Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2021]

[BRiT]

Article to go along with the Weekly DF Talks @ https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...gta-definitive-patches-and-ces-hardware-leaks

DF Direct Weekly talks GTA Definitive patches and CES hardware leaks
Plus: the mystery of the RTX 2060 12GB stealth launch.

In the face of a content pile-up next week, DF Direct Weekly goes public a day early - with myself and Alex Battaglia joined by none other than hardware and deals guy Will Judd to discuss the latest gaming and tech news. And that starts with our thoughts and plans for upcoming coverage of Halo Infinite. A game that started development before Xbox One X and launches a year after the arrival of Xbox Series X is an important topic and in our show this week, we discuss how we're going to break this one down, with various content including a full tech review, a deep dive into the PC focus and of course, console cross-platform comparisons. Going into this one, the fascination has always been about how a game designed to showcase Xbox Series hardware will look on Xbox One and whether the ambitious open world is even possible. Can 343 match the scalability shown in Forza Horizon 5? We look forward to sharing our results.

It was also great to get DF's fifth Beatle - Will Judd - onto the show this week! November represents the height of the holiday season buying frenzy and our philosophy hasn't just been to whack up any and every deal that emerges, but rather to curate the best of the best, the stuff that we'd consider buying ourselves. Will fills us in on this gigantic endeavour and the team share their BF purchases, which basically amounts to nothing from Alex, colossal hard drives for data archival for me and a high-end coffee machine for Will!

...

 

[Karamazov]

 

[DavidGraham]

So in the end Halo Infinite has been heavily downgraded, first time from the engine demonstration in 2018, and second time from the E3 2019 showcase. The game looks incredibly flat and uninteresting in the open world sections.

 

[davis.anthony]

It could be that having the game running on Xbox One has required more cut backs then they were expecting so it's affected the game on the Series consoles.

 

[Globalisateur]

The effectiveness of the VRS implementation varies based on a number of factors and in the case of Halo, it exhibits noticeable artefacts, especially when combined with temporal anti-aliasing. As a result, it can look a little fuzzy in motion.

What was the point of a slighty higher resolution if the game looks like it's running at a lower resolution (than without it)? It's not worth it as in my experience it's the resolution of textures / effects, and not geometry resolution, that mostly defines the final perceptible resolution, how "sharp" the game is.

 

[eastmen]

It could be that having the game running on Xbox One has required more cut backs then they were expecting so it's affected the game on the Series consoles.

I believe there is still ray tracing patch for next gen coming in 2022

Halo Infinite Will Add Ray Tracing After Launch - GameSpot

 

[Karamazov]

developpement troubles + going "open world" + XB1 compatibility may have hurted more than initially thought.
120fps mode also to an extent.

What baffles me is no coop mode at launch, i mean how much harder is it to put another "random" player in the campaign, just like in old halo games, where that other player would not appear in cutscenes etc...just during gameplay. They already have an online mode.

 

[snc]

developpement troubles + going "open world" + XB1 compatibility may have hurted more than initially thought.

but they target 30fps on xone and common resolution is 972p, shouldn't be that problematic with this targets

 

[Shifty Geezer]

What was the point of a slighty higher resolution if the game looks like it's running at a lower resolution (than without it)? It's not worth it as in my experience it's the resolution of textures / effects, and not geometry resolution, that mostly defines the final perceptible resolution, how "sharp" the game is.

Depends on the game. For competitive shooters, pixel count and framerate are more important than texture detail and particle effects as you need to be able to see targets at range. Modern AA techniques do a good job of hiding jaggies which are the hallmark of lower rendering resolutions, but higher true res also offsets low res reconstruction artefacts.

 

[iroboto]

What was the point of a slighty higher resolution if the game looks like it's running at a lower resolution (than without it)? It's not worth it as in my experience it's the resolution of textures / effects, and not geometry resolution, that mostly defines the final perceptible resolution, how "sharp" the game is.

Answer from ID software Billy Khan.
tldr; it's just another dial they are able to manipulate to fine tune rendering load to available resources. As per the interview, you get the average higher image quality over time, and you're looking at likely a much more stable frame rate as well as a result.

imo, Not all settings are equally affected by reductions in rendering resolution, so being able to fine tune aspects of what you want to apply VRS to could have a more precise impact over resolution reduction

 

[iroboto]

I believe there is still ray tracing patch for next gen coming in 2022

Halo Infinite Will Add Ray Tracing After Launch - GameSpot

according to the vide, seems like RT shadows would be a big win for them if they can't get around to RT GI.

 

[cheapchips]

So in the end Halo Infinite has been heavily downgraded, first time from the engine demonstration in 2018, and second time from the E3 2019 showcase. The game looks incredibly flat and uninteresting in the open world sections.

To be fair, a visual downgrade by the time the game arrives seems entirely in keeping with Bungie's 2&3 reveal trailers.

 

[BRiT]

DF Article @ https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2021-halo-infinite-tech-review

Halo Infinite campaign: the Digital Foundry analysis
Tech issues aside, this is a simply brilliant game.

Halo Infinite is a brilliant game. Honestly, against the odds, I feel that 343 has delivered one of the best first-person shooters of the last decade. It's a release that far exceeds the studio's previous work on Halo 4 and 5 in terms of design and in nailing the 'combat sandbox' experience. Worries I had about the transition to an open world have been assuaged and despite the seemingly difficult development period, I simply love the game. Is it perfect? Certainly not. There are numerous tech issues to address and fundamentally, I'm not sure this is the game that was originally envisaged based on reviewing early marketing assets. Regardless though, you've got to play it.

