Current Generation Games Analysis Technical Discussion [2022] [XBSX|S, PS5, PC]

[Jupiter]

With assets like this I would agree with that. These are the lowest quality assets in the game. However, in other games areas like this do not even exist. Scenes like this would have much less drawn objects and a more 2d like feeling while in Cyberpunk 2077 the player has to fight his way through mountains of rubbish. Even those assets are sharper than a lot of the environmental ones which Ratcket and Clank Rift Apart has to offer.

In addition there is the open world with many different areas and objects. Compared to top tier open world games linear games usually have far fewer different assets. It is easier to maintain a constant quality there.




I am particularly impressed by the car models in Cyberpunk 2077. They often don't even look that good in racing games. Especially not when you add the raytracing lighting in Cyberpunk 2077, which works wonderfully with the excellent material system. Here you can walk around and get into such high-quality models.

 

[Karamazov]

that looked the same on PS4 pro by the way.

 

[techuse]

With assets like this I would agree with that. These are the lowest quality assets in the game. However, in other games areas like this do not even exist. Scenes like this would have much less drawn objects and a more 2d like feeling while in Cyberpunk 2077 the player has to fight his way through mountains of rubbish. Even those assets are sharper than a lot of the environmental ones which Ratcket and Clank Rift Apart has to offer.

In addition there is the open world with many different areas and objects. Compared to top tier open world games linear games usually have far fewer different assets. It is easier to maintain a constant quality there.

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I am particularly impressed by the car models in Cyberpunk 2077. They often don't even look that good in racing games. Especially not when you add the raytracing lighting in Cyberpunk 2077, which works wonderfully with the excellent material system. Here you can walk around and get into such high-quality models.

A Rift Apart certainly seems to have higher quality assets to my eyes although of course there are less of them.

 

[Jupiter]

A Rift Apart certainly seems to have higher quality assets to my eyes although of course there are less of them.

At 2:45 min, look at the close objects. Something like this has already been seen on the PlayStation 3 in terms of the polygon level. Of course, materials etc. are much better here.

that looked the same on PS4 pro by the way.

The versions also share assets. It's just that these assets and their use in the world are not designed for PlayStation 4 computing power. The Star Citizen spaceships with windows to the outside might somehow run on the PlayStation 4 but that doesn't mean the game itself works well on it.

For example, Crysis 1, 2 and 3 already seemed overambitious for the PlayStation 3. I don't even want to think about all the pop-ups. Gears of War or Uncharted may not have been as complex as Crysis 3 on the PlayStation 3 but the hardware didn't seem as overtaxed.

 

[davis.anthony]

So, I am a bit worried about Hardware Raytracing in UE5 and I fear devs might choose to disable it entirely.

HW-RT has a hefty limitation and that is: If a game has over 100k instances running, HW-RT will be much slower.

SAGE 2022 - Demo - Over Jump Rally (SAGE '22 Demo)

An indie homage to the legendary arcade racing game from 1994, Sega Rally, recreated in Unreal Engine5, with graphics as you remember them as a kid!

sonicfangameshq.com

This is a fantastic UE5 demo you can download and curious as I am, I reached out to the developer to find out if they were using HW-RT.

Turns out, it's not using HW-RT because the demo has too much foliage (over 100k instances) and the dev decided its the better option to disable it as it would look and run worse compared to software RT mode.

So it seems these 100k instances are easily reachable in such a high detailed game as this. Now I wonder, what does this mean for future Triple A games? Will developers disable HW-RT, leaving those Ray accelerators/ RT cores wasted? And if not, what happens if developers are not aware of this limitation and have HW-RT enabled on supported hardware, leading to much worse performance on modern GPUs compared to old ones?

@Dictator @Andrew Lauritzen

I am curious to hear your opinions.

I just tried this and jesus!

Impossible to lock to 60fps at native 1080p with a 3060ti!

 

[davis.anthony]

In terms of asset consistency in a 'open world' game Horizon Forbidden West is the best for me at the moment.

