Current Generation Games Analysis Technical Discussion [2020-2021] [XBSX|S, PS5, PC]

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The SSD hype is to blame for this, nothing else. No one would have expected more or be let down if we didnt read forum posts and random tweets.
 
What? On PS5 and properly using the custom I/O the CPU is completely bypassed.
If all you are doing is moving data from the SSD to system memory, and that data is properly configured to take advantage of the interface and compression hardware, then yeah. Well, maybe. But when you are running a game, it's not that simple. Just because you can move 5GB of models and texture into main memory doesn't mean they don't have to be placed into the game state. That stuff isn't handled by the I/O stack. Think of the I/O stack like a dump truck hauling things. If you haul some pre-fab'd concrete slabs, you can drop them off and make a concrete platform quick. If you are hauling crushed stone, you can move it just as fast but it's going to require some work to make anything except a pile of stones when it gets to it's destination.
 
If all you are doing is moving data from the SSD to system memory, and that data is properly configured to take advantage of the interface and compression hardware, then yeah. Well, maybe. But when you are running a game, it's not that simple. Just because you can move 5GB of models and texture into main memory doesn't mean they don't have to be placed into the game state. That stuff isn't handled by the I/O stack. Think of the I/O stack like a dump truck hauling things. If you haul some pre-fab'd concrete slabs, you can drop them off and make a concrete platform quick. If you are hauling crushed stone, you can move it just as fast but it's going to require some work to make anything except a pile of stones when it gets to it's destination.
Some context from someone who knows a bit about this (large twitter thread):
 
Pretty sure there is no shipping game that is utilizing SFS nor the Velocity Architecture, yet.

So, I/O on XBS systems are still mostly just brute force loading assets from the drive.

Regards,
SB
Random thought/question:

How will SFS affect Quick Resume?

Presumably, if you're playing a game that utilizes SFS and then exit that game, whatever is in memory gets caches to the SSD. But all the texture data that's getting cached will be in bits and pieces since that's what SFS does. Is Quick Resume able to just load that cached data and it picks up where it left off or are they going to have to load the full texture data in addition to what is cached so that SFS can kick in again since it needs rendered frames to work?
 
Some context from someone who knows a bit about this (large twitter thread):
That got me interested, so I had a look.
Heres my game from a cold boot, I think its mostly IO (Of course its gonna be a combination of everything)
I think I can knock a couple of seconds off it, I'm gonna look more into it. I do have a faster SSD so its prolly gonna be slower on other PCs (and quicker on others), none of my PCs have a HDD so can't see what happens there, I suppose you can't emulate a HDD with a SDD?
 
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That got me interested, so I had a look.
Heres my game from a cold boot, I think its mostly IO (Of course its gonna be a combination of everything)
I think I can knock a couple of seconds off it, I'm gonna look more into it. I do have a faster SSD so its prolly gonna be slower on other PCs (and quicker on others), none of my PCs have a HDD so can't see what happens there, I suppose you can't emulate a HDD with a SDD?
You using the direct storage api's?
Think it's just gpu compression that's unavailable at the moment. Is reset in early access?
 
You using the direct storage api's?
Dont think so, just what ever unity uses.
Unity is not the best though, as there is a delay before splash screen that cant seem to get rid of (gonna look at it more, I'm prolly doing something stupid)
 
The versions tested were 1.0.1.0 on the Xbox Series consoles and 1.003.000 on PS5. These version numbers correspond to 2.0.1 in-game. Patch 2.1.1 doesn't appear to change performance.

The footage here is from Quality Mode which targets 60fps on all three consoles. All three consoles also have a Framerate Mode that lowers the resolution and disables v-sync which makes it difficult to analyse the frame rate. The Framerate Mode only outputs at 60hz on PS5 and VRR doesn't seem to work on the Xbox Series consoles in Framerate Mode.
PS5 and Xbox Series X in Quality Mode both use a dynamic resolution with the highest native resolution found being 3840x2160 and the lowest resolution found being approximately 2304x1296. Pixel counts at 2304x1296 appear to be uncommon on both consoles. Both consoles in Quality Mode use temporal upsampling to reconstruct a 3840x2160 resolution when rendering natively below this resolution.

