Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2018]

I assumed those were two completely different code bases, and thus incompatible.

I'm not doubting this claim. I just can't find any examples of anyone doing it. I found a video of someone talking about MCC Halo "system link", but only with other XB1s, and only through XBL (not exactly system link).

Please, someone conclusively prove to me that this works. If so, I need to go get MCC and have some family Halo fun.

 

I think I lost the train of context at some point

OG-X360-XO system link is for BC game (clearly). Halo CE/2 can't be a part of that right now since they're not BC at the moment, you're correct. The linked article doesn't even mention Halo.

Halo 3 is BC on XO, so you can system link 360 & XO. (non-MCC)

MCC is only between XO/XOS/XOX.

 

Digital Foundry writes an article featuring a video about The Witcher 2 and they drool and touch themselves meanwhile.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-how-does-xbox-one-x-witcher-2-compare-to-pc

 

Yeah I must have gotten confused on the original Xbox backward comptibility announcement. Only thing I can find is this, but it doesn't say Halo specifically. If it ever makes it to backward compatibility it should work. It was backward compatible on the 360 at launch & worked fine there.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/e3-2017-xbox-one-and-original-xbox-can-system-link/1100-6450783/

Tommy McClain

 

DF wrote this article on Kingdom Come Deliverance, which is made with CryEngine, one of my favourite game engines ever.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...erance-on-pc-offers-huge-upgrade-over-console

Thing is.., I am learning .NET and yesterday I was at the official .NET site and found that you can write CryEngine games using C# and kinda made my day, because I also have several Unity books, so yeah... That's a game changer for me.

https://www.microsoft.com/net/learn/apps/gaming

CRYENGINE
CRYENGINE's CE# Framework allows you to develop games using .NET and the C# programming language.

Development tools are available for Windows and Linux. Develop games without leaving Visual Studio using the CRYENGINE Extension.

 

Burnout Paradise Remaster goes beyond expectations, with many touches in different areas to help the 4k dream.

 

Gotta disagree with them about the motion blur.
On the PC, it greatly enhances the sense of speed.
Also don't like the increased contrast. And the "Junk Yard" sign is RUINED now .
This game was already BC. Was a remaster really necessary? I suppose for the PS4 family it was.

 

DF Article for Burnout Paradise Remaster: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...radise-remastered-is-more-than-just-a-pc-port

It's presented in pristine, native 4K on Xbox One X, yet despite the vast resolution increase over its debut outing on last-gen consoles, Burnout Paradise looks and plays just as you remember it. In this respect it's a remaster done right. There are enhancements - many of them in fact, as you shall see - but it's all in service of adapting the original experience to sit nicely on a new, higher precision medium. And in a world of freebie X-enhanced 360 titles and the existing PC version available on Origin for just £5, that's a good thing. The key takeaway here is that Burnout Paradise Remastered is more than just a port.

To put that to test, we stacked up the new release against the best available legacy version - Criterion's original PC release. It was always light on system resources back in the day, and that translates well into the current era - Nvidia's bargain basement GTX 1050 can comfortably run this at maxed settings or close to it at 1440p - but it does have some issues. First and foremost amongst them is a broken ambient occlusion implementation that introduces some bad aliasing artefacts, particularly noticeable around powerlines. The remaster not only fixes this but substantially improves the entire SSAO effect.

In fact, image quality is refined accordingly all around - native resolution is confirmed at 3840x2160 on Xbox One X, with a full 1920x1080 on the base Xbox One, and while there isn't blanket coverage, the MSAA of the PC version is swapped out for AMD's hardware-level EQAA, set to 4x. Beyond that, while the geometry of the original game (and seemingly most of its LODs) are a match for the vanilla PC experience at its best, developer Stellar Entertainment has embarked on a range of subtle, but effective upgrades to the original game. Most noticeable is the artwork: core assets are now of a significantly higher resolution, with ground art and building textures the most obvious beneficiaries. A bulk of its art seem to be retouched here, right down to the traffic lights.
...
Where things will get interesting is with the PS4 Pro edition - clearly there's a GPU deficit against Xbox One X, so it'll be fascinating to see what kind of 4K support Stellar Entertainment rolls out for Sony's supercharged console. Curiously, at max settings with 4x MSAA selected, the PC version couldn't sustain 4K60 on a Radeon RX 580 (which must surely be a driver issue) while GTX 1060 got closer with drops only in crashes (and with 8x MSAA to boot). The PC original is clearly scalable up to a point then, which makes the enhanced X version at native 4K quite impressive by comparison and makes us even more curious to see just how well the Pro compares. We'll update you with PlayStation analysis as soon as we can - hopefully before the game's Friday launch.

