Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2025]

[vjPiedPiper]

It's fine to state "I think the tradeoff that these games/systems made on performance/IQ is better" but pretending that a system that does just relatively coarse indirect diffuse is comparable to systems that do fine-grained reflections and specular is a bit silly.

To be clear, I agree that indirect diffuse-only is a good solution for a lot of games and content, and is *far* cheaper than shiny things. But the two are in very different categories of theoretical and practical complexity... diffuse-only GI you can make a lot of assumptions and simplifications that just don't work at all for specular. Fundamentally with specular a lot of the assumptions around "things far away from the surface matter less" fall apart.

I think Lumen could probably improve quality/performance in cases where people only want indirect diffuse and that's a fair discussion to have. But it - like several other modern "GI" systems - really targets a tier up in the global lighting space. It's also why I do think we at B3D need to stop calling all of these things "GI" and at least start talking about what terms they are actually approximating. Unfortunately all of the conventional words in this space have becoming meaningless now that marketing has gotten their hands on them.

I'd love to see you, or anyone, DF perhaps?
break down the most common types of "modern GI" we see these days.
From baked Light maps, which offer basically no actual GI ( as i understand it anyway )
Through to a fully Path traced solution, which would be considered the best in class GI.
and I'm guessing movie rendering comes in above even that.

You seem to already be able to classify various GI solutions into a few different categories,
and I know you complain about bad nomenclature and confused terms, but maybe this is an opportunity for someone
to jump in and create / define some more specific classes of modern GI.

I know Probe based is quite different from per-pixel, and that 4A solution is different to UE, but I have no idea how?
one could do Pros and Cons of each system, Example games + engines, that use each type. etc..

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

I'd love to see you, or anyone, DF perhaps?
break down the most common types of "modern GI" we see these days.

That'd be a fun project, but quite a lot of work for sure. There's quite a few axes of variation and while I think you could do a good job breaking them down into categories like "how do we compute visibility? which parts of the ray path are we computing vs. approximating? what data structure are we using to cache things?" and so on, it could very easily spiral into explaining all of rendering with far too broad a scope if not careful

 

[see colon]

That'd be a fun project, but quite a lot of work for sure. There's quite a few axes of variation and while I think you could do a good job breaking them down into categories like "how do we compute visibility? which parts of the ray path are we computing vs. approximating? what data structure are we using to cache things?" and so on, it could very easily spiral into explaining all of rendering with far too broad a scope if not careful

We need an interview series with some of the people who worked on these engines. Beyond the technical workings of how they achieve what they achieve, I'm interested in how they decided to do what they did. I mean, obviously it was for performance, but it's really interesting to know the decision making process.

 

[Dictator]

That'd be a fun project, but quite a lot of work for sure. There's quite a few axes of variation and while I think you could do a good job breaking them down into categories like "how do we compute visibility? which parts of the ray path are we computing vs. approximating? what data structure are we using to cache things?" and so on, it could very easily spiral into explaining all of rendering with far too broad a scope if not careful

It would be - my tech focus GI Video only did prototypical raster techniques. Could use an RT one.

 

[chris1515]

 

[Scott_Arm]

Reminds me of this game

 

[Cynicalking]

Reminds me of this game

Wreckfest is a spiritual successor to Flatout from the same devs.

 

[techuse]

I dream of an interview with Embark. I’d love to hear what Johan and all the other rendering engineers have been up to all these years.

 

[chris1515]

Returnal's PS5 Pro upgrade delivers a huge resolution boost and improved performance

One of the best PS5 exclusives looks and plays better on PS5 Pro. Digital Foundry reports.

www.eurogamer.net

 

[Charlietus]

Returnal's PS5 Pro upgrade delivers a huge resolution boost and improved performance

One of the best PS5 exclusives looks and plays better on PS5 Pro. Digital Foundry reports.

www.eurogamer.net

Tells you how bad the PS5 image quality choices were. Was it 1080p to 1440p checkboard, and then another upscale to 4k?

 

[Bludd]

DF Direct Weekly #212: Big Xbox Price Hikes, Doom The Dark Ages Path Tracing, Far Cry 4 60FPS!​

0:00:00 Introduction
0:00:54 News 1: Microsoft hiking Xbox prices
0:21:55 News 2: Doom: The Dark Ages screenshot shows off path tracing
0:35:40 News 3: Oblivion anti-stutter mods tested!
0:54:24 News 4: Switch update strips some online game sharing
1:03:49 News 5: 60 FPS update released for Far Cry 4 on PS5
1:16:27 News 6: RTX 5070 Super, 5080 Super reportedly pack VRAM boost
1:30:48 Supporter Q1: Why are prominent games journalism sites being hollowed out?
1:44:02 Supporter Q2: Will we see a lot of fully-featured UE5 games on Switch 2?
1:49:32 Supporter Q3: Why does Switch 2 have RT cores?
1:55:16 Supporter Q4: Is 8K TV tech pointless?
2:00:32 Supporter Q5: Are high end CPUs necessary for 4K60 PC gaming?

 

[techuse]

Several of the Nvidia features they discussed for Far Cry 4 were broken. God Rays and TXAA did not function as intended and looked worse than the standard options.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

00:00 Overview
00:48 Lighting and Settings Changes
06:15 PS5 Modes
10:15 PS5 Pro Modes
12:32 Observations and Conclusion

As mentioned when this first dropped, yeah the loss of checkerboarding really hurts image clarity on the base PS5. Oliver couldn't find any examples of DRS but you can see it in certain areas at night, especially later in the game where it can look quite blurry - using the scope in a sniper rifle is a good test as the dof engaging/disengaging is a demanding effect, you can watch the DRS kick in after a couple of secs once you exit the scope view.

Overall though I like the new lighting, it's not too dark where you're forced to use your headlights at night all the time, but it's not the perpetual cloudy day either.

There are also some bugs that Oliver may not have encountered, audio balance between NPC's, especially over the radio is pretty whack which has been confirmed by a number of console/PC players, you can barely hear half of the conversations at times.

Don't know if Alex is going to look at the PC version but aside from the obvious lighting changes there are some additional upgrades, so this is not simply the older PC version ported to the PS5. Textures are slightly improved, looks to be they just switched to a more modern upscaling method so I don't think new artwork has been created. LOD's are improved across the board, on my 3060 I usually use high instead of very high, but the LOD has improved at that same setting compared to the previous release. One aspect of the PC release that didn't fully make it to the PS5 though is the loading - while it's improved, there are still more separate loading screens when skipping cutscenes, whereas on the PC you usually just get a fade to black, a few seconds then you're back in, even on a HDD.