Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2021]

[Scott_Arm]

The streaming is just plain broken. I just added data for capturing a hallway by the fountain on the streets map. It's an enclosed hallway that wraps around the back of that part of the map. A narrow hallway with walls and ceilings and floor should be the ideal place for performance.

I guessing this is actually a cpu or disk problem. My gpu utilization is 85-90% in that area on streets and I get the spikes. Maybe they are trying to stream assets on demand and either my 6-core cpu or my nvme are holding me back. I wonder if this is repeatable on Windows 11. Possible they're using DirectStorage?

Either that or their animation system is completely busted and just the act of walking tanks your fps. Edit: Never mind, I already ruled this out by testing just moving the view with the mouse and no player movement.

Or maybe resizable bar would help? I don't have a motherboard that supports it, so I can't test it.

Edit: fyi, I fully restarted the game every time I changed video settings, so it's not that.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Edit: Never mind, I already ruled this out by testing just moving the view with the mouse and no player movement.

Even when turning your character will animate, just different animations than walking.

Regards,
SB

 

[Scott_Arm]

Even when turning your character will animate, just different animations than walking.

Regards,
SB

True.

 

[techuse]

Series-X is ~RTX2080 level which is 25-30% faster then a GTX1080.

So it is definitely expected.

Even the RTX2070 (~PS5's level) is 15-20% faster then a GTX1080.

So if a GTX1080 matched or beat performance offered by XSX and PS5 then there's something seriously wrong.

Xbox One X from 2016.

 

[see colon]

Isn’t VRS a rasterization only thing? Compute shaders don’t know what “pixels” are.

Shader units (as in, the hardware) is unified, so it doesn't matter if you are using them to do operations to determine the color of a pixel or the location of a vertex, or anything else. If you spend less time on one job, you have more time for another job. This is assuming that there aren't stalls somewhere else in the pipeline preventing those potential gains to be turned into achieved performance

 

[trinibwoy]

Shader units (as in, the hardware) is unified, so it doesn't matter if you are using them to do operations to determine the color of a pixel or the location of a vertex, or anything else. If you spend less time on one job, you have more time for another job. This is assuming that there aren't stalls somewhere else in the pipeline preventing those potential gains to be turned into achieved performance

That’s not really the point. If VRS only kicks in for pixel shaders but most of the shading work in the frame is done in compute then you’re not saving much.

 

[Riddlewire]

Xbox One X from 2016.

One X was released November 2017.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I tried removing the HD texture pack from Halo and it exhibits the same frame dips whenever the camera moves, or the player moves.

 

[iroboto]

I tried removing the HD texture pack from Halo and it exhibits the same frame dips whenever the camera moves, or the player moves.

the game is supposed to record everything IIRC. I'm not sure if that is what is happening there. Matches are recorded and all players have access to it.

 

[iroboto]

Shader units (as in, the hardware) is unified, so it doesn't matter if you are using them to do operations to determine the color of a pixel or the location of a vertex, or anything else. If you spend less time on one job, you have more time for another job. This is assuming that there aren't stalls somewhere else in the pipeline preventing those potential gains to be turned into achieved performance

I think he's referring to VRS being available only on the 3D pipeline.
Compute pipeline still goes from Memory to CUs back to Memory.

 

[techuse]

One X was released November 2017.

My mistake on that one.

 

[davis.anthony]

Xbox One X from 2016.

Sorry, my mistake!

Damn Microsoft and their naming schemes.

 

[Seanspeed]

I'm surprised there isn't more talk of how there is seemingly only one tree model in Halo Infinite. It's the most insanely jarring thing to me, like it's from the PS2 era where memory limitations would often mean limited asset variety like this. Yes, the tree model itself seems to have a tiny amount of variation in terms of size scaling and maybe if you poke closely you can see that there is some branch variation or whatever, but it's ultimately just the same general tree over the whole map. Combined with the repetition of only a few basic assets within this one(and only) biome, and the lack of proper shadowing - the result is something that looks so simplistic and lacking, even if the individual assets themselves are done well enough when viewed close up.

I cant get over how disappointing this is for a flagship 1st party game on a 12TF console. It might have been more forgivable if this was just one environment among a large variety of different places so you only spent a small slice of your experience here, but nope, it's gonna constitute probably like half or more of your time in the game here.

 

[BRiT]

It's a game that plays, functions, and looks the same on a 1.3 TF system from 2013.

 

[Seanspeed]

It's a game that plays, functions, and looks the same on a 1.3 TF system from 2013.

I originally expected the lack of technical impressiveness was indeed a nod to the need for 60fps on a base XB1, but nope - 30fps.

Either way, it's a flagship 1st party game for their new generation console. It should have gotten quite a bit of extra love to make the XSX version look amazing. Forza Horizon 5 looks spectacular on XSX. Something like Horizon Forbidden West also looks incredible on the PS5 from everything we've seen so far.

