Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2020]

afaik, got uses the horizon zero dawn style approach: dynamic time of day with a real dynamic light for the sun, but interpolating between several "sweet spot" times of day where the lighting looks best (and where they can tweak post processing, effects settings, etc, to be seen in a flattering light) rather than letting it inch across the sky at a fixed speed.

This has a lot of benefits for artists, since everything can be tweaked and polished to look awesome -- but it still has some (most likely all or most) of the cost of a dynamic time of day. Maybe some info like cubemaps are pre-baked for each set tod, but it's probably not got full on baked lighting for each time period.

(vs spiderman, which iirc has no changes in tod without reloading the environment, and uses fixed/baked light for each version of the city.)

 

AC Valhalla is the same. When you are outside of missions, dynamic ToD happens as you would expect but a whole bunch of missions advance ToD (and weather) to a specific point, then freeze it there for the duration of the mission.

 

The Dynamic TOD is a nice feature to personalize everyone's experience so it isn't the same exactly. Which I guess in my mind subtly is a nice feature to have. No playthrough is ever the same because night time tactics and day time tactics differ etc. So i guess the outlook there is sort of like Diablo, with its procedurally generated dungeons, you'd get very tired if its teh same dungeon/map/environment. The TOD variation may lift some mental exhaustion of repetition from the game if the intention is to play it for 200hrs or so of content that ubisoft made, or the MP of Ghosts of Tsuyshima which I read great things about.

 

Not when compared to the PC version of WDL. Quite the opposite when talking the RT implementation, DF even noted that.

 

*yawn* I was talking about the RT implementation between both games strictly within the console space.

As an FYI, I've already made my opinions quite clear on the RT implementations comparisons between WDL and SM:MM on console and PC... but good try on your part though.

 

Judging by how poor the RT performance is on rdna2 and these consoles get a weaker version of that already, RT will be a checkbox until mid gen refresh at best but really likely need to wait for next gen for it to match current gen Ampere capabilities.

hopefully DF do it right and start using a calibrated OLED as the source with a hdmi 2.1 chain for testing consoles and PC going forward, if they don’t already.

 

So we'll just ignore Spider-Man Miles Morales then? And what we've seen or Ratchet & Clank? And Watch Dogs Legion?

 

he justs means RT will be far from Ampere performance on these consoles, which is true, and obvious, even if it looks great already.
But for now RT is applied only on higher res last gen games. When real next gen graphics come, there may be not enough room to add proper RT as seen in MM for reflections, or even Cod for shadows. We'll see.

 

I think the big worry is that games that are available on PC and console have the console releases running lower settings for RT. Sometimes lower than the lowest PC settings. That doesn't install a lot of faith for the future. The console exclusive games have decent RT implementations, but there are clear compromises already.

 

Who is worried by this and isn't this to be expected? Just over a year ago nobody was expecting consoles to support any level of RT and yet we're seeing results like Miles Morales and Watch Dogs Legion.

Why is console RT somehow irrelevant and unimpressive because PC graphics cards are doing better?

 

When you read some devs, DXR on pc is meh because they can't optimise like they want.

Maybe that's where consoles can gain some perfs back vs PC. Anyway, for 399-499 machines, I'm impressed they even got RT. Now it will be time to utilize it smartly. Not just for show. It will take time.

 

Exactly, devlopers will do wonders with RT on consoles even if it's much weaker

 

I never understand comments like this. PC has always outperform consoles. That's what happens when you have yearly hardware updates and a price point where the GPU alone can cost several 100 dollars more than a whole console.

I'm sure that when the true next gen games start appearing we'll see the consoles make nice use of RT. Sure, PC will so better but that is a bit of a moot point.

 

Not to mention at times downright insane power budgets.

 

When peoole say RT are you lot just talking reflections, as RT can be used for many things like shadows.
Having RT hardware is easily going to be a net positive, I would say it's already proving to be and that on launch titles.

 

Honestly we've seen tech demos when T&L was "new" with very good looking lighting/shadows : o

 

Atleast its there, just like 8k is on them. We can always hope future RT implementations, games build around the hardware from the ground up, that it wont be like in spiderman atleast.

 

I see what you did there! No mention of the XBSS.

Anyway! My new PC cost me $2242 and it still doesn't do RT because I will have my 1080Ti in it. That's really sad!

A new Palit 3070 OC on BF special will cost me $852. I am still deciding whether I should buy one.

 

WDL has RT on XSS (even if it's kinda crappy looking).