Internet Archive to host older Unreal games?
Control was both a critical and financial success. But there you go again being incapable of separating your own highly subjective views about their games and their actual outlook.
I'll trust the financial statements over your impressions. 5 million profit in FY2019 control's release year and 10 million profit in FY2020 is hardly impressive when taking into account the effect on covid on gaming industry sales. Just as a heads up, Remedy expects their EBIT to be negative for FY2024. Finally, they sold the film/tv rights for AW and Control in exchange for 50% financing on control 2 which clearly represents the actions of a financially stable company.
Flappy Pannus
Veteran
00:00 Introduction
02:34 PS5 vs PS5 Pro Image Quality Comparison
05:30 PS5 Pro Performance/Quality Modes Frame-Rate Test
09:03 Disc Version 1.00 versus Patch 1.05 on PS5 Pro
12:23 Conclusion
Interesting to see the same foliage flickering effects that Jedi Survivor has. I'd say at this early stage for PSSR, its deficits are becoming evident when the input resolution is sub-1080p (admittedly though not enough examples yet to pin this solely on PSSR and not some compatibility engine quirks with these particular games). Performance is at least improved though.
That being said, it's hard for me to understand how a patch like this gets released in this state. Sure SH2 on PS5 could def be sharper, but UE5's temporal method is decent enough - the main gripe was performance. This largely fixes that, but now you're walking through a sea of flicker. The image quality downgrade is so blatantly obvious that I just don't get how this was signed off, it clearly needs far more work from either Blooper or Sony with PSSR upgrades, so if you're getting this result now, just put PSSR on the backburner and give players the performance boost they want. Is Sony providing some incentive to release Pro patches as quickly as possible or something? Bizarre.
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