Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2021]

[Deleted member 86764]

I'm not sure I agree with this. I think the argument was that the console IO systems have brought load times down so much that they are essentially good enough forever now (this doesn't apply to streaming of course). So for load times, even a PC 4x faster is arguably not really any better because the difference between a 2 second load and a 0.5 second load is nothing.

The GPU argument is entirely different though. While some may argue that the difference between 1440p and 4k is meaningless, few would argue the same about 30fps and 60fps. Which is what that 2x performance can give you. Or 2x the performance can bring a lot in terms of core graphics if you equalise resolution and framerate which seems to be the direction many devs are taking with PC right now. That's before we consider VR where we're every ounce of additional power counts for a lot. And of course that's only the GPU generation that's contemporary with these consoles, what about the one after that, or after that. Those benefits will keep growing over time unlike faster IO systems which even with multiple times the speed would be giving extremely marginal benefits.

Hey, for those of us that only switch once over the course of a generation - a 2x performance multiplier is small. I went from base PS4 to PS5, that's calculating (4x resolution + 2x framerate in some games) as an 8x increase. And even then we're only seeing cross generational games, so the same thing at higher res/Hz.

4k is better than 1440p and 60fps is better than 30fps, without a doubt, but they're not huge increases. Base Xbox to Series X has a ~10x multiplier, even before you take into account RDNA2 improvements that'll come later.

Even if you're a PC guy, you've got to be happy with the new consoles coz they'll push your favoured hardware further due to a new baseline (10tf instead of 1.3tf). There's more funding to make games look better than ever.

Edit: proportionally speaking, 2s loading compared to 0.5s is a much larger difference than 4k to 1440p.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Edit: proportionally speaking, 2s loading compared to 0.5s is a much larger difference than 4k to 1440p.

Especially if you are a humming bird.

 

[Allandor]

True and only Xbox Series include a "simple" (i.e. standard) NVMe controller but both consoles are obviously levering the PCIe 4.0 bus. @tunafish nailed the Xbox Series prediction but nobody could have predicted Sony would go with a smaller pool of faster flash and roll their own controller because that would be crazy.

small correction (I'm in nitpicking mood ). The flash chips are not faster. Only combined they get a higher bandwidth. Actually the xbox flash chip has lower latencies as it is only one chip that must provide all the bandwidth.

 

[BRiT]

Edit: proportionally speaking, 2s loading compared to 0.5s is a much larger difference than 4k to 1440p.

But perceptually speaking, it's less of a difference from 2:37 loading compared to 39 seconds loading despite both being 4x reduction in loading times.

 

[Deleted member 86764]

Especially if you are a humming bird.

How did you know?! *blushes at 200hz*

 

[JPT]

True and only Xbox Series include a "simple" (i.e. standard) NVMe controller but both consoles are obviously levering the PCIe 4.0 bus. @tunafish nailed the Xbox Series prediction but nobody could have predicted Sony would go with a smaller pool of faster flash and roll their own controller because that would be crazy.

Cerny channeling Crazy Ken!!

 

[Shortbread]

The Medium was a fascinating, technologically impressive next-gen only release for Xbox Series consoles - but what about PC? Not surprisingly, this game turns out to be super-demanding, even on the most powerful PC hardware money can buy. But is it really 'unoptimised' or is it simply the nature of the content Bloober has delivered? And is there anything that can be done to get a better experience - either through patches, or via settings tweaks? Alex investigates.

 

[BRiT]

DF Article @ https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2021-the-medium-pc-tech-review

The Medium pushes PC hard - and even 1080p60 is off the table for high-end rigs
So how come it runs OK on consoles?

After spending some time with The Medium on Xbox Series consoles, we were eager to try out the game on PC. It's an impressive title that at once pays homage to the survival horror titles of years gone by, while at the same time delivering some impressive - and technologically ambitious - new features. Bloober's dual viewport rendering concept clearly presents a huge challenge to the graphics capabilities of Microsoft's next-gen consoles, with even the mighty Series X employing dynamic resolution scaling that could see the title dip beneath a native 1080p - so how does the PC version deal with this and what are the extra features delivered to those with more powerful hardware? And to address the point raised by many PC users who've played the game - is it really 'unoptimised'? And if performance is poor, can Nvidia's remarkable DLSS AI upscaling technology turn it around?

In point of fact, Bloober employs both DXR-based hardware-accelerated ray tracing in The Medium and Nvidia DLSS comes along for the ride, principally in off-setting the additional cost in utilising RT features. But DLSS also improves upon native resolution image quality. In fact, in scenes we tested comparing Xbox Series X running at a higher native pixel-count to DLSS on PC, Nvidia's AI upscaling managed to deliver palpably cleaner results. As an interesting side-not, The Medium is based on Unreal Engine 4, and so therefore it's using its own temporal-based upscaling solution. It's one of the best around, but DLSS is still delivering a significantly improved image, even in its performance mode, where a 4K image is reconstructed from native 1080p resolution.

After image quality, there's the implementation of RT reflections, where Xbox renders these at a quarter of the current native resolution (remember that The Medium uses dynamic resolution scaling, with a very wide 900p to 2160p range). If there's one criticism I have of the RT features on PC, it's that there's very little granularity in the settings - so reflections always render out at full resolution: a hefty 4x increase in resolution. Bloober also uses a console-specific form of RT reflections by biasing reflections to be more mirror-like, making them cheaper to render. This feature can be enabled on PC, it is a part of UE4, but you'll need to use Unreal Engine Console Unlocker to access it. These are features available, easily tweakable, but I feel that the graphics menu option should open up these settings to the end user.

...

