Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2021]

[Silent_Buddha]

Yeah, but when the game is at 30hz, then both the overall visuals and the animations are well below the limit of human perception of fluid motion. So they both look unnatural. Whereas when a game is running at 60hz with 30hz animations, you end up with a perceptual disconnect. The game world appears fluid with close to real life movement, but the animations stand out more, being still at a choppy 30hz.
That's my speculation, anyway.
Also, I still don't know if those cut-rate animations are locked to framerate on these games (I assume so, but that's why I asked the question in the first place).

It's a continuously sliding spectrum as I, unfortuinately, can't unsee now as 60 FPS has taken on (to an extent) that feeling of watching individual frames stitched together to give the illusion of movement that was greatly apparent at 30 FPS now that I made the mistake of gaming for a bit on a friend's PC that was connected to a 144 Hz monitor. Thankfully, at least it isn't as distracting or bad at 60 FPS as it is at 30 FPS (which now looks even worse than before I'd gamed on a setup that could do 144 Hz).

Basically, within the spectrum, the lower you go the more noticeable and more egregious is the "stop frame" (like Stop Motion for claymation) effect. If you primarily game at X FPS, your brain will compensate to a degree and you'll get used to it and then anything lower will stick out.

So basically, yes, you'll notice the 30 FPS animations with a game running at 60 FPS, but it won't be as bad as 15 FPS in a game running at 30 FPS. If you are perceptive to these things it will definitely be noticeable, however. But that said, some people are either less perceptive to these things and don't notice unless they are pointed our, or they are completely oblivious and won't necessarily see it even after having it pointed out.

That line that demarcates people that can perceive it or not will shift depending on whether it's 15 FPS within a 30 FPS presentation (almost all people) or 30 FPS within a 60 FPS presentation (a lot of people but fewer than the previous example).

Regards,
SB

 

[Phantom88]

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Wow, I'm glad they are covering this. I haven't played the latest release in the series but I did play some of the previous entries in the series. I still remember when they started putting the series up on Steam a few years ago.

Unfortunate, however, that while the RT looks good (one of the better uses of RT in a game, IMO) the performance would be completely unusable for me.

Regards,
SB

 

[iroboto]

The first 2 minutes of this video and I'm thinking to myself, this is wild. Really happy @Dictator covered this one. I had no idea so much spawned from this game let alone existed

 

[davis.anthony]

High end? I wouldn't call that level of geometry any where close to being 'high end'

I don't think I've seen ground that flat since PS360's generation.

 

[Rootax]

Yeah it's looking good but nothing out of the ordinary imo, RT or not... Still, it's cool to talk about this game.

 

[Dictator]

High end? I wouldn't call that level of geometry any where close to being 'high end'

I don't think I've seen ground that flat since PS360's generation.

Most of the ground in the game is done with a geo layer for the stones (all the temples) or POM. This level of exaggeration is frankly, and categorically, wrong:

Spoiler

Just because a video I make does not focus on a certain detail, does not mean it is not there.

 

[Betanumerical]

Most of the ground in the game is done with a geo layer for the stones (all the temples) or POM. This level of exaggeration is frankly, and categorically, wrong:

Just because a video I make does not focus on a certain detail, does not mean it is not there.

Those images images look awesome, but they are gigantic, can you put them in a spoiler tag or something so only people who want to see them have to load ~70MB.

 

[Dictator]

Those images images look awesome, but they are gigantic, can you put them in a spoiler tag or something so only people who want to see them have to load ~70MB.

uups! Sorry

 

[snc]

High end? I wouldn't call that level of geometry any where close to being 'high end'

I don't think I've seen ground that flat since PS360's generation.

I don't think the ground is the problem but game for sure has aa asian game vibe from previous era with added few modern technics

 

[davis.anthony]

Just because a video I make does not focus on a certain detail, does not mean it is not there.

It's not there, I can clearly see with my own eyes it's not there and the ground looks like a PS360 game in many parts of your video.

Your ridiculously large screen shots also show textures that look extremely dated.

It's far from a 'high end' game and even RT can't stop it from looking like a game from a previous generation.

 

[Allandor]

It's not there, I can clearly see with my own eyes it's not there and the ground looks like a PS360 game in many parts of your video.

Your ridiculously large screen shots also show textures that look extremely dated.

