Current Generation Games Analysis Technical Discussion [2024] [XBSX|S, PS5, PC]

[Dampf]

They probably want to address as large a market as possible. Are there any better solutions that would work on GPUS that don't support mesh shaders?

Stop this. It stifles game development and innovation.

There's no need to account for GPUs released in 2016 and earlier anymore. The install base of mesh shader capable GPUs is huge.

 

[see colon]

The install base of mesh shader capable GPUs is huge.

The install base of GPUs not capable of mesh shading is huger.

 

[trinibwoy]

The install base of GPUs not capable of mesh shading is huger.

And this is why I’m baffled by people who want to delay adding new hardware features. It takes forever for things gain sufficient market penetration to be widely adopted. So the sooner they get added the better even if version 1.0 is t perfect because it never will be.

 

[techuse]

Stop this. It stifles game development and innovation.

There's no need to account for GPUs released in 2016 and earlier anymore. The install base of mesh shader capable GPUs is huge.

I may be wrong, but I doubt my attempt to learn in a theoretical discussion about an already released game is going to affect any developer decisions about how they write their code.

 

[iroboto]

Well technically speaking, both GTA 3 and GTA Vice City were released on PS2 alone first, then got ported to PC to almost a year later, then later to Xbox. Devil May Cry games (like Devil May Cry 3) did the same. In fact, I think many games did that, I just can't remember them all.

I think there was also titles like Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls, Metal Gear Solid 3, Metal Gear Solid 2, Journey and others.

Yea not quite an extensive list here. Most of these come across as complete code re-writes in my mind, especially the PS3 ones.
The typical porting process begins by adding in files one at a time trying to get the darn thing to compile. Eventually, should you manage to actually get something to compile, then you can actually see if the game runs without bugs and you go from there.

But going from 1 massive platform to another, re-writing the whole game from scratch is the only solution is often especially back in the day. I largely suspect most of the PS3 games were either coded in PC first, which there was enough code base there to port. Or they were entirely re-written.

Porting is a pretty intense process of trying to get a game to work on another platform with as little investment into the title as possible. If you're re-writing the whole game from scratch, that's a very expensive thing to do and will likely not behave the same, nor have the same bugs.

 

[Below2D]

I can't wait for Alex's analysis because this game is insanely heavy on PC. A 1060 at medium settings/1080p gets around 30-40fps. That's a GPU that's over twice the performance of the original PS4 and according to DF, the improvements made to the graphics in the PS5 version are minimal. I had to laugh at the requirements for 4K max settings which are the same as Rift Apart with ray tracing, albeit, Rift Apart with ultra ray tracing runs significantly slower.

 

[Seanspeed]

I can't wait for Alex's analysis because this game is insanely heavy on PC. A 1060 at medium settings/1080p gets around 30-40fps. That's a GPU that's over twice the performance of the original PS4 and according to DF, the improvements made to the graphics in the PS5 version are minimal. I had to laugh at the requirements for 4K max settings which are the same as Rift Apart with ray tracing, albeit, Rift Apart with ultra ray tracing runs significantly slower.

A 1060 playing a 2024 next gen title at 1080p/Medium/30-40fps really isn't bad. Means a 1070 like mine could get somewhere nearer 60fps, which I very much cant do in plenty of modern titles.

And I dont know what quote you've seen from DF, but I've seen John and Rich praising the visuals pretty highly, and any suggestion that visual improvements from the original are only 'minimal' seems pretty silly to me.

The game is super heavy at top settings though, yea. It's UE5.

 

[Below2D]

A 1060 playing a 2024 next gen title at 1080p/Medium/30-40fps really isn't bad. Means a 1070 like mine could get somewhere nearer 60fps, which I very much cant do in plenty of modern titles.

And I dont know what quote you've seen from DF, but I've seen John and Rich praising the visuals pretty highly, and any suggestion that visual improvements from the original are only 'minimal' seems pretty silly to me.

The game is super heavy at top settings though, yea. It's UE5.

I'm talking about Ghost of Tsushima, not Hellblade. I don't think the 1060 gets anywhere near that in Hellblade II.

 

[Seanspeed]

I'm talking about Ghost of Tsushima, not Hellblade. I don't think the 1060 gets anywhere near that in Hellblade II.

Ah my bad. lol Yea, that sounds about right.

 

[Dictator]

The game - GoT - is scaling a good deal higher in a number of areas than PS5. Nixxes did at least allow things to be pushed a good deal further in some areas, with all areas being at least somewhat better on the Very High setting.

 

[trinibwoy]

The game - GoT - is scaling a good deal higher in a number of areas than PS5. Nixxes did at least allow things to be pushed a good deal further in some areas, with all areas being at least somewhat better on the Very High setting.