 

[mr magoo]

Speaking about timing patch just arrived
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1293160/view/5825939260228842445

- Performance optimizations across the whole game
- Eliminated gameplay bugs in various locations
- Eliminated known game crashes
- Eliminated game bugs reported by the community
- Graphical bug fixes across the whole game
- Improvements in camera operation and settings
- Scene lighting fixes in various locations
- Fixes for reported crash issues when loading saves
- Improvements in interactions with in-game events and characters across the whole game
- Raytracing optimizations across the whole game
- Game sound fixes

 

[RDGoodla]

Control RT benchmarking XSX VS PS5

It is surprising no one talked about the similarity between Contorl and DMC5 performance.

Control has more performance with ray tracing on xsx (just like xsx wins in RT mode of DMC5) but PS5 has the same or a little better
rasterisation performance (like the results of no-RT modes in DMC 5).

The results are consistent with launch games of PS5 xsx.

 

[thicc_gaf]

Cerny channeling Crazy Ken!!

Actually, weren't the SSD rumors among the earliest rumors for PS5? I remember rumors on their SSD as far back as middle of 2019. FWIW, after looking at some older enterprise SSD designs the PS5's actually seems a tad more reigned in? Not in terms of the bandwidths, but in terms of certain features. There's a pretty old (around 2012) Micron enterprise SSD that had 32 channels!

https://www.anandtech.com/show/6371/micron-p320h-pcie-ssd-700gb-review-first-nvme-ssd

And that's a drive from 2012; granted it's also PCIe 1.0. But like with systems such as PS5 (and Series X arguably to a bit lesser extent), they took some rather bold approaches to solving design challenges. Who knows, maybe we'll see Sony push for a 32-channel drive (probably more standard though i.e not soldered to the motherboard) for their next system

It is surprising no one talked about the similarity between Contorl and DMC5 performance.

Control has more performance with ray tracing on xsx (just like xsx wins in RT mode of DMC5) but PS5 has the same or a little better
rasterisation performance (like the results of no-RT modes in DMC 5).

The results are consistent with launch games of PS5 xsx.

Prob owes to each system's specific strengths. Higher pixel fillrate on PS5, higher texture fillrate (and by association, BVH ray-intersects) on Series X.

 

[chris1515]

True and only Xbox Series include a "simple" (i.e. standard) NVMe controller but both consoles are obviously levering the PCIe 4.0 bus. @tunafish nailed the Xbox Series prediction but nobody could have predicted Sony would go with a smaller pool of faster flash and roll their own controller because that would be crazy.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/ps...nd-sonys-ssd-customisations-technical.118587/

The PS5 SSD was decribed in this patent and the custom controller too.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/ps...nd-sonys-ssd-customisations-technical.118587/

The PS5 SSD was decribed in this patent and the custom controller too.

A SSD and controller was described in that patent, the PS5 wasn't mentioned. It was speculated that this could be PS5's SSD but nobody knew. Lots of speculation was rife in 2019, much of it never came to pass.

 

[chris1515]

A SSD and controller was described in that patent, the PS5 wasn't mentioned. It was speculated that this could be PS5's SSD but nobody knew. Lots of speculation was rife in 2019, much of it never came to pass.

I knew two months after the opening of the thread in era and I told it in another era thread like I said here before road to PS5, the uncompressed data will be above 7GB/s, I heard 8 GB/s and I said too since last summer Sony have some new AA/reconstruction method using deep learning inside the SDK from a friend dev in a 3rd party studios.

I said in era multiples times the controller will be custom optimised for read data when people were speculating about standard SSD controller because I know my friend since a very long time and I have full confidence about his information. He doesn't want to give too much details, for example I know the acronym of the AA/reconstruction method not more. And knowing the acroynym I doubt this is not deep learning, if it is not deep learning no idea what is the meaning of the acronym.

The only things not inside the patent is the coherency engine.

 

[JPT]

I knew two months after the opening of the thread in era and I told it in another era thread like I said here before road to PS5, the uncompressed data will be above 7GB/s, I heard 8 GB/s and I said too since last summer Sony have some new AA/reconstruction method using deep learning inside the SDK from a friend dev in a 3rd party studios.

I said in era multiples times the controller will be custom optimised for read data when people were speculating about standard SSD controller because I know my friend since a very long time and I have full confidence about his information. He doesn't want to give too much details, for example I know the acronym of the AA/reconstruction method not more.

The only things not inside the patent is the coherency engine.

I only belive what you post when it means PS5 is the best, if you say XSX is better in something,I know its wrong

 

[chris1515]

I only belive what you post when it means PS5 is the best, if you say XSX is better in something,I know its wrong

XSX is better at raytracing and I said too in era before PS5 spec release at least in theory more powerful than PS5 in compute workload. I said in theory because the games have surprising performance. I expected XSX to be around 20% better at any workload than PS5 but this is more complex.

 

[snc]

XSX is better at raytracing

Hard to say xsx is better at raytraing as that suggests has some additinal features or way to do rt but its same approach as ps5. Xsx generally on paper has just more computing power by ~1.2x

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Hard to say xsx is better at raytraing as that suggests has some additinal features or way to do rt but its same approach as ps5. Xsx generally on paper has just more computing power by ~1.2x

AMD's RT implementation is leveraged using compute, so more compute = better.

 

[snc]

AMD's RT implementation is leveraged using compute, so more compute = better.

yeah but we don't digest it for example and say xsx has better texture filtering (but is as true as this has better rt)

 

[chris1515]

PS5 has better front end, cache and pixel fillrate performance but I was thinking XSX will dominate at least 10 to 20% all time with more CU, more memory bandwidth and more TMU/ray intersection unit.

Even on paper the console are not so far from each other but for the moment I am surprised by the multiplatform game benchmark. But it can change and at least this is not boring every Digitalfoundry face off will be interesting.