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

[Pete]

I don’t think anyone is saying devs suck but we are criticizing their implementations. Personally, I do not think the level of talent is as high as it was in the past for a variety of reasons.

“No one’s saying devs suck, they’re just not as good as they once were.” How is this anything other than pure conjecture? Sure, question and even complain about why what you’re seeing isn’t as impressive or performant as what you expect, just don’t use the “devs suck” brush. The next useful step in a technical forum isn’t to figure out why the devs weren’t good enough but what compromises may have led to what you’re seeing. Talent may be a reason, but is generally a black box to us (and time and money and leadership can all be contributors).

Starfield isn’t bad because it’s not as impressive as Cyberpunk in some respects. Keep in mind that Cyberpunk was pushed out the door at least slightly undercooked (police spawning behind the player, pedestrians despawning if you turned your back, traffic skating around on rails: see all the GTA comparison videos) even on PC by leadership to meet some financial deadlines.

(And as highly praised as Cyberpunk was and is visually, CDPR still decided to abandon their in-house engine for their next game. Talent flight? Leadership priorities? Market realities?)

You indirectly questioned Digital Foundry’s qualifications to weigh in on a game’s technical merits (how many other “YouTube outlets“ are “celebrated on here?”), yet it’s likely their analysis is at least somewhat informed by dialogue with developers. They posited Starfield’s adherence to the Bethesda standard of object (semi-)permanence as a potential limitation, and here we are with many benchmarks showing a decent correlation between framerate and memory access/latency.

 

[troyan]

The Last of Us was a great example what happens when optimiziations have not been done. At launch it needed at least 8GB VRAM. With 6GB VRAM (more than the PS4 Pro) the texture quality was even worse than emulating the PS3 game on the PC...

 

[BitByte]

“No one’s saying devs suck, they’re just not as good as they once were.” How is this anything other than pure conjecture? Sure, question and even complain about why what you’re seeing isn’t as impressive or performant as what you expect, just don’t use the “devs suck” brush. The next useful step in a technical forum isn’t to figure out why the devs weren’t good enough but what compromises may have led to what you’re seeing. Talent may be a reason, but is generally a black box to us (and time and money and leadership can all be contributors).

It would be conjecture if we couldn't performance profile games or things like this didn't exist.

https://twitter.com/SheriefFYI

Starfield isn’t bad because it’s not as impressive as Cyberpunk in some respects. Keep in mind that Cyberpunk was pushed out the door at least slightly undercooked (police spawning behind the player, pedestrians despawning if you turned your back, traffic skating around on rails: see all the GTA comparison videos) even on PC by leadership to meet some financial deadlines.

Starfield is bad because its a technically unimpressive game with a very unimpressive performance profile. Its not surprising as this is the history of Bethesda.

You indirectly questioned Digital Foundry’s qualifications to weigh in on a game’s technical merits (how many other “YouTube outlets“ are “celebrated on here?”), yet it’s likely their analysis is at least somewhat informed by dialogue with developers. They posited Starfield’s adherence to the Bethesda standard of object (semi-)permanence as a potential limitation, and here we are with many benchmarks showing a decent correlation between framerate and memory access/latency.

Firstly, I didn't specify any youtube outlet. Your inferences are solely your own. Secondly, I merely applied the @Shifty Geezer logic to the discussion at hand. If that logic is to hold true, it must hold true for all instance. It was meant to highlight why that pattern of thinking is questionable. Finally, if you're not an sme in a particular topic and you talk to an sme about said topic, you're not a sme on the topic.

Edit: With regards to Bethesda's object permanence, I cannot speak on it's effects on the framerate however it would not surprise me. Looking at the technical history of Bethesda, they've not shown a history of excellence and at times even competence. It would not surprise me in the least if object permanence was implemented in a very non-performant manner.

 

[cwjs]

It would be conjecture if we couldn't performance profile games or things like this didn't exist.

Seriously, what 90s or 2000s games do you think were setting up rendering resources async mid frame like sherief is complaining Jedi survivor doesn’t? What 2004 pc action game had have traversal stutter free open worlds??? These cases are clear examples of things being more complex today. Back in the day you just slapped a loading screen in and called it a day.

 

[JPT]

It would be conjecture if we couldn't performance profile games or things like this didn't exist.

https://twitter.com/SheriefFYI

Starfield is bad because its a technically unimpressive game with a very unimpressive performance profile. Its not surprising as this is the history of Bethesda.

