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

I wouldn't have Ghost of Tsushima on my list but the others are all very reasonable I'd say.

 

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/n...eTime=2020-11-06T00:58:47&ftag=GSS-05-10aaa0a

"DICE is creating our next Battlefield game with never-before-seen scale," EA said during the call. "

Very intresting. DICE has the abilties to make a good visual show atleast.

 

Not many would disagree, though I'ld have to put Dreams in there prolly at #1 flight simulator can look bad in places and has bad performance

 

dreams can look bad as wel, depending on your (lack of) talent
But good call!

 

Fixed lighting but it looks more real than RDR2 or last of us 2 or cyberpunk or ghosts of tsunami etc

Will we have large worlds (with smaller voxels) this gen looking like this but better, streaming in with the SSD?

 

I wait a lot a PS5 patch for dreams, they can raytrace all secondary ray global illumination*, use the SSD for let people create an open world, let people use 3d audio, use dual sense functionnality.

* It will help a lot people because no need to manual placement of light like in the current dreams version.

 

Dreams is sortof hard to "rank" since its doing something completely different in every way (asset production, limitations, lighting, rendering) than every other game. Might be easier to compare and contrast when more unconventional, compute based graphics pipelines come around (mostly looking at nanite)

 

Looks like NX Gamer covered the DiRT 5 update patch. Seems Series X performance is much better, but there are still instances PS5 runs at slightly higher resolution average and has slightly more detailed textures. PS5 version performance suffered a good bit tho, there's dark spots in parts of the tracks that weren't present before, and there's more framerate issues.

If VRS is being used as he points out in the video, I wouldn't say that's so much a limitation of VRS (Hivebusters and/or at least Gears 5 on Series X use it, correct?), but instead Codemaster's implementation not being that great or maybe it's not that compatible with their game engine.

 

Was the VRS responsible for the blurry Ford badge? Does it work at certain angles (like a reverse aniso) or at specified sections of the track/screen? Or maybe XSX dropped res because of the extra load at the start of a race.

 

in fact on PS5 there no "fps mode", it's running ps4 pro version, but they unlocked the framerate in "detail" mode
and contrary to wait he says, details and draw distance are higher in "detail mode" at 60fps than in "resolution mode" at 30fps

 

There is no good implementation of VRS. It's not a reconstruction tech like DLSS, CBR or TI where the positives should easily outweight the negatives. It's a method to gain a few FPS while losing image sharpness. It could explain why they added a sharpening filter on XSX (not on PS5) at 120hz in order to improve the image clarity in that patch.

 

VRS is useful for at least motion blur and depth of field you don't need to shade at full rate behind this two effect for sure and it helps a lot in VR with foveated rendering.

And VRS can help to render part of the image at higher quality too.

 

That's not true IMO. VRS has many useful features, although I do agree that some games haven't really done the best of jobs implementing the tech into the game... but that can be because every game on the market utilizing it was not built from the ground up with it in mind. Regardless of that, I think Gears Tactics has a good implementation.

Everything else the exact same but VRS (Off, On, Performance)

Spoiler: Screenshot comparison of Gears Tactics

Off


On


Performance

Off - 71fps
On - 78fps
Perf - 85fps

14fps between Off and Performance is quite big, and for console games where sticking to a locked framerate is a huge deal at the moment, it serves as another tool that developers have to reach their goals. Now of course if you zoom in and look... and compare side to side.. you can see some artifacting from the VRS.. but lets be real.. nobody is doing that IRL. Unless you are.. you wouldn't even notice any difference.

Now lets say developers actually code their game with the technology in mind.. and design assets and effects that take advantage of VRS. You could have out of focus DOF with big performance gains. Some games, when they switch to a "cinematic view" which crank up the detail and add effects, could cause momentary slowdown... which is something VRS could alleviate or eliminate altogether. It's also extremely dynamic, so specific assets which don't require the precision of full rate shading can be reduced specifically. Speed and motion of the camera.. like in racing games can lower the shading rate and keep framerates high while improving blurring effects and lowering the cost of other effects that rely on transparencies.

