Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2020]

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Well, it's a team of people at DF, right? So, it might be that the person testing doesn't have that TV at their house. Hopefully we'll get some clarification.

What I was hoping to see in one of the tests is MS's claims that a some titles with locked 30 Hz or 60 Hz rendering would be able to be played at 60 Hz and 120 Hz respectively in BC mode, however I didn't see that mentioned in any of the titles that DF tested.

I wonder if that is something that is still in testing or DF just happened to test titles where that mode wasn't supported?

Regards,
SB
I think so far they've only shown raw backwards compatibility, not sure if there is enhanced backwards compatibility coming.
 
lol did they really promise 120Hz on BC? I don't recall that, but I may not have been paying attention.

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/05/28/xbox-series-x-next-generation-backward-compatibility/

We are also creating whole new classes of innovations including the ability to double the frame rate of a select set of titles from 30 fps to 60 fps or 60 fps to 120 fps.

There you go. :) I'm interested to see how they pull this off.

If they can do that, it should go without saying that games with unlocked framerates should be able to go to 120 Hz as well, although it's possible that is locked for now.

Regards,
SB
 
I do wonder what display they are using to test on. It may be that their display lacks support for refresh rates higher than 60 Hz and lacks VRR.

Considering the games that have unlocked framerate modes are hitting the 60 Hz cap, it leads me to believe they are testing on a TV or monitor without a 120 Hz mode...or the mode isn't enabled...or there's a bug with the XBSX display out.

[edit] Also, if it's always locked to 60 Hz for unlocked games when DF tested...erm, how are we to know whether VRR is enabled or not? :) The only way to tell would be screen tearing when framerates drop (no V-sync). Or alternatively if V-sync is enabled and only double buffered (do these exist on console) rather than triple buffered and you have discrete framerate "steps".[/edit]

Regards,
SB

I believe they showed their setup, this is fed into a hardware recording device and the split,.the frame rate logged for the graph. Not sure this can log VRR or record VRR as this needs to be negotiated between the console and TV.

120fps is possibly output but the games hard cap to 60. The Xbox One X and S have 120fps modes for video out but only one game goes over 60 from a quick Google.
 
Did i miss hear, i swear he said that he looks forward to testing on a vrr display as the one he was using wasn't vrr capable.
From my perspective of doing PC coverage I am not sure exactly how we will be doing VRR coverage in the future as VRR Videos do not exist. VRR recording... Does not exist tmk? I think the vid feed would be forced and judder Bad.
Filmimg the Set and talking about it works, but there is not a great way to record and present VRR tmk ATM. I want to have it on the channel as trying to generated optimised settings for 60 Hz locks is becoming antiquated - an artefact of Vsync displays. It also makes our criticism of games that drop down to 5 fps or so less than 60 occasionally rather unimportant.

It also means I need New Equipment and capture cards!
 
From my perspective of doing PC coverage I am not sure exactly how we will be doing VRR coverage in the future as VRR Videos do not exist. VRR recording... Does not exist tmk? I think the vid feed would be forced and judder Bad.
Filmimg the Set and talking about it works, but there is not a great way to record and present VRR tmk ATM. I want to have it on the channel as trying to generated optimised settings for 60 Hz locks is becoming antiquated - an artefact of Vsync displays. It also makes our criticism of games that drop down to 5 fps or so less than 60 occasionally rather unimportant.

It also means I need New Equipment and capture cards!

I think it's good enough to just mention it or talk about it. I don't think it's something that can really be captured. You'd have to do a VRR -> video render conversion (24, 30, 60, whatever FPS) which I don't imagine to be fun and would likely miss the point of VRR anyway.

The other thing that can't be conveyed is how it feels to each individual person. If I watch someone playing with VRR, it's fine. If I attempt to play a game with VRR and framerate varies more than 1-2 FPS, it ends up being a rather bad experience for me. OTOH - I have friends which don't notice the variability in control<->feedback loop and they just like the smooth presentation.

Regards,
SB
 
From my perspective of doing PC coverage I am not sure exactly how we will be doing VRR coverage in the future as VRR Videos do not exist. VRR recording... Does not exist tmk? I think the vid feed would be forced and judder Bad.
Filmimg the Set and talking about it works, but there is not a great way to record and present VRR tmk ATM. I want to have it on the channel as trying to generated optimised settings for 60 Hz locks is becoming antiquated - an artefact of Vsync displays. It also makes our criticism of games that drop down to 5 fps or so less than 60 occasionally rather unimportant.

