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

if devs design a SW VRS that suits their need better, can they still run it with HW VRS to save some ressources ?

 

Moving Gears to Tier 2 Variable Rate Shading | DirectX Developer Blog (microsoft.com)

 

VRS, dlss, dynamic resolution, taa upsampling, and checkerboard are all clear tradeoffs. They all have incredibly noticeable artifacts if you care to freeze frame or zoom in 4x. If everybody has 200tf gpus we wouldn't use any of them, but since we don't, the techniques should be judged based on how good they look and how much performance they save.

VRS is blurrier than something like checkerboard, but it has no ghosting, no noisy breakup of samples on area lights/raytracing, and no other temporal artifacts. Also, in theory, vrs can be only used for parts of the screen that are disproportionately expensive (such as a part with many lights in a forward renderer, or certain vfx where overdraw is an issue, etc), or in areas where the loss of resolution is completely invisible (in large flat colored areas, in source pixels behind blurs, etc.) Vs a reconstruction tech where you're stuck downscaling the entire screen even if only a tiny portion is pushing you over your ms budget.

But it's relatively coarse and you're stuck with big resolution drops in the spots you use it for.

Everyone here understands the tradeoffs of these techniques except you and snc, and you guys have been trying to make up cases where it looks like a bad technique (by only comparing in like-for-like resolution shots for doom eternal, when the reality is xbox's base resolution is much higher, by making up phantom vrs to explain low res textures in games like outriders, etc.) for months

 

Yeah? Tell me about the differences discussed in the video. I'm all ears.

 

impeccable timing for release considering where England is right now

 

I dunno, absence of an audience makes it more realistic...

 

Hadn't watched this one, thanks. The part about setting 2x2 shading rate for a pass and measuring perf gains is really good advice, if you don't see much of a perf difference by setting the entire frame to be 2x2 then it means the bottleneck for that pass is somewhere else and probably not worth looking into VRS. That way you can easily see where VRS is useful in your frame, the changes required are fairly trivial to get some initial performance numbers. Although, RDNA2 doesn't support 2x4, 4x2 and 4x4 shading rates, these would probably be useful in cases like the DOF scene in that video.

Edit: Not to mention AMD provide drop in open source code that you can easily integrate into your engine https://gpuopen.com/fidelityfx-variable-shading/

 

ID Soft DF interview. Billy Khan mentioned a saving in performance of about 10-15% from VRS:

 

10-15% more framerate with VRS while PS5 looks overall >15% higher resolution in both 60fps modes. Easily noticeable without zoom using 2 identical scenes (source VGTech).


I know it's not a discussion most want to hear about. They want to think VRS is a miraculous tech that is going to dramatically improve all parts of a game without downsides. But VRS is a sharp trade-off, one many wouldn't want in their game, it's not a silver bullet.

 

Again vrs doesn’t smear the entire screen. It’s dynamic and only portions of screen where the algorithm thinks shading isn’t important, like the one you post of a small portion of the entire screen at 400% zoom. No matter what as noted by every analysis XSX is sharper looking in every mode. Vrs allows the XSX to get up to 29% better res with the help of the stronger gpu/bandwidth. Every dev will use it better over time as they get accustomed to it. TC did wonders with it in Gears

 

Amazing tech he even said he wishes every console had it

 

If your on consoles only, the XSX version is technically the one to get if you own both.

 

Yeah its a very good fitting for a console, like Alex had already mentioned along time ago in one of their analysis.

 

Ps5 looks 15% higher res than XSX which is roughly 20% higher res. So ps5 is approx 35% higher res then same res on not ps5. yeah I’m good for tonight.

 

If you only notice it with screenshot comparisons then it's not really that bad.

 

quick ask; which ones are these on VG Tech? I can't figure out where you clipped from.

Thank you in advance!

Also if possible could you pixel count both? I don't need to see the proof, just provide the numbers.

Thanks.

 

Stop making and presenting false statements. You're the only person ever talking about VRS as a silver bullet or miraculous tech. Everyone except for you has a reasonable view of it.

Consider this is your last warning to stop having discussions in bad faith.

 

Are we sure that's even VRS? I'm absolutely not sure on this, but it looks like this is low res in texture space, not in screen space -- like from a streaming issue. There's a polygonal shape on the left side thats identical on ps5 and xsx. Wouldn't you expect either the texture to sharpen right around that seam, or the 2x2 vrs downscaling to also apply to the edge?

Edit: Maybe its just tricking my eyes, and because both images are blurry the polygonal seam looks the same to me even though its lower res. Would need to see this with like, textures turned off.

 

Please stop making definitive conclusions about nextgen hardware and nextgen technologies based on games made for ps4 and xbox one.

Xsx and xss were designed for completely different development methods using sfs, ms, vrs, rt and ml in the early stages of development.
Not for hastily ported games from the previous generation.