...

 

[iroboto]

oof, the 5 second random freezing needs addressing.

 

[Globalisateur]

Depends on the game. For competitive shooters, pixel count and framerate are more important than texture detail and particle effects as you need to be able to see targets at range. Modern AA techniques do a good job of hiding jaggies which are the hallmark of lower rendering resolutions, but higher true res also offsets low res reconstruction artefacts.

But we are talking about a single player game.

Answer from ID software Billy Khan.
tldr; it's just another dial they are able to manipulate to fine tune rendering load to available resources. As per the interview, you get the average higher image quality over time, and you're looking at likely a much more stable frame rate as well as a result.

imo, Not all settings are equally affected by reductions in rendering resolution, so being able to fine tune aspects of what you want to apply VRS to could have a more precise impact over resolution reduction

Whatever what they say about "it's worth it" "higher average image quality" for me VRS (software or hardware) brings too many downsides. Besides from the PC benchmarks I have seen the gains are very minors (<10%) except if you use performance mode but then the quality is horrendous, PS1 type textures.

But anyways even using a quality mode I can see the difference, easily. It's lacking details, it's blocky. It's very noticeable, much more than a 5-10% lower resolution (which is not noticeable notably with TAA + DRS). Now playing with Metro Exodus and seeing the compressed textures due to VRS (software but similar thing), I remember why I didn't like the textures on their PS4 games. I didn't know the reason but now I understand. Those games (at least the last) were already using software VRS and something was troubling me back then, resolutions were lacking details and the game didn't look to run at native resolution compared to most others games.

Now the lighting is really nice in Exodus, but the blocky / low frequency aspect of the textures is very noticeable. I would have prefered a slight resolution loss (unoticeable with DRS/TAA) but using much higher resolution textures (1.5x, 2x higher resolution or more? that would have being so much better).

 

[Silent_Buddha]

But we are talking about a single player game.

Just because it's a single player game doesn't mean you need to have crap FPS gameplay. The gameplay and thus rendering engine are centered around fluid and responsive FPS combat for both single player AND multiplayer. The multiplayer for Halo games is just as important as the single player.

I'll gladly sacrifice some graphical quality 24/7 in order to have FPS combat that feels good due to being fluid, responsive and clear. Good gameplay > great graphics, IMO. I will choose gameplay over graphics 100% of the time. Especially since I play games to play the games, not to stand still and look at still images of the game.

I really detest games that have good to great feeling FPS combat in multiplayer but then they crank up the graphics for single player and suddenly it's like you're playing in mud and everything feels bad. Looks great, but the gameplay ends up being crap in single player compared to multiplayer. If you're going to make an FPS, IMO, the gameplay should be the focus in both multiplayer and single player and not just multiplayer like some FPS games.

Regards,
SB

 

[iroboto]

Whatever what they say about "it's worth it" "higher average image quality" for me VRS (software or hardware) brings too many downsides. Besides from the PC benchmarks I have seen the gains are very minors (<10%) except if you use performance mode but then the quality is horrendous, PS1 type textures.

But anyways even using a quality mode I can see the difference, easily. It's lacking details, it's blocky. It's very noticeable, much more than a 5-10% lower resolution (which is not noticeable notably with TAA + DRS). Now playing with Metro Exodus and seeing the compressed textures due to VRS (software but similar thing), I remember why I didn't like the textures on their PS4 games. I didn't know the reason but now I understand. Those games (at least the last) were already using software VRS and something was troubling me back then, resolutions were lacking details and the game didn't look to run at native resolution compared to most others games.

Now the lighting is really nice in Exodus, but the blocky / low frequency aspect of the textures is very noticeable. I would have prefered a slight resolution loss (unoticeable with DRS/TAA) but using much higher resolution textures (1.5x, 2x higher resolution or more? that would have being so much better).

I just wanted to provide a real answer as to why developers want this and it exists as a hardware feature.

For me, you're the only one it seems has an overall issue with VRS (perhaps as a result of spending too much time trying to pixel count that you're always zoomed in looking for aliased edges to count etc.)
And you naturally don't like it since you spend a lot of time zoomed in looking at IQ.

That's fine, for the same reasons if someone asked me to look for noise, I can zoom in and look for it, but generally speaking it's not really bothering me during gameplay if that makes sense. Though blurriness from panning left and right bother me from temporal solutions at 30fps as it's too much.

I don't notice VRS as you may be; typically the item that is requires high 1:1 quality shading is where I'm looking, and the places I'm not looking it's less. I'm okay with that, because it works for gameplay, but it doesn't work well for analysis. I get that, but it's not nearly as bad as you say, because without side by side comparisons, you're guessing if it's VRS, resolution, or texture filtering issues.

 

[Jay]

What a good video.
Next up @Dictator more in depth technical breakdown.

It really seems like 343 has produced one of the best MP and FPS campaigns in years, there right up there.

Some issues, sure.
Hopefully most will get addressed quickly post release, rightly or wrongly.
Also an extremely solid foundation to build on going forward.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

I'm pretty excited about where MS is headed with Flight Sim, Psychonauts 2, Forza Horizon 5, and Halo Infinite all in a 5 month window. Hope they can keep the quality up.

 

[Jay]

I'm pretty excited about where MS is headed with Flight Sim, Psychonauts 2, Forza Horizon 5, and Halo Infinite all in a 5 month window. Hope they can keep the quality up.

Disappointed that Age Of Empires didn't get console launch.