Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2022]

[Dictator]

I think John is just referencing different game types that were more common on PC vs. those found on console back then. A number of console exclusive games focused on animation quality and cutscene quality (trying to ape hollywood animation) and their casual pick up and playability (the PS2 era is when gaming grew massively for the casual audience) while PC exclusive games at that time focused on depth of play, serious genres, uncompromising difficulty or controls and general simulation complexity.

Console games could * look more polished * while PC games tended to be where the honestly interesting gameplay would be found while that polish for things like animation was not always present. That is how I view it.

 

[Below2D]

tl;dw Another stutterfest. The camera also has an issue where if your fps lock in the menu isn't the same as the fps you're getting in the game, it'll mess up with variable frame rates.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Get their ass Alex. No game should ship in this state. It's disappointing as in many aspects, this is a great port - but as the focus of the video illustrates, all of that work is undermined when you miss the most basic optimization features. Like I noted in my impressions too, it's so bizarre to spend all this time making all these PC-specific QOL elements like adding RT, in-game performance statistics counter, dlss etc - then fuck it all up by shipping it in a state when it routinely has the game completely stall repeatedly within the first 10 minutes of gameplay (and may still occur thoroughout the game, albeit the frequency was lessened as I kept playing).

I mean "don't have half-second pauses and support variable frame rates" should kind of be a priority, rather than "Add an RT setting that will cripple a 4090".

 

[Below2D]

Get their ass Alex. No game should ship in this state. It's disappointing as in many aspects, this is a great port - but as the focus of the video illustrates, all of that work is undermined when you miss the most basic optimization features. Like I noted in my impressions too, it's so bizarre to spend all this time making all these PC-specific QOL elements like adding RT, in-game performance statistics counter, dlss etc - then fuck it all up by shipping it in a state when it routinely has the game completely stall repeatedly within the first 10 minutes of gameplay (and may still occur thoroughout the game, albeit the frequency was lessened as I kept playing).

I mean "don't have half-second pauses and support variable frame rates" should kind of be a priority, rather than "Add an RT setting that will cripple a 4090".

"Maybe if we ignore stutters, they'll go away"

- PC devs lately

 

[Flappy Pannus]

"Maybe if we ignore stutters, they'll go away"

- PC devs lately

Kind of hard to fault them for this outlook, considering only one outlet actually covers these issues. You read most reviews of games with these kinds of problems and they don't mention them at all.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Oooh BRUTAL!

 

[Cyan]

Interlaced mode should be a lot better, it works very well on consoles. The problem as the DF video illustrates, is that it's working from their flawed TAA implementation on the PC.

wish Capcom get rid of TAA in Resident Evil games or even better, I hope they add something like DLSS or XeSS (which works on ANY gpu) support.

As Digital Foundry mentioned in the XeSS video, they recommend using these AI reconstruction techniques over native resolution.

And, with all due respect, DF staff are graphic whores. We're talking serious stuff here.

There are instances where you lose certain detail vs native, but there are other very important instances where TAA loses detail compared to reconstruction techniques. (the vegetation and the net, to mention a few)

Also, FSR 2.1 support, compared to FSR 1.0 would be a plus.

 

[Below2D]

Kind of hard to fault them for this outlook, considering only one outlet actually covers these issues. You read most reviews of games with these kinds of problems and they don't mention them at all.

Lol I see the stutters right as he plays.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

btw speaking of recent ports, Iron Galaxy's first patch for Uncharted 4 isn't going so well. In their effort to add raw mouse input, then apparently completely fucked up the implementation and have made it unplayable for many M&K users, with no updates in a week and no easy method to downgrade.

Again, basic stuff here. Have a beta branch release for new patches on Steam, or provide a path to downgrade until you've got sufficient feedback.

 

[Phantom88]

btw speaking of recent ports, Iron Galaxy's first patch for Uncharted 4 isn't going so well. In their effort to add raw mouse input, then apparently completely fucked up the implementation and have made it unplayable for many M&K users, with no updates in a week and no easy method to downgrade.

Again, basic stuff here. Have a beta branch release for new patches on Steam, or provide a path to downgrade until you've got sufficient feedback.

Raw mouse input should be the first thing every dev does. A lof of these modern devs must be so removed from playing on a PC that they don't even know how a pc game looks like to play. The Santa Monica dev comes to mind in one of the interviews about PC god of war, where he said he spent the last 2 years playing the game with m/kb and it's awesome, it became his favourite way to play. And then the game launches and it has this hilarious mouse acceleration. )) The guy is a developer, plays it daily for 2 years and has no idea what he's talking about, regarding this particular PC staple. They patched raw input several weeks after launch.