Better yet... is that games developed with VRS in mind.. would not give any other points of reference to compare them too... so something that looks great designed with VRS... will look.. as it should.

It's not something that should be looked to as enabling some massive increase in power.. but rather something that can allow developers to hit and maintain performance targets by optimizing the shading of pixels, which they had in mind from the beginning. More variable rate shading hopefully leading to less variable frametimes

 

Essentially this. There was something bugged with it which I "confirmed" caused artifacting in the game. That bug was fixed in the subsequent 2.0 patch, and now the game looks great. It looks like the Series X utilizes a lower precision implementation of VRS and still causes some nasty artifacting. It runs at a lower base resolution too than what I was running on my PC, so that doesn't help things either.

In the beginning I wasn't sure what was happening with the VRS artifacting in Dirt 5.. I wasn't even really sure if it was a VRS issue.. until I played Gears 5 Hivebusters with the new patch that added VRS and other gfx options to the game. When I started up that game, I turned on VRS and... I had similar issues that Dirt 5's VRS implementation had.

You can easily see on the faces.

but then.. I tried something. I tried turning off Async compute.... and... it fixed the problem. So it's something with running VRS and Async compute simultaneously which causes the issue (at least on my machine/drivers.. which is fully updated btw)

So perhaps there's an issue with Nvidia and VRS/Async compute when used together currently? Maybe Codemasters realized this and disabled Async compute on Nvidia GPUs? Maybe not.. I dunno. It's hard to tell because Dirt 5 doesn't have any options to enable/disable both settings separately like Gears 5 does.

It's worth noting though that Gears Tactics works perfectly fine with both VRS and Async Compute enabled.. so I'm thinking it's just a quirk with Gears 5 and the previous build of Dirt 5.

 

What? you choose what samples get rendered at lower resolutions. Clearly it's an effect that can vary based on implementation.

 

Not a bad list, I'd likely shuffle things around a bit, and I'd have to remove one of those in order to make room for Ori and the Will of the Wisps.

Regards,
SB

 

Personally I see value in VRS, but it probably won't be truly leveraged until later in the generation, once games get more ambitious in scope and need to squeeze out as much perf as possible. Preferably you use a technique like VRS on parts of the frame that aren't going to be visible to the player and have no major impact on visual quality or fidelity when implemented.

Like any technique if it's used skillfully it will absolutely make a difference, doesn't even matter if the impact it gives in performance gains is "less" than other techniques, they all add up.

Lol that's exactly how not to use VRS xD; things like faces or I'd argue anywhere on the player character model, it's probably best to not use VRS there because it will be more noticeable especially with time. If it's being done on things that aren't of significance that always seems like the better (and would argue, the intended) purpose.

Maybe the reason VRS & Async compute aren't playing friendly together with these games, on Nvidia cards no less, sounds like driver incompatibility issues. As far as what tier of VRS Series X is using, how many tiers are there exactly to VRS? MS mentioned Series systems supporting Tier 2, but is there a Tier 3 already? If they are supporting the full suite of RDNA 2 features and there's a Tier 3 but by some chance MS aren't using it, well that'd be a bit of a face palm imo.

So at least regarding Series X performance with VRS in Hivebusters I'm more leaning with it being slight lack of time optimization and possibly something with the engine that's causing a bit of incompatibility requiring some tuning. Gears 5 had some odd issues running on Series X as Digital Foundry pointed out a while back, things the team was aware of and ended up fixing with an update, though I don't exactly remember what they specifically did to fix them. Could be something similar they would need to do with slightly more optimization of VRS in the Gears 5 engine and, obviously, the DiRT 5 engine as well, which would probably need even more work given its status.

Gonna have to disagree on this one. By that notion, foveated rendering would fall in a similar ballpark, but IMO it doesn't. Any technique needs careful usage in order to leverage the benefits, some just require more skillful handling than others. Part of that is also impacted by time of the software development.

As well IIRC the sharpening filter was mentioned in reference to Series S, but not Series X. I could be wrong, but when MS rolled out the Series S reveal and in a couple of Jason Ronald's subsequent interviews they specified an image sharpening filter for that hardware, but I've not seen any mentions of similar for Series X.