Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2025]

Which games other than Fortnite? Google is useless for this question. It keeps telling me games that are either not UE5 or not on PS4.

On mobile but this is one.


Performance isn't great but it's not from a massive studio either so with more resources could have it running better.

But as it can be seen, from a CPU perspective, it can be done.
 

I don't fully understand what Reflex does, but I do know FF7 Rebirth is a stuttering piece of shit with vsync on unless you force Ultra Low Latency Mode in the NV App. Just setting it to On makes no difference. It's gotta be Ultra. Why this requires proprietary driver override? The game sucks without it.
 
AC: Shadows tech interview



And accompanying video


Incredible video Alex. 10/10

Videos like this is what helps drive progress forward for those who want to see progress. In a world that is so marred by BS online discussion, the purity of just looking at the technology stacks and educating people on how it works, is what we need more of.

I knew that Ubisoft was capable of this level of maintaining their tech stack, but I didn't know how far they went mwith Anvil, as my extended family works on Snowdrop. But it's ultra impressive what they've managed to accomplish here.
I hope the most important portion of the narrative that people take away from your video, is why we absolutely need to move towards rendering techniques that happen in realtime as opposed baked.

As the worlds get larger and larger, the space requirement to support more and more environments becomes untenable. They have night to day, on a massive open world, with several seasons, the lighting data I agree would be impossible. Combined with specular reflections. The geometry engine to support that, would also be so hard. The destructible terrain, all of this now being simulated created a very grounded world that we couldn't achieve in the past. So while these SSDs solve some issues, in particular they are useful for streaming in assets and pre-computing things, you still have size limitations. And this streaming of baked technologies can only go so far. This is a next generation title, there is no doubt of that, this would be impossible to achieve last gen. Even the Series S would outperform a X1X despite being weaker on power, this game requires a modern feature set like Mesh Shaders that would not allow X1X to be able to run this title.

And so for the many haters out there, who don't understand why we need this technology, and why it's so heavy, it's because many of the UE5 games that came out earlier, were still largely designing small scope games using the wrong tools to support it. That mismatch is what created the angst against progress. But now we have a situation of pairing the scope with the tools that are available, and now we have an incredible end result. At max settings, this game is consistently beautiful everywhere.

I'm thinking it's on my to buy list now. I guess I'll need to some my family a wish list on this one and get it direct, cough.
 
I did enjoy Alex calling out the great foliage movement. This is still quite the issue for too many titles. Trees shouldn't look like they're having a little dance!

At least future Anvil titles should inherit the work they've done here
 
Does capping the frame rate with rivatuner not reduce the stuttering?
Probably as long as the framerate never drops below the cap. ULLM makes it smooth regardless of the framerate. It's silly that I had to spend an hour trying to figure out how to deal with this only for the solution to be so simple. And I had to figure it out myself. Googling will turn up suggestions that do far more harm than good.

Hopefully this helps with the google results:
To fix the stuttering in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth with vsync on, go to Low Latency Mode in the NVIDIA App and set it to Ultra. Do not use the VRR setting in the game, because whoever made that doesn't know what VRR means.
 
AC: Shadows tech interview



And accompanying video



Great video Alex @Dictator and you did exactly what I wanted to see RTGI diffuse only compared with RTGI plus specular. The RTGI plus specular reminds me TO1886 baked GI which was done in a corridor game without dynamic object contribution to GI and witout procedural weather and time of day system in an open world and dynamic objet, player and NPC contibuting to the system. The game is gorgeous.

Crysis style physics, procedural winds, hair strand system. Procedural systems are great and with better realism than other games with tree swaying and other stuff.

The game looks so good probably the best looking open world.
 
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AC: Shadows tech interview


Hopefully Alex will cover some of this in his PC video but enabling RT in AC shadows seems relatively cheap on recent cards. Maybe it's because the fallback GI is also somewhat expensive and there's some savings when that's turned off. Per TPU numbers @ 4K quality upscaling. RDNA 4 is showing its chops with 64 CUs almost catching the 96 CUs of RDNA 3. Unsurprisingly the 5090 isn't scaling with its paper specs.

5090: 2.2 ms
5080: 3.1 ms
4080s: 2.7 ms
9070xt 4.8 ms
7900xtx: 4.5 ms

Also with RT off, the 5080 and 4080 super lose a lot more performance than the 9070 XT and 7900 XTX as resolution increases. Ada and Blackwell aren't scaling as well in general in this game.
 