Latelly, Plague Tale emulates stick movement for mouse camera instead of raw. Gotham Knights does it at well. And to think there are moders fixing this in various games, by just injecting raw input in a game via a dll file. Thats it, copy a dll file in the game folder and its done. Just recently i was looking at Binary Domain and noticed it got a raw input mod last year i think. Copy the dll and it works like a charm. And that game was near unplayable on m/kb due to the negative acceleration it had.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Speaking of Shader compilation, going through my old, old backlog of games and loaded up COD: Advanced Warfare recently. You know, the one from 2014.

...8 years old.



This isn't some new phenomena that UE4 introduced. Devs have known about this for a decade + for pete's sake.

How, how do you ship a game with this problem in 2022?

 

[Remij]

Good video @Dictator! It sucks, but this is the type of attitude that has to be taken with games like this. It's just completely unaccepable. I honestly don't even want to hear excuses from developers/pubs anymore.

Epic would be smart to maybe make a video demonstrating how Unreal Engine 5.1's (or whatever version it ends up shipping with) Automatic PSO Gathering and background compilation will fix this issue. Showing the same game compiled on UE4 running with stutters vs the UE5.1 compiled one running smoothly the first time through.

Because right now... Unreal Engine is in an unacceptable state on PC. Period.

 

[DavidGraham]

Just recently i was looking at Binary Domain and noticed it got a raw input mod last year i think

Glad someone still remembers this gem of a game, any fix for the broken AO in that game?

 

[see colon]

Just recently i was looking at Binary Domain

That's the best Terminator game!
I really do like BD, but it's a game with issues. Not the least of which is that every enemy is a bullet sponge at the higher difficulty. But it's one of the first games to get the fine hairs on the back of people's heads right.

Speaking of Shader compilation, going through my old, old backlog of games and loaded up COD: Advanced Warfare recently. You know, the one from 2014.

Battlefield 2 from 2005 would compile shaders at first run or after driver update. This was a solved issue years ago.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Speaking of Shader compilation, going through my old, old backlog of games and loaded up COD: Advanced Warfare recently. You know, the one from 2014.

...8 years old.

View attachment 7418

This isn't some new phenomena that UE4 introduced. Devs have known about this for a decade + for pete's sake.

How, how do you ship a game with this problem in 2022?

How? Developers increasingly focusing on console as the primary dev. platform. Thus new programmers entering the field have their primary experience being developing for consoles and then porting to PC while more experienced programmers who started development on PC (and thus have far more experience with having to program for a huge variation in hardware) are leaving the field (retirement or switching to more lucrative programming opportunities) over time.

Thus we increasingly have programmers who only know how to develop for one ... maybe two different sets of hardware at any given time with little to no knowledge how to optimize for a large number of hardware targets.

Combine that with increasing development costs making new programmers more attractive to have than experienced (and thus more expensive) programmers and we have the perfect storm for something that was solved over a decade ago on PC to reappear as a problem on PC.

Same goes for horrible game UI, bad control response, bad custom keybinds, lack of resolution options, etc. etc.

I shouldn't only mention console here as being a deleterious factor WRT game programmers not having a varied and flexible programming skillset, but mobile gaming platforms also atrophy game programmer skills.

If you take a look at markets where PC still dominates versus console, like S. Korea, it's relatively rare in my experience to run into issues WRT shader stutter. Granted, I haven't seriously gamed in recent S. Korean released games (games released in S. Korea and not games which have been localized to Western markets which tend to be years older) in the past couple of years so maybe it's changed there as well. Hope not.

Regards,
SB

 

[snc]

 

[Below2D]

It just doesn't stop for the DF crew, The AMD launch event is later today. Then the RTX 4080 in two weeks. Then Miles Morales on PC. Then RDNA 3's actual launch...

 

[BRiT]

DF written article for GoW:R

God of War: Ragnarök on PS5 is like a maxed-out PC port with flawless performance

The Digital Foundry tech review: a cross-gen game where PS5 focuses on polish and presentation rather than big visual improvements.

www.eurogamer.net

 

[Flappy Pannus]

It just doesn't stop for the DF crew, The AMD launch event is later today. Then the RTX 4080 in two weeks. Then Miles Morales on PC. Then RDNA 3's actual launch...

I believe they'll just talk about the AMD event in the next Digital Direct, there's not going to be any cards released to reviewers today, just a presentation.

 

[Karamazov]