 

Marseille mCable Gaming Edition review: hardware anti-aliasing from an HDMI cable?
It's pricey, but does it work?

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-marseille-mcable-gaming-edition-review

It sounds almost too good to be true. Marseille's mCable Gaming Edition is an HDMI cable that promises to improve image quality in your games, adding anti-aliasing and enhanced colour detail to anything that's thrown at it - at a price. In a world where you can pick up an HDMI cable from a poundshop, the mCable will set you back between $120 to $150, depending on the length you choose. It's also a North America-only release for now, but Amazon and others can import it for you. Now, we've all seen video cables go for ludicrous prices, claiming to give a better picture than the bargain basement equivalents, but the mCable is different, it does indeed do the job. The question is to what extent it is effective and how well it processes different types of content.

So what makes this product different? It's all down to the ASIC processor at the TV end of the cable. This is an integrated chip dedicated to processing each frame it receives. Edge detection, artifact removal and colour management are some of the main bullet-points on the box, and this requires power, provided via an integrated USB cable. Most modern TVs have a USB slot located within short proximity of the HDMI ports, so this isn't really a problem, but you need to make sure that one is available before you consider buying in.

 

Such technologies could be wondrous in saving performance maybe? I wonder how much would it cost to produce such chips at a mass scale. If it is very cheap, maybe that could be a solution fot ffreeing up valuable GPU resources for other tasks

 

Not suitable for PC use, IMO. Especially as it turns off with output over 1080p.

However, I do agree with them that for console use, you could make a compelling argument for it. Aliasing drives me nuts, and if it can AA a console game that otherwise has little to no AA, that'd be a bonus. Might be really good with quite a few Switch games.

Regards,
SB

 

It's a device which is ten years too late.
It would have been great for the 7th generation. They all had HDMI output and 720p or lower output. Half the games had no AA at all.

In 2012 I had the crazy idea that I could design such a device for the 6th gen and earlier consoles. The algorithm is simple, but it was only 1D. Only worked across scanlines, not vertically. Also, with stronger filtering, HUD elements and text became fuzzy. Of course, the bigger problem was that I had no ability to turn it into hardware. It was a fun exercise, though.

As wonderfully polished as this device is, I just don't see much visual benefit to using it. I could only see improvements in the DF video when they showed closeups of still frames. Not in motion, though.

 

Burnout Paradise is also native 4K on Pro.

https://www.resetera.com/posts/5690106/

Are DF not impressed by the Pro game enough to make an article about it ? Because they were like floored by the native 4K on XBX, as if they couldn't get enough of native 4K on their XBX:

 

If you actually read the article and watched the video you would know they reviewed the game on Microsott platforms, Xbox and PC, because it was available early on 2018-03-14 with the EA Access service. For some unknown reason, Sony still does not allow EA Access service on their platforms. As such, the game wasn't available on Sony hardware until Friday, 2018-03-16.

"At the time of writing, we only have the Xbox release via EA Access, so right now we can only speculate about the PlayStation editions. "

"We'll update you with PlayStation analysis as soon as we can - hopefully before the game's Friday launch."

It seems DF has been busy with other articles and developer interviews in the meantime.