But I dont think it's a case of them just wanting more parity between generations, either. The performance limitations really do seem like this game is genuinely stretching the limits of what they're able to do, for whatever reason. Obviously we'd have to have first hand knowledge of what's going on, whether the Slipspace engine is just using all sorts of highly inefficient visual features or what, but this is not good. This is not something for the technical team at 343 to be proud of at all. And that's just so strange cuz that's not like them.

Seriously. One tree model. Even games in 2013 were doing better than that.

 

[iroboto]

I originally expected the lack of technical impressiveness was indeed a nod to the need for 60fps on a base XB1, but nope - 30fps.

Either way, it's a flagship 1st party game for their new generation console. It should have gotten quite a bit of extra love to make the XSX version look amazing. Forza Horizon 5 looks spectacular on XSX. Something like Horizon Forbidden West also looks incredible on the PS5 from everything we've seen so far.

But I dont think it's a case of them just wanting more parity between generations, either. The performance limitations really do seem like this game is genuinely stretching the limits of what they're able to do, for whatever reason. Obviously we'd have to have first hand knowledge of what's going on, whether the Slipspace engine is just using all sorts of highly inefficient visual features or what, but this is not good. This is not something for the technical team at 343 to be proud of at all. And that's just so strange cuz that's not like them.

Seriously. One tree model. Even games in 2013 were doing better than that.

The game has to support running everything close up and in the distance. It's extremely taxing to have that many active objects in sight and in animation.
People are looking at the trees but not seeing the scale of the landscape. They explain this in the DF video where using a sniper scope can see in a far distance UNSC forces fighting against the covenant. And you can just waltz right up to them and engage in that combat.

It's extremely challenging to do what Halo Infinite has done, most games that take on that many moving pieces are often not graphical lookers or have other compromises.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I don't know. Red Dead Redemption 2 ran on Xbox One. It had a pretty wide variety of vegetation and different npcs on screen. Only thing I can't remember is from how far away you could observe NPCs.

 

[iroboto]

I don't know. Red Dead Redemption 2 ran on Xbox One. It had a pretty wide variety of vegetation and different npcs on screen. Only thing I can't remember is from how far away you could observe NPCs.

extreme lag in any player response. Things took nearly 0.5 seconds to register. Sniper zooms were no where close to the instant flick of Halo.
They definitely didn't have 2 AIs battling it out either.
I'm not saying there wasn't development hell, as there is a lot more this game could have reached in terms of heights. But to make it seem like any engine could pull this off without massive backend changes is unlikely.

Think about how slow PUBG ran on release. Even after years of patches it's still garbage in response time compared to Halo. Let's not even get into how much denser and better Halo looks in every way. There are animals, fauna, wind, volumetric fog, day/night cycles, enemy AI battling user AI. Vehicles of all sorts, travelling at high speeds.

 

[Seanspeed]

The game has to support running everything close up and in the distance. It's extremely taxing to have that many active objects in sight and in animation.
People are looking at the trees but not seeing the scale of the landscape. They explain this in the DF video where using a sniper scope can see in a far distance UNSC forces fighting against the covenant. And you can just waltz right up to them and engage in that combat.

It's extremely challenging to do what Halo Infinite has done, most games that take on that many moving pieces are often not graphical lookers or have other compromises.

So the only thing they had to do to make this game look next-gen was cut away the draw distance for distant enemies? Seriously now. If it was that simple, then they've made an absolute *hair brained* decision to prioritize this if it compromised the graphics so incredibly severely. There's also many ways to optimize such things to where their costs wouldn't be extreme. Infinite is hardly alone in having distant objects doing things.

There's definitely things that have gone wrong here for them to have gotten such lackluster results for the hardware potential on offer. This seems very evident to me now, and I know darn well that hindsight will prove it correct for anybody not convinced yet. Especially as Infinite is supposed to be a long-term game for Microsoft.

 

[iroboto]

So the only thing they had to do to make this game look next-gen was cut away the draw distance for distant enemies? Seriously now. If it was that simple, then they've made an absolute *hair brained* decision to prioritize this if it compromised the graphics so incredibly severely. There's also many ways to optimize such things to where their costs wouldn't be extreme. Infinite is hardly alone in having distant objects doing things.

There's definitely things that have gone wrong here for them to have gotten such lackluster results for the hardware potential on offer. This seems very evident to me now, and I know darn well that hindsight will prove it correct for anybody not convinced yet. Especially as Infinite is supposed to be a long-term game for Microsoft.

Game design decisions outweigh graphical decisions. You cut away draw distance, you get massive pop-in issues which isn't useful information to the player if you can't see nothing until you arrive just before. It's not so simple at all. There is a lot of verticality in this game.

People didn't want another Halo 4. They wanted a return to something closer to Halo 1. The vision is for the game is to be wide linear.