It's far from a 'high end' game and even RT can't stop it from looking like a game from a previous generation.

I've not seen the video, yet (it is on my list) but I guess the problem you have with texture etc is the youtube-compression problem. Even at 4k it "removes" small details due to video-compression.
I've seen this problems countless times since the last gen midgen refresh. But even on PS4/xb1 small details are just lost in captures on YouTube.

 

[davis.anthony]

I've not seen the video, yet (it is on my list) but I guess the problem you have with texture etc is the youtube-compression problem. Even at 4k it "removes" small details due to video-compression.
I've seen this problems countless times since the last gen midgen refresh. But even on PS4/xb1 small details are just lost in captures on YouTube.

I think you're getting confused? I can't work out what you're saying and what it relates to in my post?

I like to think I can tell the difference between a flat texture and YouTube compression, and my comment around the texture detail was from seeing Alex's pictures which as pointed out above are of a very high quality and certainly not from YouTube and full of compression artefacts.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This level of exaggeration is frankly, and categorically, wrong:

I can agree with that, but I can't help but feel you started that with calling this a 'High end PC Exclusive' and setting people up to expect bleeding edge visuals, a game doing for PC what something like HZD did for PS4. I accept exaggerated titles are par-for-the-course for YouTube, heck, social media and the Internet in general, but here it does the game a disservice - it's a competent third-person action game with some high-end features rather than a high-end PC exclusive.

 

[davis.anthony]

I can agree with that, but I can't help but feel you started that with calling this a 'High end PC Exclusive' and setting people up to expect bleeding edge visuals, a game doing for PC what something like HZD did for PS4. I accept exaggerated titles are par-for-the-course for YouTube, heck, social media and the Internet in general, but here it does the game a disservice - it's a competent third-person action game with some high-end features rather than a high-end PC exclusive.

Naming the video: Sword and Fairy 7 Tech Review: A PC Exclusive With Ray Tracing That Nobody's Talking About

That would have been much better title because lets face it, the game isn't 'high end' and having RT is the only reason DF made a video about it.

 

[techuse]

To be fair the video name says “high end PC title”. That could easily mean its steep performance requirements due to a few high end features rather than the visuals being bleeding edge.

 

[davis.anthony]

To be fair the video name says “high end PC title”. That could easily mean its steep performance requirements due to a few high end features rather than the visuals being bleeding edge.

The video name says : "High End PC Exclusive"

 

[see colon]

To be fair the video name says “high end PC title”. That could easily mean its steep performance requirements due to a few high end features rather than the visuals being bleeding edge.

Given the performance with RT on, this would be true. Hell, RT in general is a high end feature. I know more than a few people who have RTX GPUs and never turn on RT because they want framerate over image quality. Thinking about it, I have some friends with 2060's and 2060 Supers and they use RT, but it's my 2080/S friends who are the ones that think RT is too taxing. That's actually backwards from the way I would have guessed things would pan out.

 

[techuse]

The video name says : "High End PC Exclusive"

That is correct, but my point remains. Actually I expect there are various readers here who would consider the visuals to be high end due to multiple RT effects being present. Such a negative reaction over the video title feels unwarranted to me.

Given the performance with RT on, this would be true. Hell, RT in general is a high end feature. I know more than a few people who have RTX GPUs and never turn on RT because they want framerate over image quality. Thinking about it, I have some friends with 2060's and 2060 Supers and they use RT, but it's my 2080/S friends who are the ones that think RT is too taxing. That's actually backwards from the way I would have guessed things would pan out.

People who buy higher tier GPUs usually have higher performance requirements. Lower tier GPU owners have accepted lower framerates as par for the course.

 

[Seanspeed]

When they say 'high end PC exclusive', they are not saying 'high end PC', they are saying 'high end game on PC'. Basically, it's a game with AAA level visuals with some cutting edge features that's exclusive to PC(something we dont see much of anymore at all, much less from an Asian studio...). Nowhere was it suggesting this was the new Crysis and would blow away everything else.

The game obviously has its weak points visually(as most games do), but it's otherwise quite amazing looking. Not everything can have a $100,000,000 development budget and all, ya know? I feel saying this game doesn't actually look that great is coming from either having a poor eye for this stuff or is just being cynical/contrarian for the sake of it.