Current Generation Games Analysis Technical Discussion [2023] [XBSX|S, PS5, PC]

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Discuss properly or not at all.

I must say it seems you actively look to find the smallest things to reprimand me. I didn't outright call him a troll, I said that's what it seemed to be. I ultimately didn't know. He begins by saying the two photos look a generation apart, then follows up with "building detail extends farther" which is observably false even without zoom. I don't think it's unreasonable to ponder whether it is a trolling comment or not. Anyone making such an observation in favor of one over the other, is either being facetious/trolling, or is highly uninformed. So Silent buddha, if you weren't trolling, then please ignore.

Moving on...

The Spiderman 2 footage is rendering at native 4k with ray traced reflections on body of water and building windows. Same can't be said about the Matrix demo. I will stress again, the camera is panned much further out than Matrix demo. In regards to TOD, yes you will see more instances of shadowing in Matrix because Spiderman shot takes place during evening. I will also point out that the Matrix demo doesn't seem to do a great job of maintaining accurate scaling for the sizing of the buildings (which as you point out are little more than grey squares with no detail whatsoever) further out into the distance. Making everything look very toy-like.
 
Most impressive thing in the Spider-man 2 demo is the speed around the city with all those details and ray traced reflections. This is definitely a big improvement compared to the first game. It reminded me the end of the first UE5 demo running on PS5, that we still haven't seen elsewhere. It's going to be interesting if the 60fps mode will be able to run at a stable framerate with as many details even at those speeds, now that will be a very impressive benchmark if they accomplish this.

The biggest problem for me is first the obvious lack of polish in many areas and the fact that most of the time the demo was showing on-rails sections with plenty of QTEs which I dislike. I think the first showing of Spider-man was more interesting.
 
Spiderman 2 definitely is not native 4K all the time - they use DRS. Whether or Not the User notices it is a very different question.

Well maybe you did a pixel count and know better but to my knowledge, Oliver will be analyzing this one for DF so we will see. I am just going off of traditional Quality v performance mode expectations on that one. At the very least, I hope it's not too controversial to say here that the resolution is MUCH higher than Matrix Awakens demo and image stability isn't even in the same stratosphere.

So all that considered, as it relates to rendering far out detail into the distance, SM2 is an achievement we haven't really seen before. Especially from a shipped game.
 
What on earth are you looking at? The opposite is true. Building detail falls off on forefront structures in the Matrix demo.
Spiderman 2 maintains the building detail much better, the camera is much further, and it is rendering at ~3x distance of Matrix if not more. Sounds like trolling.



Not from this distance it doesn't. Spiderman 2 is drawing much more geometry in this scene than the Matrix. I've checked the triangle view myself, it falls off the cliff at such distance. In fact this isn't even a fair comparison for Spiderman because Matrix camera can't be pulled further back for a more fair comparison.



The matrix demo was 1080p and an unstable 30fps.
but how do you know Spiderman 2 draws more polygons without any data available at all ?
Or is it just your personnal opinion.
A fact, data provided by epic,we know is that the matrix demo draws an absurdly high amount of polygons at any time, with 17 000 simulated traffic vehicles at the same time plus 45 000 parked cars.

  • The city is 4,138 km wide and 4.968 km long, slightly larger than the size of downtown Los Angeles
  • The city surface is 15.79 km2
  • The city perimeter is 14.519 km long
  • There are 260 km of roads in the city
  • There are 512 km of sidewalk in the city
  • There are 1,248 intersections in the city
  • There are 45,073 parked cars, of which 38,146 are drivable and destructible
  • There are 17,000 simulated traffic vehicles on the road that are destructible
  • 7,000 buildings
  • 27,848 lamp posts on the street side only
  • 12,422 sewer holes
  • Almost 10 million unique and duplicated assets were created to make the city
  • The entire world is lit by only the sun, sky and emissive materials on meshes. No light sources were placed for the tens of thousands of street lights and headlights. In night mode, nearly all lighting comes from the millions of emissive building windows
  • 35,000 simulated MetaHuman pedestrians
  • Average polygon count? 7000k buildings made of 1000s of assets and each asset could be up to millions of polygons so we have several billions of polygons to make up just the buildings of the city


 
The problem with the Matrix demo is the catastrophic performance (on consoles) with big frame-time spikes once you go really fast between the buildings and the game try to load and render all the new assets (and many of those assets are way more repeated than in Spider-man looking how uniform in all areas the city is in the demo).
 
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but how do you know Spiderman 2 draws more polygons without any data available at all ?
Or is it just your personnal opinion.
A fact, data provided by epic,we know is that the matrix demo draws an absurdly high amount of polygons at any time, with 17 000 simulated traffic vehicles at the same time plus 45 000 parked cars.

