Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2021]

I'm doubtful iphone 13's could match PS4 settings simply because of a lack of RAM, but I have no doubt that they could do a better job than Switch.

don't know how it directly compares to the Steam Deck (it isn't even out so who really knows) but the M14 was faster than the TegraX1 that was clocked higher in Shield tablets by a significant margin. The M15 found in this year's iphone is supposed to be 50% faster (I think that what Apple claims). It would walk all over Switch's low clocked Tegra for sure.

People comparing Steam Deck to Xbox One are mostly doing it based on the TF and the 800p screen (thus it's target resolution). Based on those numbers it's closer to XBO than PS4 for sure, but the CPU is probably going to outperform them unless the power constraints hold it back too far.

 

I doubt that. The 13 Pro Max cant even maintain a steady 60fps in genshin impact, and that game's lower quality on IOS vs the consoles/pc. When it starts trotthling its barely 40fps avg it can maintain.

In geekbench scores yes. In practice im not all that impressed as opposed to even PS4/OneS consoles but ok. For a mobile chip it is mighty impressive though.

See above, i dont think so either, and not just because of ram probably. Remember that those consoles are 8 years old by now, and they werent even high end at the time.
Apple has alot to do if they want to power the next playstation.

50% faster than 'the competition' was the official statement. In practice it was marginally faster over the A14 in geekbench and real world tests. Its slightly faster, but also consuming slightly more power.

 

Hard to say we need some benchmarks
I had a quick search

iphone 13 pro seems to run 60fps(theres also 120fps mode)
ps4 and ps4 pro manage 30fps
ipad pro M1 60 fps

what is needed are at what settings? i.e. res/texture quality etc

on the iphone 13 pro its using ~5watts i.e 1/3 of the switches power running faster and with better settings, is it a miracle or just 4 years later hardware? (though TBH the recent apple chips is a bit of a paradign shift)

Sorry all the IOS videos are taken off the screen, we need direct feed videos to really see

 

And here the A14 is performing worse than the android devices except the samsung



Same reviewer covering the 120hz on the new iphones

 

crazy, didn't even know you could play Genshin Impact on mobile. lol

 

Not a fan of mobile gaming either, its just too limited on performance, controls and in special screen size. Think streaming's the better alternative on phones but ok.

 

Thanks DF for all the work y'all do

 

I don't know who wrote this, but the Steam Deck is most probably a whole lot faster than a PS4 at 1280*800p, let alone a XBOne.

RDNA's IPC is around 40% faster than GCN2, so a 1.6 TFLOPs RDNA2 should have around the same performance as a ~2.2 TFLOPs GCN2. That's >20% faster than a PS4 and ~70% faster than a XBOne.
The only "win" for the PS4 would be raw bandwidth and pixel fillrate, but the Steam Deck's GPU probably nullifies that advantage with a larger L2 cache that works at a much higher clock, delta color compression and the fact that the target resolution is already pretty low at 1280*800.

Not to mention the significantly faster CPU and twice the RAM.

 

Don't quote me on this please, but I believe it was Richard Leadbetter on a DF Direct.

 

I wonder what those save stutters could be about on ps consoles, hopefully they can fix that. John and Richard made it seem it wasn't actually related to streaming of assets

 

If RDNA2 GPUs' declared boost clocks are anything to go by, the 1.6GHz can be pretty conservative, and the lower 1GHz threshold is reserved for power viruses like furmark.

 

I've played trough Crysis 2 and Crytek thanked the DF members by mentioning their names at the beginnen of the end credits. At first I thought I knew these names from somewhere and it took me two seconds to make the connection.

I am glad that DF could help to improve these games.

 

What's more advanced technically, killzone shadow fall or crysis 3?

 

Technically probably Crysis 3, art-wise it might be SF though.

 

It's hard to compare as KZ is limited by the PS4, so 'technically' is difficult as that speaks to what the engine is capable of rather than the hardware. Playing KZ recently on my PS5 though, there any many elements which are pretty rough - shadows can be atrocious. Crysis 3, even limited to the same res, is far more visually impressive imo.

 

I would say KZSF has incredible art and does atmospheric rendering very well - it used a lot of ray marched volumetrics there on a per light basis (low res of course), where as Crysis 3 just has a global fog one from the sun usually that was stupidly high res for the time. And even though it is not physically correct, KZSF did have area lights for arbitrary shapes of lights kinda. Crysis 3 only had area lights for strips/rectangular lights. But it suffers under stuff like @Flappy Pannus mentions - compromises to keep it running on a limited system. C3 on the other hand has surprisingly pristine shadows at its highest settings even for 2013... with PCSS even.... Crysis 3 has some neat stuff like silhouette POM, extensive usage of tessellation, the water rendering... IDK

If KZSF had a PC port, we would maybe have a better understanding to compare against.

 

Who can forget the tessellated frog

 

We never saw the patented tessellated toad tech again :/

Man the nostalgia of hype for "next gen graphics" back on those days was unreal