Xbox Series S in Quality Mode uses a dynamic resolution with the highest native resolution found being 1920x1080 and the lowest resolution found being 1280x720. Native resolution pixel counts at 1920x1080 seem to be common on Xbox Series S in Quality Mode. Xbox Series S in Quality Mode uses temporal upsampling to reconstruct a 1920x1080 resolution when rendering natively below this resolution.

PS5 and Xbox Series X in Framerate Mode render at a native resolution of 1920x1080.

Xbox Series S in Framerate Mode renders at a native resolution of 1600x900

Screenshot-20210824-203815.jpg
 

- The game runs in backward compatibility mode on all 3 consoles.
- On S Series, the maximum resolution has been increased from 900p to 1080p (on Xbox One it was limited to 900p).
- Series X and PS5 use dynamic resolutions just like PS4 Pro and One X. The resolution in Series X usually reaches 2160p, while PS5 reaches 1620p.
- Series X has a more unstable framerate due to resolution. At times of greatest stress, it can drop 10FPS below the PS5/Series S.
- Loading times are faster on Xbox Series as is always the case with backward compatible titles.


XSX and ps5 are using dynamic res scaling XSX (1692-2160p) and PS5 (1242-1620p). During normal gameplay fps seems to be very solid on all platforms.
During the heavy battle scenes all consoles drops frames with xsx dropping noticeably lower than ps5 (low 50).
 

- The game runs in backward compatibility mode on all 3 consoles.
- On S Series, the maximum resolution has been increased from 900p to 1080p (on Xbox One it was limited to 900p).
- Series X and PS5 use dynamic resolutions just like PS4 Pro and One X. The resolution in Series X usually reaches 2160p, while PS5 reaches 1620p.
- Series X has a more unstable framerate due to resolution. At times of greatest stress, it can drop 10FPS below the PS5/Series S.
- Loading times are faster on Xbox Series as is always the case with backward compatible titles.


XSX and ps5 are using dynamic res scaling XSX (1692-2160p) and PS5 (1242-1620p). During normal gameplay fps seems to be very solid on all platforms.
During the heavy battle scenes all consoles drops frames with xsx dropping noticeably lower than ps5 (low 50).
Those loading times are really irritating on PS5. So I guess the cuts to the CPU are in a place that are heavily used for decompression, as PS5 titles don't need those on the CPU. Everything else really makes no sense. Yes the CPU in the series x has a bit higher clocks, but just a bit. While loading the PS5 CPU should also always reach their highest clockrates, as the GPU has not much to do.

Funny that they upped the Series S maximum resolution (this was missing in the Tomb Raider patch) but didn't do the same thing on the PS5. As this is a dynamic resolution, I really don't get why they don't increase it. PS5 shouldn't have a problem to get more pixels out, even in back-compat more.

That the consoles couldn't hold a stable framerate all the time was clear from the beginning, as even really high end PCs struggle to run AC Odyssey at 60fps all the time. The engine seems not really well optimized to run at 60fps all the time. There seem to be some things in that game that don't easily scale that well with the performance, even if double the performance is available.
 
While loading the PS5 CPU should also always reach their highest clockrates, as the GPU has not much to do.

There shouldn't be any downclocking going on while loading. If not the GPU is doing some tasks we dont know about. Anyway, bad optimized title to begin with on all platforms.
 
The versions tested were 1.5.5.2663 on Xbox Series consoles and 1.55 on PS5. There may be time of day and weather variance in some clips.

PS5 uses a dynamic resolution with the highest native resolution found being 2880x1620 and the lowest native resolution found being approximately 1824x1026. Native resolution pixel counts at 2880x1620 seem to be uncommon on PS5. PS5 uses temporal upsampling that can reconstruct a 2880x1620 resolution when rendering natively below this resolution.

Xbox Series X uses a dynamic resolution with the highest native resolution found being 3840x2160 and the lowest native resolution found being 2432x1368. Native resolution pixel counts at 3840x2160 seem to be rare on Xbox Series X. Xbox Series X uses temporal upsampling that can reconstruct a 3840x2160 resolution when rendering natively below this resolution.