It also means I need New Equipment and capture cards!

It looks there are some variable rate video recording options

https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/latest/technical/frame-rates.html

http://avisynth.nl/index.php/VFR

However I wonder if something like a hdmi fury product can somehow log the vrr data to then graph some way over the top of the footage. It would not be DF without a cool graph or two :D
 
I am not sure exactly how we will be doing VRR coverage in the future as VRR Videos do not exist. VRR recording...
I was confused due to few posts over last couple pages regarding VRR not being shown in BC titles and he must be using VRR display (paraphrasing)

Thanks for your post, it does highlight the issues involved with doing VRR related content fully and properly.
Although I'm just expecting it to be done in a similar manner that it was covered before.
Mainly in the first round just saying handled same as 1X or better etc.
 
I expect some of the slight performance dips might get smoothed out in time. Remember, they constantly update the emulator performance in general and on a title by title basis. Halo Reach was terrible when it was enabled but it has been fixed. XSX is a new albeit similar/familiar architecture so I expect the performance to improve even more as time goes by and the BC team work more on the system.
 
I see Richard commented the fast resume was slightly slower than when he saw it at Microsoft.

Random musings:

I would ask were the games at Microsoft the X versions of games as these will use more memory which it has to write out. Was this apples to apples.

If testing this I would reboot between tests to clear running game or close the game. Then resume so it's only reading, do this a few times to get an average.
Then load another game of interest and quick resume into the original game. This new load time minus the first is the write time saving this out

I think some testing could be done to get a feel for write perf Vs read.

If we compare X to non X patched games knowing the total memory allocation of each might help to estimate read and write speed.

I would think you would need to play the games a bit to give a better chance of full
Memory allocation when setting this up. That would allow a better comparisons although this will only ever be a rough guess
 
I see Auto-HDR is the trash fire I was expecting, tone-mapping is garbage AI enhanced or no, leave the damn image alone! This is like that relative who insists on using "Vivid" mode on their TV
it can be disabled for people that don't want it.
 
DLSS creates detail when upscaling, I am not sure why this should not eventually do better at adjusting the colour space. It probably needs some more time in the oven.
Really these are radically different issues, the fundamental issue is that unlike a simple colourspace translation such as say NTSC (TV colourspace) to Rec. 701 (aka Blue Ray) HDr includes a luminance channel. There is no information in colour to derive luminance, the 255R 0G 0B red dot in the centre of a brake light is the same as that of the red paint on the car itself which is why it was so unimpressive and inconsistent on racing titles.

There is no way to do this "right", to get a game to display in HDR correctly means either redoing every asset and making the renderer export luminance info (aka remaking the game as HDR native) or you randomly assign luminance values with a smattering of ML on top. It's why I have to spend so long reading about 4K BD releases of movies to discover whether it was actually rescanned from source in HDR or was it simply run through an algorithm

it can be disabled for people that don't want it.

Cuts to me in relatives homes disabling Smooth Motion Plus Plus Sigma Gamma Zeta WTF mode so everything doesn't look like a Telenovela
 
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Really these are radically different issues, the fundamental issue is that unlike a simple colourspace translation such as say NTSC (TV colourspace) to Rec. 701 (aka Blue Ray) HDr includes a luminance channel. There is no information in colour to derive luminance, the 255R 0G 0B red dot in the centre of a brake light is the same as that of the red paint on the car itself which is why it was so unimpressive and inconsistent on racing titles.

There is no way to do this "right", to get a game to display in HDR correctly means either redoing every asset and making the renderer export luminance info (aka remaking the game as HDR native) or you randomly assign luminance values with a smattering of ML on top. It's why I have to spend so long reading about 4K BD releases of movies to discover whether it was actually rescanned from source in HDR or was it simply run through an algorithm

Agreed but by your own words if it's good enough for Hollywood releases then by extension it should be good enough here with a little bit of tuning from the BC team? I obviously mean for the average person.

Nothing is correct as it was not there to start but that's not to say a pleasing result cannot be achieved.
 
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