Hopefully Alex will cover some of this in his PC video but enabling RT in AC shadows seems relatively cheap on recent cards. Maybe it's because the fallback GI is also somewhat expensive and there's some savings when that's turned off. Per TPU numbers @ 4K quality upscaling. RDNA 4 is showing its chops with 64 CUs almost catching the 96 CUs of RDNA 3. Unsurprisingly the 5090 isn't scaling with its paper specs.

5090: 2.2 ms
5080: 3.1 ms
4080s: 2.7 ms
9070xt 4.8 ms
7900xtx: 4.5 ms

Also with RT off, the 5080 and 4080 super lose a lot more performance than the 9070 XT and 7900 XTX as resolution increases. Ada and Blackwell aren't scaling as well in general in this game.
It's the Anvil engine. NVIDIA cards have always done poorly on it, often being outperformed by their AMD counterparts by up to 20%.
 
Incredible video Alex. 10/10

Videos like this is what helps drive progress forward for those who want to see progress. In a world that is so marred by BS online discussion, the purity of just looking at the technology stacks and educating people on how it works, is what we need more of.

I knew that Ubisoft was capable of this level of maintaining their tech stack, but I didn't know how far they went mwith Anvil, as my extended family works on Snowdrop. But it's ultra impressive what they've managed to accomplish here.
I hope the most important portion of the narrative that people take away from your video, is why we absolutely need to move towards rendering techniques that happen in realtime as opposed baked.

As the worlds get larger and larger, the space requirement to support more and more environments becomes untenable. They have night to day, on a massive open world, with several seasons, the lighting data I agree would be impossible. Combined with specular reflections. The geometry engine to support that, would also be so hard. The destructible terrain, all of this now being simulated created a very grounded world that we couldn't achieve in the past. So while these SSDs solve some issues, in particular they are useful for streaming in assets and pre-computing things, you still have size limitations. And this streaming of baked technologies can only go so far. This is a next generation title, there is no doubt of that, this would be impossible to achieve last gen. Even the Series S would outperform a X1X despite being weaker on power, this game requires a modern feature set like Mesh Shaders that would not allow X1X to be able to run this title.

And so for the many haters out there, who don't understand why we need this technology, and why it's so heavy, it's because many of the UE5 games that came out earlier, were still largely designing small scope games using the wrong tools to support it. That mismatch is what created the angst against progress. But now we have a situation of pairing the scope with the tools that are available, and now we have an incredible end result. At max settings, this game is consistently beautiful everywhere.

I'm thinking it's on my to buy list now. I guess I'll need to some my family a wish list on this one and get it direct, cough.
Great video Alex @Dictator and you did exactly what I wanted to see RTGI diffuse only compared with RTGI plus specular. The RTGI plus specular reminds me TO1886 baked GI which was done in a corridor game without dynamic object contribution to GI and witout procedural weather and time of day system in an open world and dynamic objet, player and NPC contibuting to the system. The game is gorgeous.

Crysis style physics, procedural winds, hair strand system. Procedural systems are great and with better realism than other games with tree swaying and other stuff.

The game looks so good probably the best looking open world.
Happy you guys loved the video. I loved it too. Interestingly, ubisoft wanted to do a tech interview last year but the game got delayed so it fell away. Then we started contact again last month and pushed for it as side content to a main pc video. But this last week, due to sickness, I was not working full-time at all... so there was no time to do a full PC video at the moment. Instead I repurposed the massive 2.5 hour long interview I did into this summation video with about 2 days of work. Honestly cannot believe I finished it in 2 days lol.

When people wonder sometimes why our video schedule is the way it is on PC, I wish I could give them a look behind the curtain. Not every week you are healthy. Not every week do you get a game long before release! Sometimes you gotta just let things sail even though you wish you could spend more time on it because the audience is fickle.
 
i wonder if their snowdrop engine will get the same enhancements.
Apparently Ghost recon breakpoint uses anvill engine, so i hope their next game looks just as good as shadows.
 
No idea on 'engine' differences either. Both engines have such a long history the important differences are less likely to be rendering features than how the huge production teams work with their tools.
 
Snowdrop was created by Massive and it's used in some Ubisoft games, like The Division or Mario Rabbits.

Anvil is the engine used for Assassin's Creed games.

Ubisoft never forced a single engine on their studios, and that's a good thing.
isnt anvil the engine that evolved out of the original far cry engine when ubisoft bought the franchise from crytek and released an updated version in far cry 2?
 
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