Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2021]

texturing and LOD, draw distance were all terrible in initial reveal. Outside of tightening up rendering issues, there were no real improvements. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a large improvement over what was shown.

 

Nope

 

lol, you're seriously watching this on a 4K screen with HDR and thinking this looks like a 360 title?

I think it's fair to say visual design is dated, since everything looks err, geometrically and impossibly clean, and more of a match for the visual design of the 360 era. But outside of that design aspect, I see no relation to 360 era level of graphics.

 

I played most of the master collection on PC recently and I agree, the overall look of Halo is a little spartan (aha!) compared to modern titles. Mostly due to limited texture and geometry detail. Infinite seems to have improved particle effects, geometry detail and resolution but the overall look hasn't changed much from the early titles in the series especially in outdoor combat scenes.

 

Yea, I know what you mean. The look and feel is definitely fairly old school Halo. But the renderer is leveraging fairly modern techniques. Unfortunately I don't think they went far enough in some areas (in particular realtime GI, lighting still does not look unified), lack of movement in vegetation, just a general lack of vegetation density, but in others they oddly have some improvements , like cloud shadows.

 

Yes with Ratchet it was a pretty cool innovation that the RT used a form of DLSS like up scaling to reach higher resolutions than would otherwise be expected from RT on console hardware.

 

And it was nice to already see improvements in RT reflections from Miles Morales to R&C.

 

CB rendering is nothing like DLSS other than they both try to resolve a higher resolution from a lower one. The implementation and technique are very different.

As for Halo, I will hold my judgment until I play the game, but from a technical angle, it is a really disappointing game. Especially compared to the Slipspace engine demo of 2018; The lighting has been massively downgraded, the environmental variety is pretty much nonexistent, the vegetation is so lifeless, explosions cast no dynamic lights at all... it's just an effect that doesn't affect its environment in terms of lighting, there is still pop in if you look closely, the part where it shows MC jumping down and transitioning from cutscene to ingame while facing the ground, the motion blur is frankly embarrassing. So I agree with @Dictator here. It's an extremely disappointing game from a technical perspective. Even the "stage/level design seems lacking". The part where the Chief was to destroy the Banished salvage operation just looked like something created in Forge. Also, they seemed to have ramped up the contrast to try and bring out more detail without actually adding more detail.

I will reserve my judgment on the minute of the game but what I have seen so far doesn't inspire confidence. With all that said, I hope the story, gameplay, and world/level design are very good and better than what they have shown so far.

 

About Halo what Alex stated is what he should have boldly stated last time without spending his whole analysis at praying for some upcoming lighting miracles. I have about the same opinion about the MP game. Technically the game has simply too much problems in almost all areas (not only lighting). And whatever all the fancy techs and resolutions they use, it looks mediocre and very unappealing notably compared to how incredible the first Halo looked on original Xbox. Now that was a true console seller (and I did buy the console for that game).

I think the fact that Infinite started as a XB1 game could be one of the reason of how it looks now notably with the low resolution textures and low level of geometry.

They don't use CB in any Insomniac game. It's some custom temporal injection tech.

https://blog.playstation.com/2018/09/06/insomniac-interview-the-tech-behind-marvels-spider-man/

 

Where are you seeing low resolution textures?

 

Yeah, but it's definitely not DLSS either, and if people are going to categorise the reconstruction technique used, CB is a better approximation than DLSS. It should really just be referred to as a reconstruction technique, not CB nor DLSS.

 

The textures are high res I think, I wouldnt complain about those at all, yes the geometry is extremely low (i.e. even low for an xbox one game) which makes me think they were gonna do RT or something, that and the world is dead and empty, the obviously have tried to keep things as simple as possible, it must be for a reason. Whilst gameplay may be great, visually it still looks below average but I do see praise for its visuals the last couple of months! Which is a bit inexplicable, my only explanation is due to the 2020 showing backlash and the low bar that got set anything now looks brilliant in comparison.

 

The visual upgrades are rather clearly visible in comparison to previous demo. Unfortunately most of the visual upgrades seems to be more artistic than technical, mostly better texturing, every surface has a lot more details, scratches etc ( i dont know what @Globalisateur is smoking but it has te be some heavy stuff, or as always he is trying to spark unnecessary trolling)
https://preview.redd.it/b8ux1lfet2q...bp&s=8f8c54240ba92381d4535558384ae70d71d61731

When it comes to tech there is some small upgrades to better geometry handling, with higher draw distances and less poping but sadly nothing amazing, just small tweaks. Most (all?) models seems to be exactly the same. Driving scene comparison between 2020 demo and newest one at 1:30 seems to be almost identical. While the game looks solid in current state, one may wonder why the flagship studio for microsoft is unable to deliver visually stunning game since the last halo they released (5) was like 2015!? WTF

 

Most of the changes are purely artistic (new texture grit, increased contrast) - and my main complain (how lighting is handled) is VERY similar. Just look at how the character models glow in shadow - any of the brutes.

The cutscenes are also running not at 60 fps in the trailer (poorly) and are missing shadow casting on some lights that were shadow casting before and a lot of the depth of field is gone. That looks worse to me, generally.

 

Sure by looking closely you can find some textures details but overall most assets look soft, too soft compared to the quite high official rendering resolution. Even using this cherry picked picture the big texture detail on the right looks fine but what about most of the left side with some parts (even exposed to the light) totally lacking details?

I think the softness is caused by VRS and how everything looks like some specific vaseline filter has being applied unevenly. Sure it's hard to see what I am talking about when we can't compare it without what I think is VRS (and we know from previous analysis that they do, well did, use VRS in Halo Infinite).

But we can see it in for instance in Outriders as the game is identical in both PS5 and XSX except with VRS only on Xbox. When most people won't see a sharpness difference (and DF didn't even talk about that difference in their article, like if there wasn't any difference at all) for me the difference of sharpness is very starking. Way more noticeable than something like a 30% resolution gap and the cost (loss of perceptible resolution) is certainly higher than the feeble framerate gains. When I see Halo Infinite I can't help but see that uneven vaseline filter applied to the assets:

Outriders left PS5, right XSX with VRS



It's not like that complaint about how it looks too soft is something targeted to that new Xbox Halo game as I have being obsessing with that particular subject since the beginning here. Back then I was complaining about notably the first and awful FXAA implementations. And how things have improved with better anti-aliasing methods, notably morphological, temporal based etc. I mostly don't have to complain about AA solutions anymore. But this VRS implementation I see in those games forces me to talk about it again. Devs either need to improve it, or not use it at all like all developers eventually stop used quincunx on PS3 because the gain wasn't worth the immense image quality cost.

 

Its not dlss, nor a 'form' of it. Higher then expectations? I think what rift apart RT does is within what a PS5, and hopefully more.

 

Some lights also don’t cast on characters either. I’ll try to gif a scene, but they had the strobing red light that went around the environment but it didn’t light the characters (but does so only when hit directly). That was extremely noticeable.

 

Fairly certain all technical review sites chalked that one up to being lower AF levels and not VRS. Only a handful of games use VRS that we know of.

 

DF speculates that they do for reflections in Rift Apart