Come on, Starfield like any game is an entertainment product, belongs to a specific genre and comparing products across genres is basically just a taste comparison. I mean its almost like comparing a Toyota Yaris to a F1 car. And then complain about the yaris not being performant or using bleeding edge tech like the F1. When it does what it is designed for just fine.
So please tell me, if Starfield is the Yaris, which fabled unicorn game is the F1 car equivalent ? Oh and it needs to be in the same genre and scope as Starfield.

 

[techuse]

Seriously, what 90s or 2000s games do you think were setting up rendering resources async mid frame like sherief is complaining Jedi survivor doesn’t? What 2004 pc action game had have traversal stutter free open worlds??? These cases are clear examples of things being more complex today. Back in the day you just slapped a loading screen in and called it a day.

There are studios today that consistently ship titles without such strong issues though. I agree development is much more complex and IMO this just further separates the more proficient coders.

Just keep in mind that id and Crytek are dev studios known to push technical boundaries. Ascendant Studios is a new studio comprised of many former Telltale Games devs. Telltale was the opposite end of the tech spectrum (relatively unambitious 3D [not that there’s anything wrong with that] point and click adventures games vs. cutting-edge FPS games). id and Crytek licensed their game engines. Telltale did not (save for one game).

Nothing to disagree with here, I just don’t think the comparison between the recent titles people consider as underperforming and the mentioned titles of the past is suitable. I’m not talking about Starfield just to clarify, I don’t find that particularly egregious and rather in line with expectations relative to the studios history and content of the game.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

There are studios today that consistently ship titles without such strong issues though. I agree development is much more complex and IMO this just further separates the more proficient coders.

Sure if you scale things down enough then it becomes far easier to ship a title with less issues. The only other company on the planet that ships a AAA title at anything remotely close to the scale of a typical Bethesda title is RockStar. Everyone else ships far smaller games with far smaller scope and orders of magnitude less interactivity. And I'm talking about the scale of everything both visible (graphics and presentation) and not visible (data management, gameplay systems, NPC AI and dialog, etc.). NMS is a large game with a large world, but they aren't attempting to do most of the things that Bethesda are doing (for example, NMS is almost devoid of any NPCs that have daily routines that they run). Of course, Bethesda are also not doing some of the things that NMS is doing (like planet to space transitions which is computationally far less intensive than having all those NPC AIs running even when the NPC isn't visible).

Now if that's not your thing then Bethesda games aren't for you and that's fine. But it has nothing to do with how capable the developers themselves are. They are top tier in the AAA gaming world, but it's not used just for graphics like almost all other AAA developers.

Regards,
SB

 

[BitByte]

Seriously, what 90s or 2000s games do you think were setting up rendering resources async mid frame like sherief is complaining Jedi survivor doesn’t? What 2004 pc action game had have traversal stutter free open worlds??? These cases are clear examples of things being more complex today. Back in the day you just slapped a loading screen in and called it a day.

Funny you say that since devs in the day had to write their own engine for the most part. A lot of devs today use 3rd party engines like Unreal and deliver subpar products.

Finally, complexity is almost never the cause of poor performance. Poor performance usually occurs as a result of poor trade offs, lack of technical competence and/or poor craftsmanship. All of these are trademarks of Bethesda.

 

[BitByte]

Sure if you scale things down enough then it becomes far easier to ship a title with less issues. The only other company on the planet that ships a AAA title at anything remotely close to the scale of a typical Bethesda title is RockStar.

The bold is most certainly false since starfield has no real scale. Well, I don’t consider level reuse to be scale. On a systems level, starfield is not superior to other games in its class. Its animation is poor. The interactivity is not especially outstanding. The world generation is behind no man’s sky which runs on the switch seamlessly. The space combat is poor. The mission design is not class leading. Bethesda’s claim to fame is object permanence of irrelevant things that don’t advance game design. It was cool on the ps360 but it’s no longer impressive now. To compare Bethesda to Rockstar is an insult to Rockstar. They’re not even in the same galaxy.

Everyone else ships far smaller games with far smaller scope and orders of magnitude less interactivity. And I'm talking about the scale of everything both visible (graphics and presentation) and not visible (data management, gameplay systems, NPC AI and dialog, etc.). NMS is a large game with a large world, but they aren't attempting to do most of the things that Bethesda are doing (for example, NMS is almost devoid of any NPCs that have daily routines that they run).

I also disagree with this strongly. Other than object permanence and npc routines, No man’s Sky does everything starfield does and things they don’t. To claim that no man’s sky is smaller shows a real lack of understanding of the game. It’s not smaller at all. They just chose to focus on different things.

Of course, Bethesda are also not doing some of the things that NMS is doing (like planet to space transitions which is computationally far less intensive than having all those NPC AIs running even when the NPC isn't visible).