There's no deny that CP2077 is beyond it with RT lighting, shadows...etc..... enabled but from a pure asset point of view CP isn't close.

 

[Karamazov]

talking about assets density, i remember when i was impressed by kessen 2 up to 500 characters on screen at once on PS2, and now we get things like this

 

[Deleted member 11852]

talking about assets density, i remember when i was impressed by kessen 2 up to 500 characters on screen at once on PS2, and now we get things like this

And Total War been doing combat at a large scale - not quite at that scale, but definitely with more sophisticated AI - for quite a while.

 

[Dampf]

I just tried this and jesus!

Impossible to lock to 60fps at native 1080p with a 3060ti!

The game actually uses DLSS all the time, I've troubleshooted this with the developer.

Still, the performance you're experiencing is likely because of your VRAM. The game is incredibly VRAM hungry because the dev has issues getting virtual texturing to work and the textures are super high res, so you would need atleast 10, maybe more to run it.

 

[davis.anthony]

The game actually uses DLSS all the time, I've troubleshooted this with the developer.

Still, the performance you're experiencing is likely because of your VRAM. The game is incredibly VRAM hungry because the dev has issues getting virtual texturing to work and the textures are super high res, so you would need atleast 10, maybe more to run it.

Ah, you are correct, according to the built in statistics I'm 1.4Gb over my 8Gb VRAM limit

 

[Dictator]

So, I am a bit worried about Hardware Raytracing in UE5 and I fear devs might choose to disable it entirely.

HW-RT has a hefty limitation and that is: If a game has over 100k instances running, HW-RT will be much slower.

SAGE 2022 - Demo - Over Jump Rally (SAGE '22 Demo)

An indie homage to the legendary arcade racing game from 1994, Sega Rally, recreated in Unreal Engine5, with graphics as you remember them as a kid!

sonicfangameshq.com

This is a fantastic UE5 demo you can download and curious as I am, I reached out to the developer to find out if they were using HW-RT.

Turns out, it's not using HW-RT because the demo has too much foliage (over 100k instances) and the dev decided its the better option to disable it as it would look and run worse compared to software RT mode.

So it seems these 100k instances are easily reachable in such a high detailed game as this. Now I wonder, what does this mean for future Triple A games? Will developers disable HW-RT, leaving those Ray accelerators/ RT cores wasted? And if not, what happens if developers are not aware of this limitation and have HW-RT enabled on supported hardware, leading to much worse performance on modern GPUs compared to old ones?

@Dictator @Andrew Lauritzen

I am curious to hear your opinions.

If UE5 leaves the default renderer to be software mode on with UE5 than developers might just "unwittingly" design their scenes around the performance particulars of that and then run into GPU or CPU issues when they want to turn on higher quality HWRT at the moment. But I would hope developers have a bit more sense to first choose their renderer before they design things.

IDK, UE5 is incredibly in flux at the moment and IMO is still not at all in a game shippable state regarding how it uses the CPU. The roadmap shows as much and so does dev feedback.

I would not put any stock in one indie game so early into UE5s life cycle as being indicative of what larger studios will do in X years.

Furthermore, I imagine Epic will want to ensure as good HWRT performance over time as possible, even with instancing bananas, as that the general trend of the hardware industry is to push further into HWRT. Microsoft is going to expand DXR to be more compliant with performance concerns of UE5. Similarly IHVs like NV and Intel are just going to keep adding more to their forward looking RT designs and AMD for sure are going to have RDNA4 align more with NV and Intel designs. Surely Epic will want to utilise as much of that hardware acceleration in the GPU as possible.

The only thing I am curious about is the current generation consoles. They are stuck hardware wise for the next 5 years at least and they have "lacklustre HWRT" (but still good enough for the very pretty Matrix Demo), so maybe that will influence the first 4 to 5 years of UE5 usage but then it will wane as the generation goes on.

 

[PSman1700]

At 2:45 min, look at the close objects. Something like this has already been seen on the PlayStation 3 in terms of the polygon level. Of course, materials etc. are much better here.

