Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2020]

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Right. I’m not too up on current CPUs. I know Intel bumped the i5-8xxx to six cores, so I thought a) they also bumped i3s to four, b) it happened with the 7xxx series, and c) those system requirements were proof. Occam’s razor is that the min system requirements are factually incorrect* (like ”Remaster“ ;)).

* “4 logical CPUs” would be still wrong, but better.
 
I am flipping out with the HDR implementation of Ori and the Will of Wisps. (PC) It is unmatched compared to everything I've seen so far, and I've played very good HDR games, like Forza Horizon 4 and many others.

It pushes my monitor to the limit in terms of HDR quality, just with the default setting! So gorgeous.:oops::oops:

I captured a couple of screengrabs in another thread, photos don't do justice to the brightness and contrast you see with your own eyes. The powerful light bother your eyes, and the dark areas looks great. I am enjoying it like a bitch.

 
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Just an erratum in Digitalfoundry video, vegetation react to Jin and horse

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they did not do their homework well, you can litterally see the character and horse pushing the foliage as they walk through during the whole video, and yet they say they did not see it...
 
Nice timing for me ... :) I plugged in a 1,5TB external usb I still had (but now replaced with a tiny faster 500GB SSD) and downloaded all the big games I had to delete on my Pro due to lack of space (Uncharted 4 and lost legacy, HZD, God of War, RDR2 ...). I replayed The Lost Legacy chapter 7, was wonderful. Now I think Horizon: Zero Dawn should be next!
 
There is a particular lighting condition in ghosts of Tsushima that I really do not like. It’s overcast with the sun shining through the clouds, I imagine after rain. There are just way too many bright highlights. All of the dirt paths glow white, each blade of grass has a white highlight on one side. There’s so much white clipping. It’s an intentional stylized look but I think it’s really unpleasant. The rest of the game looks great, especially in sunny conditions with colourful trees.
 
There is a particular lighting condition in ghosts of Tsushima that I really do not like. It’s overcast with the sun shining through the clouds, I imagine after rain. There are just way too many bright highlights. All of the dirt paths glow white, each blade of grass has a white highlight on one side. There’s so much white clipping. It’s an intentional stylized look but I think it’s really unpleasant. The rest of the game looks great, especially in sunny conditions with colourful trees.
Easily fixed when playing the game in HDR on a high peak brightness set. SDR just doesn't cut it any more.
 
Easily fixed when playing the game in HDR on a high peak brightness set. SDR just doesn't cut it any more.

I don't know. High peak brightness is not really what I want in a scene composed like this. It honestly just looks awful. The ground is glowing. Maybe their SDR tonemapping is totally broken, but I think it's just an intentional art design. Most people are going to play on SDR displays or poor HDR displays.

upload_2020-5-18_0-58-20.png
 
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It's likely an art direction thing. Consider the inherent stylisation in the cell shaded series, Sly Raccoon, and the stylised art direction of all of the Infamous games, in spite of its more realistic focus.

Personally, I hadn't even noticed it, but we've all got different, little things that bug us with graphics and art direction. Going by the screenshot you posted above, it reminds me a little of MGSV. @Scott_Arm How did the highlights sit with you there?
 
It's likely an art direction thing. Consider the inherent stylisation in the cell shaded series, Sly Raccoon, and the stylised art direction of all of the Infamous games, in spite of its more realistic focus.

Personally, I hadn't even noticed it, but we've all got different, little things that bug us with graphics and art direction. Going by the screenshot you posted above, it reminds me a little of MGSV. @Scott_Arm How did the highlights sit with you there?

Never played MGSV, so not sure. I think Ghosts of Tsushima is a really nice looking game, especially especially in the scenes with colourful trees or the fields of white flowers. It's just this one particular lighting condition that I just think looks really ugly.
 
Never played MGSV, so not sure. I think Ghosts of Tsushima is a really nice looking game, especially especially in the scenes with colourful trees or the fields of white flowers. It's just this one particular lighting condition that I just think looks really ugly.

It's a shame when an aspect of graphics or art direction sticks out like a sore thumb. It can really end up detracting from the experience.

Personally, when I was playing through Uncharted 4, the entire time I kept being bothered by how muted the palette was compared to the previous 3 games. It's still quite colourful, but the first 3 felt more lively and vibrant.

It didn't completely spoil the game for me, but I kept thinking "this would look even prettier if they'd saturate the colours like the PS3 games." And I knew that to be true because it was an option in the bloody photo mode.
 
new DF video. So glad that John has left Retardera. He is such a brilliant guy and his work is excellence so he can be calm about it.

 
Pretty interesting tech discussion there.

Shame about the controversy involving the devs. If folks want to talk about it, keep it to RSPC.
 
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Some context to the game, that was just released on current-gen consoles last week on 2020-05-14:

Ion Fury is a cyberpunk first-person shooter video game and the prequel to the top-down action game Bombshell launched in 2016. Ion Fury was first released for PC last year and this year for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.​

Some context to that video from their YouTube Blurb...

Ion Fury pushes the ancient Build engine - powering classics like Duke Nukem 3D - to its very limits, but fundamentally, how difficult can a port to current-gen consoles be? The answer turns out to be more complex than you might think. John Linnemans checks out the PS4, Xbox One and Switch
Obligatory reference to the game's controversy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Fury#Controversy
 
I don't like the way grass is rendered in this game : it looks too polygonal...

Yeah, they went with a very technically impressive solution that unfortunately has arguably worse looking end result than other games with cassical solutions.

While most games use larger alpha-tested cards with a cut-out texture of multiple weed leaves on it, GoT seems to have modeled each and every idividual leaf as its own model.

The pro of that aproach is the grass feels much more volumetric and 3-Dimentional. Also, if they are actually deforming them individually as well, this ends up looking much more lively as well.

The con of that aproach is that their fully poligonal grass blades are not high-poly enough to have smooth silhouettes, so up-close each individual blade looks way more pointy and gamey than the classical textured card aproach.

It looks high-tech but artificial, something I noted to be a constant in the art/tech direction of this game in more aspects than only this one.

My techie side can't help but marvel that an open world game is managing that level of foliage density with fully modeled curving blades at all. I feel the same way about the abundance of swaying cloth and the density of their meshes, but them too also have a bit of a "simulationish" look to them.

When it comes to performance, I still wonder how the full modeled vegetation aproach compares to the cards one. For what they spend on extra geometry, they save on fill-rate killing alpha testing and overdraw. Yet also, for what they save on that and texture bandwith, they must loose a bit on worse raster pixel-quad performance (tiny polys are not your GPU's friends).

While impressive, it does not come without precedent, as Zelda BoTW on the WiiU of all places did manage it. The main difference is on zelda those blades were single polys sticking up. Saving on triangles but limiting the look of their grass to a very slecific type. Tsushima is like a spiritual successor to the aproach, taking the next logical step: add more geo, and bend those fuckers.

The thing is one might argue that by Zelda not trying to reproduced curved shapes, it saved itself from the embaracement of when your poly budget fails to give you enough tris for it to look round enough. Tsushima just took that blemish on the chin with a "this is as good as it gets on a ps4" the same way Zelda did with their completely rigid weeds.
 
Halo 2 is available on PC now. Is it frame capped?

Seems it's not quite the case. :p 120fps doesn't seem to apply on view weapon and certain other elements, but is otherwise full 120fps?

:oops:

Enhanced setting seems to not be worth using at the moment.
Co-op suffers from hitching.
 
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