What evidence do you have that Ais are running when npcs are not visible? What developer would be running ai routines for npcs in a level that the player is not in? Of what use is that? That would be one of the most wasteful use of computational resources I’ve ever heard of. Starfield is not a simulation so why would they be doing that?

 

[Seanspeed]

Edit: With regards to Bethesda's object permanence, I cannot speak on it's effects on the framerate however it would not surprise me. Looking at the technical history of Bethesda, they've not shown a history of excellence and at times even competence. It would not surprise me in the least if object permanence was implemented in a very non-performant manner.

OR, their priorities just mean implementing complex game systems in some way is preferable to not having them at all, even if they're not all designed in the most performant way possible. Game development is always something of a race against time, and simply 'getting things done' is often more important than 'implementing something as optimally as possible'.

I dont think anybody would argue Bethesda are technical gods, but they ARE also doing things, as a whole package, that hardly anybody else is doing. And thus it's very hard to say, "They're just not good at what they do", when even other highly accomplished programmers or designers or whatever might well end up having to make similar compromises when put in the same situation. Suggesting they are just straight up 'incompetent' is exactly the kind of crap rhetoric that gamers need to stop with.

 

[cwjs]

Funny you say that since devs in the day had to write their own engine for the most part. A lot of devs today use 3rd party engines like Unreal

Just as many engineers are doing engine development today as were back then — probably vastly more, actually. When I say engineers today are just as skilled or more skilled than engineers in the 2000s I’m obviously including the devs of say, Unreal. My point is that *engine devs* didn’t have to do those things back then, the apis to support them didn’t even exist. Nobody was writing custom gpu drivers, and software renderers from back in the 90s were much simpler.

Also, complexity is absolutely associated with bad performance and bugs. It is by definition harder to schedule and time 3000 features and systems than it is 300. A frame of a modern renderer is doing *so much* work to perform the way you expect, you simply can’t add more objects and shading complexity to a hl2 style engine and see linear performance increases.

“More complex = worse” is one of the defining traits of software engineering. It’s like playing Jenga with ten times as many blocks.

 

[techuse]

Sure if you scale things down enough then it becomes far easier to ship a title with less issues. The only other company on the planet that ships a AAA title at anything remotely close to the scale of a typical Bethesda title is RockStar. Everyone else ships far smaller games with far smaller scope and orders of magnitude less interactivity. And I'm talking about the scale of everything both visible (graphics and presentation) and not visible (data management, gameplay systems, NPC AI and dialog, etc.). NMS is a large game with a large world, but they aren't attempting to do most of the things that Bethesda are doing (for example, NMS is almost devoid of any NPCs that have daily routines that they run). Of course, Bethesda are also not doing some of the things that NMS is doing (like planet to space transitions which is computationally far less intensive than having all those NPC AIs running even when the NPC isn't visible).

Now if that's not your thing then Bethesda games aren't for you and that's fine. But it has nothing to do with how capable the developers themselves are. They are top tier in the AAA gaming world, but it's not used just for graphics like almost all other AAA developers.

Regards,
SB

My posts aren't referring to Starfield. Further down in the post you quoted I point out how I don't find Starfield particularly noteworthy for being a bad performer..

 

[BitByte]

OR, their priorities just mean implementing complex game systems in some way is preferable to not having them at all, even if they're not all designed in the most performant way possible. Game development is always something of a race against time, and simply 'getting things done' is often more important than 'implementing something as optimally as possible'.

You mean the exact same systems that were working in Skyrim ps360 and in fallout on the ps4/xb1? Their game systems aren’t complex, they’re as shallow as a puddle. I played starfield.

I dont think anybody would argue Bethesda are technical gods, but they ARE also doing things, as a whole package, that hardly anybody else is doing. And thus it's very hard to say, "They're just not good at what they do", when even other highly accomplished programmers or designers or whatever might well end up having to make similar compromises when put in the same situation. Suggesting they are just straight up 'incompetent' is exactly the kind of crap rhetoric that gamers need to stop with.

I guess we can agree to disagree and that’s fine. Saying they’re doing things others are doing is not an excuse for a lack of technical competence. No new gen AAA games are using as many loading screens as starfield so that’s a feather in Bethesda’s cap. Very few new gen AAA games have facial animations as bad as Bethesda so that’s another feather in their cap. Very few new gen games have combat ai as bad as Bethesda…. No one else is wasting time with Bethesda levels of object permanence because it adds nothing to the gameplay and it’s a giant waste of computational resources. Congratulations to Bethesda I guess.