Xbox Series S uses a dynamic resolution with the highest native resolution found being 1920x1080 and the lowest native resolution found being 1280x720. The cutscenes are capped at 30fps on Xbox Series S and the only resolution found during cutscenes was 1920x1080. Xbox Series S uses temporal upsampling that can reconstruct a 1920x1080 resolution when rendering natively below this resolution.
Screenshot-20210826-224726.jpg
 
QuickResume is hibernation of the entire game's memory. If SFS has runtime state it would be part of that memory.
I guess the question was more what is possible. E.g. it would be possible to give the game some kind of feedback "prepare to be hibernated in the next few seconds" and the game would than release resources (like raw textures etc) from it's memory to reduce it), than after resuming it could reload those parts (e.g. what SF tells is needed). But overall this makes things much more complicated and is more the "savegame" kind of solution. Quick Resume is more the brute force method so it can work with almost everything.

Random thought/question:

How will SFS affect Quick Resume?

Presumably, if you're playing a game that utilizes SFS and then exit that game, whatever is in memory gets caches to the SSD. But all the texture data that's getting cached will be in bits and pieces since that's what SFS does. Is Quick Resume able to just load that cached data and it picks up where it left off or are they going to have to load the full texture data in addition to what is cached so that SFS can kick in again since it needs rendered frames to work?
Just because you need less memory for a scene (when using SFS) it doesn't mean the game really uses less. Game will just fill the memory with other stuff. Not really randomly, but than developers have the room to actually use more memory than before, so that might make some features that weren't possible before possible now.

E.g. I guess this is why MS thought that 8GB for games is enough on the Series S, because if SF(S) is used the game just does not need those large amounts of memory. SFS has also the advantage that it reduces bandwidth usage. So even the much lower bandwidth shouldn't be a problem in the future.
 
There shouldn't be any downclocking going on while loading. If not the GPU is doing some tasks we dont know about. Anyway, bad optimized title to begin with on all platforms.
Doesn't PS5 cap frequency in BC mode? That's probably what's happening here.
 
oc rtx 2070 in 1440p ps4pro settings (tough without checkerboad which also hit performance) can drop to mid 40s in city, ps5 in bc mode no drops
 
oc rtx 2070 in 1440p ps4pro settings (tough without checkerboad which also hit performance) can drop to mid 40s in city, ps5 in bc mode no drops
I suspect what may be at least part of the reason why he sees such drops is his CPU though, on the PC this title has a pretty large CPU bottleneck with frequent CPU spikes - it can't maintain 60fps at 1080p on my 1660 with periodic stutters that coincide with single-core CPU spikes of 80%+ when they occur on my I5-9400. I can get mid 40's at 1440p better than console settings inside Meridian/Mothers Heart too, but that's on a 1660 - his 2070 should actually be quite a bit better, but that Zen-1 architecture CPU could be holding him back.

He also states that this title 'needs' PCI-E 4.0, and while he may be correct in that this title was problematic to port due to the lack of shared memory architecture, not sure that's entirely the culprit for the less than optimal performance here. This is somewhat tough to determine though, as the cards that support PCI-E 4.0 are newer generation cards that have enough excess vram, it would be interesting to see if a 6GB card would show a difference if we had a version PCI 3.0 vs 4.0 to compare, but TechReport testing this on a 3080 and found no substantial change in performance:

r2xtkvX.png


I mean it may indeed be based in reality, a 3080 has so much brute force (but from youtube videos I've seen may still even have small drops below 60fps at 4k with everything maxxed) but like I said before his tendency to state things authoritatively when they're more hypothetical in nature is kind of my quibble with some of his videos.

All that said, some instructive concrete details in the video too - I especially liked that he showed side by side comparisons between checkerboarding on the Pro vs PS5 - the PS5 looks to resolve fine detail noticeably better, I remember playing this on my Pro and the hair shimmering was far more noticeable to my recollection. I've gone back and forth between this and the PC version at true 4k (it's hard to make a fully valid comparison as anything above 1080p on my 1660 screws up the texture detail though), in terms of fine detail they're remarkably close, as he said you would have to go to 1800p or above to really match how 4K checkerboarding looks in this title at 60fps. Checkerboarding was often dismissed by PC gamers as 'fake' 4K but really, at least in PS5 titles at 60fps with two titles I can directly compare on the same set - Days Gone and HZD - it holds up very well to native 4K imo.
 
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