Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2021]

[Dampf]

Failing to see why Dying Light is such a 'miracle' port and I feel that John needs to tone the Nintendo fanboy down.

Switch may have less power then Xbox One and base PS4 but it's GPU hardware has the exact same features as GCN which makes porting much simpler as they won't have to remove rendering features or come up with clever solutions to emulate one.

Granted the developers should get some praise for making the right cuts in the right areas and preserving the games 'look' but in no way is this a 'miracle' port like John makes it out to be, simply turn 'X' settings down until the game runs at an acceptable quality.

Whaaat? It absolutely is a miracle port. The PS4 is a 150 watt console, Switch is a 15 watt handheld. The difference in visual quality is so small when considering how much more powerful the PS4 really is. The port looks great and Switch comes much closer to the consoles than usual.

 

[davis.anthony]

Whaaat? It absolutely is a miracle port. The PS4 is a 150 watt console, Switch is a 15 watt handheld. The difference in visual quality is so small when considering how much more powerful the PS4 really is. The port looks great and Switch comes much closer to the consoles than usual.

View attachment 5914

Go and actually play the game before coming out with such nonsense.

The difference, especially on a TV is monstrous where it looks like it's running on a 15w console.

 

[Inuhanyou]

Consoles are back compat, next gen consoles running between medium and high with no RT, planar reflectionsn etc. There. It is not the interesting story here at all.

I guess so. Not intending to put you folks on the spot or anything. I just like when you go into equivalent settings and such like that in your videos. No disrespect intended

 

[Karamazov]

though it's not like the ps4 version is the pinacle of last gen graphics wise.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Somewhat disappointed with this analysis...would have loved to see direct comparison between PC and console remastered. What settings are console using compared to what settings on PC, what PC hardware is performing equivalent to the consoles ect. They did a console video but it was largely confined to the fps being good and res being "over 1440p for enhanced consoles and pc" with no real details on each platform. Also no details on crysis 3 for consoles or how switch performs.

I think the DF crew can get a little tired with platform comparisons at times, they prefer to focus on the underlying tech and they had some involvement with Crytek on this so it's understandable Alex would want to focus on all the engine changes. I do agree though that a cursory quick comparison would have been appreciated though, multi-platform owners aren't rare these days (especially with the price of GPU's) and I'd like to have some direction on that front as to which version is doing what.

Also what are the differences in the graphics settings? Why is "Very High" now recommended, what do you lose in say, medium vs. the original Crysis 2? There seemed to be no breakdown on exactly what they do. If you turn off planar reflections do you get cubemaps? I've seen reports of the very high texture setting causing stuttering on 8GB 2070's as well, how much vram does this game need?

Edit: Well Epic just dumped a $14 CAD coupon in my lap so guess I'll see for myself considering Crysis 2 RM will cost me $10.

 

[DavidGraham]

Switch may have less power then Xbox One and base PS4 but it's GPU hardware has the exact same features as GCN

Switch is using low level NVAPI and runs Maxwell, not GCN.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Failing to see why Dying Light is such a 'miracle' port and I feel that John needs to tone the Nintendo fanboy down.

Switch may have less power then Xbox One and base PS4 but it's GPU hardware has the exact same features as GCN which makes porting much simpler as they won't have to remove rendering features or come up with clever solutions to emulate one.

Granted the developers should get some praise for making the right cuts in the right areas and preserving the games 'look' but in no way is this a 'miracle' port like John makes it out to be, simply turn 'X' settings down until the game runs at an acceptable quality.

The PS4/XBO GPUs (AMD) are far more similar in features to the PS5/XBS GPUs (AMD) than they are to the NSW GPU (NV).

Porting a title to the NSW from PS4/XBO is much harder (like a LOT harder) than porting a title to PS4/XBO from PS5/XBS.

Man, it's too bad the graphics on PS4/XBO for Dying Light was held back by the NSW. (Poking fun at all the "eeeuuwww, it's a cross gen title people" )

Regards,
SB

 

[Flappy Pannus]

simply turn 'X' settings down until the game runs at an acceptable quality.