Indeed, even Rift Apart has its flaws and throwbacks to last generation..... Its pretty obvious. Its to be expected with a small jump in hw over last gen.
CP2077 is much more openworld with more things going on, targetting a more realistic scenario aswell. Both these games have their strengths and weaknesses, both in their best light though, its 2077 that outdoes rift apart (running at the max settings/pc). Also to consider is that rift apart was developed for a single platform whereas CP2077 targetted a few more.

 

[PSman1700]

The only thing I am curious about is the current generation consoles. They are stuck hardware wise for the next 5 years at least and they have "lacklustre HWRT" (but still good enough for the very prettz Matrix Demo), so maybe that will influence the first 4 to 5 years of UE5 usage but then it will wane as the generation goes on.

The lack of ML acceleration doesnt help either, like intel/nv have (dlss and xess), which could help performance alot. Then the CPU's which are going to be a problem (low clocked zen2) seeing how cpu intensive UE5 demo was. With 2070/3060 (or 6600XT) level of gpu performance, theres not much headroom there either. Lets hope scaling is as good as it was last gen, otherwise tech is being held back for another 7 total years, or more (cross gen for next gen).

 

[Jupiter]

Let's see when games will finally bring more real-time environmental derformation. Destruction is mostly just breaking in games but in reality many materials like metals often bend.

In terms of asset consistency in a 'open world' game Horizon Forbidden West is the best for me at the moment.

There's no deny that CP2077 is beyond it with RT lighting, shadows...etc..... enabled but from a pure asset point of view CP isn't close.

The assets in Horizon 2 are indeed very good and much better than Spiderman or Rift Apart. I never said that Cyberpunk 2077 has the best assets but they are on average much better than I am used to from most games and some assets like the vehicles I even find first class. Often you can zoom in close to an object with an ocular and it still looks sharp which does not apply to most games.

For example the newly released Spiderman Remastered which is also set in a city can't compete with that.

talking about assets density, i remember when i was impressed by kessen 2 up to 500 characters on screen at once on PS2, and now we get things like this

It even runs relatively smoothly.

 

[PSman1700]

The assets in Horizon 2 are indeed very good and much better than Spiderman or Rift Apart. I never said that Cyberpunk 2077 has the best assets but they are on average much better than I am used to from most games and some assets like the vehicles I even find first class.

For example the newly released Spiderman Remastered which is also set in a city can't compete with that.

Indeed, forbidden west has very good assets, but lacks in other areas vs 2077. The have-it-all solution isnt there yet, if it ever will on current gen hardware, most likely not.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

The game is plastered with assets that have base Xbox One level geometry and textures.

It's arguable the most inconsistent game released from memory when it comes to asset consistency.

Yeah I just can't unsee that stuff. I agree that Metro Exodus also has this problem, some truly brutal textures no doubt. But to call Cyberpunk 'top tier in all other non-ratracing areas' is bizarre to me. On a 3090 at 4k with RT/DLSS? I can see it as an impressive game visually sure, but without RT, especially on a more middling rig - nah.

In terms of asset consistency in a 'open world' game Horizon Forbidden West is the best for me at the moment.

Yeah I'd say the same, albeit I have some issues with the art direction with the game (and just don't like many design decisions with it outside of that).

 

[PSman1700]

Yeah I just can't unsee that stuff. I agree that Metro Exodus also has this problem, some truly brutal textures no doubt. But to call Cyberpunk 'top tier in all other non-ratracing areas' is bizarre to me. On a 3090 at 4k with RT/DLSS? I can see it as an impressive game visually sure, but without RT, especially on a more middling rig - nah.

There wont be much that would please you so far.

 

[Karamazov]

thing with CP77 is that assets are the same across versions, so no "next gen" assets for PC or new consoles.
But still, RT and higher res make a good difference, and of couse draw distance; but yeah assets wise those are the same.

 

[PSman1700]

Basically the same thing mostly for FW and other titles.

 

[Karamazov]

For Most of them yes, though for HFW characters are higher polygons on PS5.

There is a CP77 stream on tuesday, they'll certainly announce new story DLC, and surely a lot of enhancements with it.