 

[Seanspeed]

You mean the exact same systems that were working in Skyrim ps360 and in fallout on the ps4/xb1? Their game systems aren’t complex, they’re as shallow as a puddle. I played starfield.

I guess we can agree to disagree and that’s fine. Saying they’re doing things others are doing is not an excuse for a lack of technical competence. No new gen AAA games are using as many loading screens as starfield so that’s a feather in Bethesda’s cap. Very few new gen AAA games have facial animations as bad as Bethesda so that’s another feather in their cap. Very few new gen games have combat ai as bad as Bethesda…. No one else is wasting time with Bethesda levels of object permanence because it adds nothing to the gameplay and it’s a giant waste of computational resources. Congratulations to Bethesda I guess.

It honestly just sounds like you dont like the games and therefore are unable to give them any credit at all for what they're doing.

 

[see colon]

No one else is wasting time with Bethesda levels of object permanence because it adds nothing to the gameplay and it’s a giant waste of computational resources. Congratulations to Bethesda I guess.

It adds something to me. Perhaps it's that immersion that youtubers and redditers are constantly bantering about being broken. Putting down my potato in a spot and forgetting where I put it is just like real life.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Bethesda's object tracking really shouldn't cost anything directly in terms of performance, just memory. In each world segment they should just have entities in memory with a type and a position (and probably some other stuff), and that should only really get updated if a player interacts with them by picking them up or moving them. Unless you put things on the floor and npcs are walking into them, they're really not doing anything that would require physics simulation, or any kind of processing.

This is where I get a bit lost on what people are talking about when they bring up the world "simulation" in starfield. The NPCs don't seem to have really complex behaviour (just dialog trees) other than when they enter combat. It doesn't have weather sim, or wildlife/ecosystem type stuff that I've seen. Considering the world is segmented, it looks much smaller than other open world games. You're never in a seamless area that's as big as an assassin's creed game, or red dead or something. I'm just not picking up on what the game should actually be doing at all times, that would be heavy on the cpu compared to any other game that has city areas with npcs walking around.

There is some really impressive physical scale to buildings. The interior areas can look really nice, but I think the most impressive thing is some of the huge space hangers/factory type buildings and stuff like that. If I were to guess what's hitting the cpu it would be cpu-side work for rendering. Seems like draw distance is quite far.

 

[DavidGraham]

The main problem with Starfield is that it doesn't look next gen at all. It's biomes are inconsistent. Some of the interiors look indeed next gen, but the rest of the game is average looking. Foliage is average, reflections are mediocre, water simulation is of low quality. Lighting is also not good in the vast majority of outdoor areas. The amount of shadow casting lights is also low. Draw distance is bigger than before but not that far. The game is not even open world like Skyrim and Fallout. It's segmented all the time. Hair rendering and facial animation are last gen.

If we are going to talk about object permenance then it's nothing new, Skyrim and Fallout had them. Starfield doesn't bring anything new in that regard. There is no new phsyics or world simulation to speak of.

 

[Scott_Arm]

The main problem with Starfield is that it doesn't look next gen at all. It's biomes are inconsistent. Some of the interiors look indeed next gen, but the rest of the game is average looking. Foliage is average, reflections are mediocre, water simulation is of low quality. Lighting is also not good in the vast majority of outdoor areas. The amount of shadow casting lights is also low. Draw distance is bigger than before but not that far. The game is not even open world like Skyrim and Fallout. It's segmented all the time. Hair rendering and facial animation are last gen.

If we are going to talk about object permenance then it's nothing new, Skyrim and Fallout had them. Starfield doesn't bring anything new in that regard. There is no new phsyics or world simulation to speak of.

I haven't played it. I've only seen a lot of gameplay. There are some HUGE building that you can walk up to, go inside and explore. They're drawn from far away and get more and more detailed as you get close. I was watching a video of this person playing and there was this massive building with a huge hangar that was well lit inside, and the outdoors were dark. The lighting looked really good. Just the overall scene was very nice. Wish I knew where the vid was so I could screen cap it. The game is definitely next-gen in a lot of ways, it just has shortcomings.

 

[see colon]

The main problem with Starfield is that it doesn't look next gen at all.

Nothing does this generation, if I'm being honest.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Nothing does this generation, if I'm being honest.

I think people generally remember last-gen games looking better than they actually do, and all of the PS5/Series X remasters add to the confusion. Plus there were mid-gen consoles that brought a lot of visual improvement.

In terms of gameplay that's a longer problem. We're stuck in a cycle where we're playing genres that were defined in the PS360 era, with a lot of the games being direct sequels to PS360 franchises.