Damn I should be a developer, sounds easy as fuck

 

[Globalisateur]

Whaaat? It absolutely is a miracle port. The PS4 is a 150 watt console, Switch is a 15 watt handheld. The difference in visual quality is so small when considering how much more powerful the PS4 really is. The port looks great and Switch comes much closer to the consoles than usual.

View attachment 5914

When you take into account all compromises and downgrades, well it just runs like it should run on Switch IMO.

- Often native <720p resolution docked (PS4 renders >2.25x more stuff). In portable mode they don't even state the actual native resolution, probably something like <540p like the others "miracle" Switch games (PS4 renders >4x more stuff). And we don't know how lower it can get on Switch.
- Framerate ~25-35fps (PS4 is capped so who knows how high the average is, but it rarely drops under 30fps and actually sometimes runs at 60fps when indoors).
- Game is likely further optimized on Switch (and uses a more modern APU).

By the way I doubt this game pushes the launch PS4 enough to consume 150W which is the maximum seen in the most demanding games like Infamous Second Son. A demanding game like BF4 consumes max 140W and many non-demanding multiplat games consume maximum about 110W.

But if we use the newer PS4 1200 models (that use the same node for the APU with less GDDR5 chips) which consumes even less (max is 122W instead of 150W). Then many games are now consuming only about 100W or lower on PS4, for instance MGS5 (a very demanding game, one of the most technically impressive PS4 multiplat game) consumes 106W in the first level.

Yep, Dying light runs like a Tegra X1 should run the game compared to PS4, like all the others Switch miracle ports.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Consoles are using the high res texture pack, while PC needs 12 GB VRAM atleast, as recommended by Ubisoft.

That is VERY interesting.

PC's only need that much RAM to run the high res texture pack if the game is running at 4K/Ultra with RT. At console settings the VRAM requirements would be lower. There also appear to be memory management issues on PC - at least with Nvidia GPU's which is seemingly inflating the memory requirements artificially.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Hmm, so far may disagree with Alex on this only being worth it if you can run on high/very high. Granted it only cost me $10, but playing at 1440p on Medium preset on my 1660 and maintaining 60fps most of the time, a few drops near smoke but otherwise pretty consistent, we'll see how it holds up.

The thing is though even on medium there are aspects which are vastly improved over the original on Ultra, the textures are massively higher res (some exceptions, but even more than the Maldo mod with the RM running with medium textures), and perhaps most noticeably the pop-in is severely reduced. Even on Ultra with the original you would see trees change geometry 10ft in front of you, this does not happen even with objects on medium.

 

[davis.anthony]

Yep, Dying light runs like a Tegra X1 should run the game compared to PS4, like all the others Switch miracle ports.

Not to mention the pop-in that rivals GTA:SA running on PS2.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Hmm, so far may disagree with Alex on this only being worth it if you can run on high/very high. Granted it only cost me $10, but playing at 1440p on Medium preset on my 1660 and maintaining 60fps most of the time, a few drops near smoke but otherwise pretty consistent, we'll see how it holds up.

The thing is though even on medium there are aspects which are vastly improved over the original on Ultra, the textures are massively higher res (some exceptions, but even more than the Maldo mod with the RM running with medium textures), and perhaps most noticeably the pop-in is severely reduced. Even on Ultra with the original you would see trees change geometry 10ft in front of you, this does not happen even with objects on medium.

Hmm, maybe check that. Bouncing back and forth between this and MaldoHD, the remaster can be quite inconsistent at times. There can be amazing detail on a wall texture, but billboards and rocks have barely changed (if at all) from the original, and there can be some streaming issues when they're incredibly low res at a distance - I find MaldoHD is actually more consistent, even though its wall/floor textures may not be as high. There also appears to be less tessellation/parallax in some scenes.

 

[see colon]

Go and actually play the game before coming out with such nonsense.

The difference, especially on a TV is monstrous where it looks like it's running on a 15w console.