Is the DF video coming soon? Heard you were on vacation

 

[Dictator]

Is the DF video coming soon? Heard you were on vacation

I only really started in earnest on Tuesday, but Mohammed has helped me out with this one big time. He got PS5 settings and optimised settings for me already over the weekend while I was away. So I am mainly scripting and getting additional footage + checking out the game for sundry issues (I am the nixxes issues one is starting to expect from them at launch).

 

[Below2D]

Is the DF video coming soon? Heard you were on vacation

Vacation? Alex isn't lazy like you youngsters. He comes from my generation where we worked 30 hours a day and 200 hours a week with no paid overtime.

 

[DavidGraham]

checking out the game for sundry issues (I am the nixxes issues one is starting to expect from them at launch).

I am hearing that (just like Spider-Man) SSAO offers better visuals than either HBAO+ and XeGTAO.

 

[raytracingfan]

Stop this. It stifles game development and innovation.

There's no need to account for GPUs released in 2016 and earlier anymore. The install base of mesh shader capable GPUs is huge.

You mean 2019 and earlier? RDNA 1 doesn't support mesh shaders, and this a port of a PS4 game anyways. Spending the resources to rewrite the engine and dropping support for Maxwell, Pascal and RDNA1 in the process (or spending even more resources to maintain two paths) doesn't make any business sense.

 

[troyan]

I have a feeling that you might not know what the term "GPU driven" truly entails. It has nothing to do with tessellation or geometry. It's a very abstract concept about the "absence of a CPU-GPU feedback system" in rendering. With indirect rendering APIs, we evolved from elementary indirect APIs like draw/dispatch indirect (GPU generated commands for shader dispatches) to ExecuteIndirect (GPU generated commands to change shader input bindings) and finally Work Graphs (nested parallelism/forward progress w/ persistent threads) especially w/ the mesh nodes extension (GPU generated commands for PSO swapping)!

it's specifically about having NO CPU intervention for generating rendering command ...

What you describe is just meaningless when the result is something like Ghost of Tsushima. What matters is only efficiency. Here is a scene from GoT:

And this is an example from A Plague Tale: Requiem which i currently play with a 4090:

The difference is three years. And yet A Plague Tale: Requiem looks like it has been released a decade later. GoT is the low point of Sony's effort to port their games. And while the delay is not a problem releasing unoptimized software and looking like a last decade game should not be applauded.

 

[Charlietus]

What you describe is just meaningless when the result is something like Ghost of Tsushima. What matters is only efficiency. Here is a scene from GoT:

And this is an example from A Plague Tale: Requiem which i currently play with a 4090:

The difference is three years. And yet A Plague Tale: Requiem looks like it has been released a decade later. GoT is the low point of Sony's effort to port their games. And while the delay is not a problem releasing unoptimized software and looking like a last decade game should not be applauded.

Are we going to ignore that ghost is a huge open world while plague tale is a very linear game? When it released next gen consoles weren't even out. And even then, ghost still looks good compared to other open worlds released today, with the technical highlight of the foliage system that's still top tier.

 

[Seanspeed]

Are we going to ignore that ghost is a huge open world while plague tale is a very linear game? When it released next gen consoles weren't even out. And even then, ghost still looks good compared to other open worlds released today, with the technical highlight of the foliage system that's still top tier.

I do think GoT is overall noticeably last gen, but it's definitely still a nice looking game with some standout visual elements.

The difference is three years. And yet A Plague Tale: Requiem looks like it has been released a decade later. GoT is the low point of Sony's effort to port their games. And while the delay is not a problem releasing unoptimized software and looking like a last decade game should not be applauded.

Is this your first time experiencing a new generation of consoles? Visual leaps happen very fast.

Look at games released in 2013 before XB1/PS4 released compared to what games looked like in 2015. Huge difference overall. Doesn't mean those 2013 games looked a 'decade' older, it's just what happens when developers target a much higher tier of hardware.

 

[troyan]

Are we going to ignore that ghost is a huge open world while plague tale is a very linear game? When it released next gen consoles weren't even out. And even then, ghost still looks good compared to other open worlds released today, with the technical highlight of the foliage system that's still top tier.

Final Fantasy 15 was released four years earlier and looks at least as good. On the PC it runs better with DX11 and the full options enabled:


Tessellation was always the best way to render geometry.

 

[OlegSH]

Final Fantasy 15 was released four years earlier and looks at least as good. On the PC it runs better with DX11 and the full options enabled:

Maybe that's because the issue with ExecuteIndirect and such APIs is that they are not making the GPU's life easier, quite the contrary. You're supposed to use them when performance is limited by either the CPU or backreads from it (so that it's beneficial to do the job on the GPU for overall performance rather than wait for the CPU). As there is a Cortex-A15 class CPU (performance-wise) on the PS4, I can easily see why they tried to offload the weak CPU there by abusing indirect commands, but for a game of such complexity on PC, porting over such a design seems to be a bad choice.