Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2020]

what a change, I remember you was almost angry on me when I said wait for gameplays on your horizon analysis in resetera ;d

 

After I have no doubt it will be as good. I have much more confident to have gameplay looking as good as this coming from Guerrilla games. Since Killzone 2 controversy, they are traumatized and don't want to heard about any downgrade discussion. If it was a Naughty Dog game maybe a downgrade is a possibility.

Guerrilla Games have all my confidence and there is some compromise into the trailer, vegetation assets in the snow for example are directly PS4 assets coming from HZD.

But I prefer gameplay and the little teaser for God of War out of the date was even worse like Metroid Prime 4. God of War, KZ Shadow Fall or Horizon Zero Dawn presentation were perfect gameplay first.

 

Mmm...I disagree a bit with that. If it didn't hit the initial trailer's level 100%, they were very close to it IMO, particularly when running the game on PS4 Pro. UC4 is a bit of an odd case though because there could've been some reasons outside of technical limitations why it would've hit where it did (the story rewrite, primarily).

TLOU2, in any case, there's a much closer 1:1 between its unveil trailer and the final game than not. On that note there's a few areas where you can directly compare the two and the release version actually pulls ahead somewhat.

Apologies; didn't see this before posting the reply. I'll stay on-topic hereon.

 

They only confirmed that 'UE' (their engine) is able to run those characters real-time. That's all. It's marketing PR from EPIC. Don't you think the actual devs would have made an official statement? like: "Our demo was running real-time. " Or even better, a deceitful statement:

"It was running real-time, on Xbox Series X, the game will look amazing".

But whatever. It wasn't running real-time on XSX.

 

Given the timing of when that demo was released and the knowledge of subsequent devkit releases. And the state of WIP titles like Halo. I think it leans heavily that the HB2 demo was done on PC, with almost great certainty.

 

Yup, I mentioned that.

 

Interesting stuff.* Both CoD:MW (2019) and Hellblade show the same 60fps but way better clarity than X1X thanks to presumably maxing out their dynamic res. Assetto Corsa Competizione goes from ~33fps on X1X to only ~50fps. Bizarre.*

* Richard bingo.

 

I took away something totally different than you.
I thought he found it interesting because he thought they was both the same resolutions.
XSX rendering at max resolution of DR compared to 1X isn't surprising.

 

It's possible that the XSX version is using a higher resolution for the individual textures, but both are rendering at the same final resolution for the output frameBuffer.
A While back there was a good talk online form the MS back-compat team, outlining how they use some tricks to force the game engine to always use the best possible version of a texture, when previously it might have used a smaller mipmap.

It could also be the improved SSD allows for loading of higher quality assets faster, so the X1X version takes a few frames to get the best quality texture map, but the XSX gets it in the first frame?
(ie. gpu only has low quality assets loaded at all times?)

I'm just guessing, but that would explain improved image quality, even when the final framebuffer is the same resolution.

 

I think the high quality mips thing was only for 360 games running on One (and presumably Series as well). And that's an easy thing to turn on across nearly every title when you are moving from 512MB of RAM to 8GB or more.

 

AF is apparently also added for BC titles.

 

Hellblade is a native X1X game. I thought it would already be AF A F, but apparently DF tested it in performance mode for that sweet 60fps action.

 

This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but honestly in a lot of the shots I've seen so far of RT reflections it's the RT that is the least natural looking part of the image in terms of the overall lighting of the scene. The reflections may be geometrically correct, but they often look garish and uncanny. I suspect part of this comes from the same shortcomings you see in a lot of 90s CG and more primitive Whitted RT where the scene has tons of perfectly specular surfaces, but the ambient lighting of the neighboring environment is unaffected by caustics or scattering from those surfaces. It's kind of the inverse equivalent of a scene lacking baked radiosity or SSAO resulting in objects not feeling rooted in their environment.

The nice thing about SSR and cube map probes is that their lack of accuracy encourages developers to hide them by adding surface noise in geometry normals and materials as much as possible, with the side benefit of that diffusion of light probably being far closer to whatever the ground-truth ought to be. Trying to use them both simultaneously becomes a problem because you end up with cases of marble floors producing perfectly flat specular RT reflections, while the cube mapped imposter light reflections are more diffuse, and the remainder of the environment is lit with baked heavily scattered ambient light. Given how significant the cost of RTRT is, I worry developers are going to feel obligated to insert scenes and sequences that exist for no other reason to elbow you in the ribs and point at it, much like we saw with Matrox's EMBM or the earliest DX8 games.

 

Eh, I kinda agree but the techniques used so far are all in their respected infancy. There simply isn't enough cheap compute to throw at the problem but as devs become more familiar with the tech I think it will look better and more natural once all those nasty edge cases are tackled. I think reflections in the near future are going to be solved edge case only, especially since 4-8k fixed pixel displays have dominated marketing.

 

Totally agree mate, I just had a look around the house
the only things that have reflections (aside mirrors) was the TV, even the shiny pots (which had reflections) you could not see what was reflected in them, I could not see myself, huh was I a vampire, it was only by sticking my hand within 20 cm of the pot could I see my hands reflection.
My plea with developers stop using RT for reflections (unless the game takes place in mirror world)
Use RT for more accurate lighting. blah blah Hammer nails

 

I guess it really does depend on the game. Ultimately, to make a game look 'more CGI', the lighting itself needs to be better, and perfect reflections can help but won't save a game such as Watchdogs with its mostly flat lighting.

For example, a game with very, very good baked lighting such as TLOU2 would probably benefit more from RT reflections than Watchdogs. At the same time, making TLOU2 look as good as it does but with an RT GI implementation - instead of baked - may be outside of the performance targets we will get this generation. We'll have to see!

Watchdogs just looks flat, regardless of the reflections!