DF is more about celebrating the good ports than it is about tearing down the bad ones. I'm not sure I would personally have gone as far as saying this is a miracle port, but it is fairly impressive. Better than I would have expected it to be. People always point to games like Doom as being miracle ports and that's impressive also, but Doom was a 1080p 60fps game that had it's framerate halved and it's resolution quartered. That's what, 12.5% as many pixels per second? Dying light was a 30fps game to start and that framerate is largely maintained along with it's visual identity. That's pretty impressive.

 

[milk]

@Dictator, if I could give a suggestion, I'd tell you guys to try to move the camera position slowly in some of the shots you demonstrate RT reflections, as the proper parallax vs a static cubemap shows off the difference much more clearly.

It would also be a good idea to rotate the camera when demonstrating the better shandows on the player gun too.

 

[zed]

DF is more about celebrating the good ports than it is about tearing down the bad ones. I'm not sure I would personally have gone as far as saying this is a miracle port, but it is fairly impressive. Better than I would have expected it to be. People always point to games like Doom as being miracle ports and that's impressive also, but Doom was a 1080p 60fps game that had it's framerate halved and it's resolution quartered. That's what, 12.5% as many pixels per second? Dying light was a 30fps game to start and that framerate is largely maintained along with it's visual identity. That's pretty impressive.

fair enuf and its good they are positive.
Yet you have to remember switch came out 3.5 years after ps4/xbox 1 yet its running the game at lesser settings.
Im guessing the iphones from today could run the game at ps4 settings whilst consuming less power than the switch. As I've said before, tech advances each year

 

[davis.anthony]

DF is more about celebrating the good ports than it is about tearing down the bad ones. I'm not sure I would personally have gone as far as saying this is a miracle port, but it is fairly impressive. Better than I would have expected it to be. People always point to games like Doom as being miracle ports and that's impressive also, but Doom was a 1080p 60fps game that had it's framerate halved and it's resolution quartered. That's what, 12.5% as many pixels per second? Dying light was a 30fps game to start and that framerate is largely maintained along with it's visual identity. That's pretty impressive.

I have no issues with the video's, it's with John labelling nearly every high profile PS4/Xbox One S game port to Switch as a 'miracle' or 'impossible port' when they're not.

They often look dreadful, blurry and down right messy on a TV screen (And TW3 even looks a blurry mess in handheld mode) so how are they miracle ports?

If Insomniac ported Rift Apart to PS4 with loads of cut backs would that be a 'miracle' port?

And I've previously stated, the Dying Light port does need praise for maintaining the look of the game.

 

[orangpelupa]

i genuinely think the titles of DF stuff are highly editorialized for maximum impact / clicks. while the articles / videos / photos itself still provides enough info to reach a good conclusion.

 

[Sigfried1977]

fair enuf and its good they are positive.
Yet you have to remember switch came out 3.5 years after ps4/xbox 1 yet its running the game at lesser settings.
Im guessing the iphones from today could run the game at ps4 settings whilst consuming less power than the switch. As I've said before, tech advances each year

Could they really? I've read that even the Steam Deck is more akin to an Xbox One rather than a PS4 in terms of performance. Is that Apple M1 chip that powerful? Genuine question, btw. I literally have no idea.

Either way, excited to replay one of my favorite games from last gen in bed.

Bought both Crysis 2 and 3 remasters for the Switch thanks to the DF videos, btw. Now those games do look damn fine and run really well on the little device. Especially 3. Not a huge fan of C2's art direction, though. Despite all the color grading changes, SVOGI and whatnot it still has that typical mid-PS3 generation look where every bloody texture was authored to be as contrasty as possible. Makes for a really busy and somewhat noisy presentation. Also makes for visuals that are kinda hard to read, especially on the small screen.
No idea whether either game should be classified as a miracle port, but for what it's worth, Crysis 3 is probably the best looking game on the system so far. That and Alien Isolation.

 

[Karamazov]

even if it's heavily downgraded, it's always a nice feeling to have a full blown home console game running on a portable device, just like when i first played uncharted golden abyss on PSVITA, or ridge racer on the PSP.