 

coupled with having to study 2 extra platforms, each game is now nearly double the effort without double the number of hits or ad impressions. They're definitely going to have to cut corners somewhere unless you're willing to pay for their patreon

 

I don't know if it's a product suited for the future. The results are comparable to the AA techniques that are some of the lightest on GPU resources, so it's uses are limited to older consoles like 360/PS3 or newer systems like Switch where the output is 1080p or less. I would like to see the results of something like, say, a WiiU running Wii software, Gamecube games via a hacked WiiU or GC HDMI adapter, and maybe some PS2/PS1 games run on a PS3, though. Not sure I would spend north of $100 on an HDMI cable redgardless, but It would be interesting to see if lower than 720p image quality gains or if it would just introduce blur and artifacts making the image look worse.

 

That cable seems like a dead end to me. Temporal upsamling/supersampling/AA are going to be the norm. Dynamic resolution will probably become more common making those temporal solutions a necessity. The cable is not smart enough to contribute significantly.

 

Agreed.
This cable would've been great for the PS360 when people were getting 1080p TVs.

The only current hardware I can think of that could make use of this would be the Switch, but I don't know how many Switch games are getting 1080p output in docked mode.

perf/$$$ to whom? Microsoft/Sony or customers?
The fact that the Pro is selling for almost as much money as the XboneX tells me Sony is probably making quite a bit more money from the Pro than Microsoft is making from the XboneX.

Regardless, I'll tell anyone who only plays multiplatform titles (CoD, FIFA, etc.) that spending ~430€ on a XboneX is better than spending ~380€ on a PS4 Pro, but the exclusives are the reason why Sony hasn't significantly lowered the Pro's initial price from 2016, yet.

As for claiming a console released in November 2017 with a higher BoM being technically better than a console released in November 2016 with a lower BoM... well, color me impressed! /s

And Sony enabled Vega's rapid packed math, plus they introduced their own custom hardware for checkerboard rendering that saves bandwidth at little to no discernible difference on most 4K TVs.
And they did so while releasing a full year before the XBoneX.

Both companies did their own homework. Claiming MS did a huge amount of profiling as a "plus" for its solution seems to imply that Sony didn't do the same, which is honestly a bit naive.

I won't call the X1X "brute force", but the Pro does have a couple of features that are clearly beyond Polaris (as Cerny himself stated), whereas Scorpio seems to be a highly optimized Polaris architecture with electrical optimizations + process maturity that allow significantly higher clocks. This is further proven through the fact that the Neo's CUs are significantly larger than Scorpio's, and the area dedicated to the iGPU is actually very similar between the two SoCs.

Since both consoles clearly have uneven production costs and weren't released at the same time, it's really not possible to claim which one gets the "better overall technical achievement" award.
Unlike what we saw with PS3 vs X360 (X360 was the clear winner) and PS4 vs. Xbone (PS4 was the clear winner).

There's no mixed messaging. The Pro is an enhanced PS4 experience for 4K TV owners, as Sony always stated from the very start.

It's also a much better system for PSVR, though that only applies to the minority who have it (personal advice: do get the Pro if you're planning on playing with PSVR!).
And 1080p TV owners will get downsampling (in the case of Pro-enabled games) or just boosted framerates - because why not.

The Pro and the XboneX are both mid-gen upgrades for the 8th generation of consoles, both targeted towards the surge of 4K TVs.
One appeared later, is more expensive and performs better overall. The other appeared sooner, is less expensive and performs worse overall.
But it makes no sense to claim they're not clear competitors with a very similar value proposition.

And I didn't know the Pro was being criticized heavily.
Who's heavily criticizing the Pro, besides you and 1 or 2 others in an internet forum discussion?

 

According to the same article X1X is not even polaris, but GCN1.1 'Southern Islands' from base ps4 and xbone. It would be interesting to compare CU size to base slim models on 16nm FF.

 

Looks like we got a new benchmark for the PS4 graphics showcase. Love all the techs that went into this especially the abundance of GPU particles, thick volumetric lighting & fog, top notch character models, assets and a 4k Checkerboarding technique sharper than even Horizon's.

And this is only in the beginning hours, I bet those giant bosses are the real tech pushers as always per Gow game.