  • The city is 4,138 km wide and 4.968 km long, slightly larger than the size of downtown Los Angeles
  • The city surface is 15.79 km2
  • The city perimeter is 14.519 km long
  • There are 260 km of roads in the city
  • There are 512 km of sidewalk in the city
  • There are 1,248 intersections in the city
  • There are 45,073 parked cars, of which 38,146 are drivable and destructible
  • There are 17,000 simulated traffic vehicles on the road that are destructible
  • 7,000 buildings
  • 27,848 lamp posts on the street side only
  • 12,422 sewer holes
  • Almost 10 million unique and duplicated assets were created to make the city
  • The entire world is lit by only the sun, sky and emissive materials on meshes. No light sources were placed for the tens of thousands of street lights and headlights. In night mode, nearly all lighting comes from the millions of emissive building windows
  • 35,000 simulated MetaHuman pedestrians
  • Average polygon count? 7000k buildings made of 1000s of assets and each asset could be up to millions of polygons so we have several billions of polygons to make up just the buildings of the city



You have thrown up a bunch of random facts and figures with very little in the way of context. But I will take on your very first bullet point as it has at least somewhat form of significance to the discussion of render distance. You are comparing a world in the Matrix demo modeled after downtown LA, which is less than 6 square miles and no more than 3 miles from it's furthest two points. In comparison, the Spiderman 2 screenshot is taken from Battery Park NYC southern coast, and the map extends to Harlem NY at minimum, meaning you are looking at 8 miles minimum and as the screenshot shows, assets are drawn all the way up to the horizon. Finally, the Spiderman 2 map is far more dense with building structures than the Matrix Demo. So yes, I hope that all of this is enough to understand that the draw distance and asset/geometric detail is much greater in Spiderman 2 than the Matrix Demo

it's an old demo built by a smaller team in 8 months, i'm sure they could get it stable 30fps by now.

Pure conjecture.

Imagine trying to argue that Spiderman 2 looks better than the UE5 Matrix demo.

This does not contribute to the discussion in any way shape or form.
 
Spiderman 2 is an OK looking game if you can look past the obvious pop-in and visible LOD transitions, something that doesn't happen un the UE5 Matrix demo.
 
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What on earth are you looking at? The opposite is true. Building detail falls off on forefront structures in the Matrix demo.
Spiderman 2 maintains the building detail much better, the camera is much further, and it is rendering at ~3x distance of Matrix if not more. Sounds like trolling.
Do you have access to the Matrix demo on a computer? If so, load up the scene and go into nanite wireframe and observer the number of polys for large structures in order to see what I mean. We aren't talking about building detail with regards to textures. We are talking about how many polys make up a particular building. I'm not sure how you can count polys in a SM2 trailer to declare what I'm saying as inaccurate. By definition, nanite streams an enormous amount of polygons. And as far as we all know, there is no other custom game engine doing something similar. Not sure why you would think that hand-crafted buildings (modeled) would have more polys vs. an actual geometric pipeline for managing assets by streaming straight from the SSD.

Not from this distance it doesn't. Spiderman 2 is drawing much more geometry in this scene than the Matrix.
The amount of buildings doesn't dictate more geometry. The actual number of polys that make up that asset does.

I've checked the triangle view myself, it falls off the cliff at such distance.
Do you have a video showing this? Moreover, how can you extract polys from a SM2 demo trailer unless you work for Insomniac to substantiate your claim.

In fact this isn't even a fair comparison for Spiderman because Matrix camera can't be pulled further back for a more fair comparison.
What do you mean here?

The matrix demo was 1080p and an unstable 30fps.
The matrix demo was low res because it's lighting engine dwarfs Insomniac's lighting system for their rendering engine (i.e. typical GI probe data vs. signed distance fields and pure RTGI + RTAO).
 
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I must say it seems you actively look to find the smallest things to reprimand me. I didn't outright call him a troll, I said that's what it seemed to be. I ultimately didn't know. He begins by saying the two photos look a generation apart, then follows up with "building detail extends farther"
I said building detail as an asset. Not arguing your point about "seeing" boxes at a much further distance.

The Spiderman 2 footage is rendering at native 4k with ray traced reflections on body of water and building windows. Same can't be said about the Matrix demo.
The Matrix demo is doing a LOT more than just reflections. SM2 is only doing reflections (i.e. cuts have to be made to the rendering budget).
 
I'm all for pointing out how last-generation SM2 looks on PS5 (because it does), but using a very limited demo that has none of the trappings of a full fledge game (i.e., gameplay mechanics, NPC AI, character/NPC/objects world collision/detection systems, etc.) is somewhat pointless. And that demo being as limited as it is, still requires a hell of a PC if you're looking for 60fps gameplay with moderate to high IQ settings. Hell, the demo which is running 20-30fps on PS5/XBSX should be some type of indication that a full fledge game trying to achieve those types of visuals is going to be a challenge on these current gen systems.

I suspect we'll start to see some very beautiful open-world games on consoles and PC next year, similar to The Matrix Awakens cityscape, but nothing that's visually as dense and complex as the demo's cityscape when factoring in other aspects on making a full fledge game.
 
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There's actually swing speed mods aswell that kinda disrupt the argument about ps5 io being needed for faster travel speeds.

Should just up the "run speed" and run with Spider-Man on the streets because the street level textures and LODs is what really taxes the system. Still... pretty interesting to see how well the engine already deals with it.

I'd like to see what Nixxes could do with DirectStorage. Hopefully we'll find out soon with Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart.
 
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