Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2022]

[Silent_Buddha]

Next dying light 2 pc patch includes dlss improvements, and subsequent patch will unlock more video settings.

Good to hear, a lot of people have disabled DLSS and in turn RT because of DLSS artifacting in the current version of DL2. That includes streamers that I watch who are using 3080, 3080 Ti, and 3090. The first thing they did was turn on RT. Game didn't run well enough. Turn on DLSS. They saw artifacts and then disabled DLSS and RT.

Regards,
SB

 

[PSman1700]

Very intresting DF Direct, the view on where consoles (PS) is going.

 

[chris1515]

 

[chris1515]

 

[snc]

nice loading times on ps5, kudos for Sloclap as they are small team and found time to implement proper io usage while sometimes much bigger dev studios didnt bother

 

[pjbliverpool]

Yes the loading test is very interesting. Particularly the fact that it's clearly much more CPU limited on the PC than it is on the PS5. This looks like a perfect example of where Direct Storage would bring clear gains to the PC.

 

[cwjs]

Sifu: That pc port looks like a bummer -- I beat (well, not the secret ending) this over the last week and the perfectly locked framerate and fast load times felt necessary. Surprised the port doesn't pull either of those off.

Been playing CrossfireX's singleplayer campaigns by remedy. These aren't getting much attention, which I kinda understand -- very much 7.0 out of 10 games and not very polished. But graphically they're a treat in places, remedy's northlight engine almost justifies the 30fps performance mode... great volumetrics, raytraced reflections on some very rough surfaces, great lighting and particles. How it looks varies heavily from level to level though (the first 60% of the gamepass campaign is not particularly impressive!), doesn't seem like it got the art polish to make everywhere shine. Hope DF takes a look!

 

[Remij]

More UE4 PC stutter issues... who could have guessed? ...

It's at the point where I just hate seeing games utilize Unreal Engine.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Sifu: That pc port looks like a bummer -- I beat (well, not the secret ending) this over the last week and the perfectly locked framerate and fast load times felt necessary. Surprised the port doesn't pull either of those off.

I expect the load times are a genuine PC limitation at this stage. The game is very fast at loading, even on PC, it's just that the PS5 is even faster, so it looks to me like there's a very well thought out IO process happening there but the simple fact is that without Direct Storage, theirs a ton more work to be done on the CPU for the PC vs the PS5 so even with much faster CPU's, it just can't keep up. I image an 12900K would be even closer again to the PS5 time but probably still a way short.

 

[Phantom88]

Sifu: That pc port looks like a bummer -- I beat (well, not the secret ending) this over the last week and the perfectly locked framerate and fast load times felt necessary. Surprised the port doesn't pull either of those off.

Isnt this an exaggeration ? The game can run at 8k/144hz on PC, with better image quality. 6 seconds against 4 seconds and a one second framedrop when opening a door hardly means this should be played on playstation

 

[Globalisateur]

Yes the loading test is very interesting. Particularly the fact that it's clearly much more CPU limited on the PC than it is on the PS5. This looks like a perfect example of where Direct Storage would bring clear gains to the PC.

PS5 custom I/O, if done properly, completely bypasses the CPU. Everything is done by custom hardware / API. From SSD to custom I/O to Video memory, and data being ready to use by the GPU. It can even load data in Vram during a frame rendering.

Anyways here they must be bottlenecked by their rendering engine (like Ratchet actually is). 4s is a lot for an I/O optimized PS5 game.

 

[cwjs]

6 seconds against 4 seconds and a one second framedrop when opening a door hardly means this should be played on playstation

2 seconds is a lot of time when you die 1,000 times. Playing through I felt like the ps5 load times were too long, so them being 50% longer is a lot.

 

[Jay]

I expect the load times are a genuine PC limitation at this stage. The game is very fast at loading, even on PC, it's just that the PS5 is even faster, so it looks to me like there's a very well thought out IO process happening there but the simple fact is that without Direct Storage, theirs a ton more work to be done on the CPU for the PC vs the PS5 so even with much faster CPU's, it just can't keep up. I image an 12900K would be even closer again to the PS5 time but probably still a way short.

Yea, really highlights the limitations of the older IO stack.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

And yet we hear nothing of the fabled Direct Storage for PC.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Anyways here they must be bottlenecked by their rendering engine (like Ratchet actually is). 4s is a lot for an I/O optimized PS5 game.

Yes, IO can't solve everything. If there is say a hypothetical fixed cost of 4 seconds to do "something" when loading a level, then it doesn't matter if your storage solution is infinitely faster than other storage solution, it'll still take 4 seconds to load a level.

And with rendering, there is always "something" that is being done that incurs costs over and above just loading in assets. For a game like this one or R&C that means that there is no way for those games to take "full" advantage of the end to end I/O bandwidth available on PS5. Basically, they could have halved the speed of PS5's I/O and no-one would notice the difference in those games. IE - if it takes 0.1 seconds to load the assets or 0.5 seconds to load the assets while "something" else is being done, then no-one would notice.

I do wonder if we'll ever see a game that can fully leverage the PS5 I/O stacks full speed or even come close to it.

Regards,
SB

 

[chris1515]

Yes, IO can't solve everything. If there is say a hypothetical fixed cost of 4 seconds to do "something" when loading a level, then it doesn't matter if your storage solution is infinitely faster than other storage solution, it'll still take 4 seconds to load a level.

And with rendering, there is always "something" that is being done that incurs costs over and above just loading in assets. For a game like this one or R&C that means that there is no way for those games to take "full" advantage of the end to end I/O bandwidth available on PS5. Basically, they could have halved the speed of PS5's I/O and no-one would notice the difference in those games. IE - if it takes 0.1 seconds to load the assets or 0.5 seconds to load the assets while "something" else is being done, then no-one would notice.

I do wonder if we'll ever see a game that can fully leverage the PS5 I/O stacks full speed or even come close to it.

Regards,
SB

Wait next Spiderman 2, they will have time to correct CPU code. they are CPU limited when instancing level because Insomniac multithreading is not optimal. They were using the gameplay thread and render thread architecture.

And they will probably use oodle texture too. They are only at 5 GB/s for loading on R&C they will probably double this.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

I do wonder if we'll ever see a game that can fully leverage the PS5 I/O stacks full speed or even come close to it.

Demon Souls? I seem to remember loading times being 1 or 2 secs.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I'm playing Sifu on a Ryzen 3600x and I get between 140 and 230 fps depending on the scene. When I go through doors there is no noticeable stutter at all. My fps counter might drop to around 140, but if there's a small frame dip to "stutter" I cannot tell that it's there. I have an RTX 3080 and it never hits 100% and I'm playing at 1440p ultra with DLSS off. The idea that there's some kind of technical problem with stuttering in this game on PC seems kind of absurd to me.

I forgot I set a cap at 235fps and that's why it won't go higher.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Wait next Spiderman 2, they will have time to correct CPU code. they are CPU limited when instancing level because Insomniac multithreading is not optimal. They were using the gameplay thread and render thread architecture.

And they will probably use oodle texture too. They are only at 5 GB/s for loading on R&C they will probably double this.

You still have to do all the level and rendering setup so you're always going to have to contend with CPU speed as well as IO speed. Sifu despite being very efficient on the IO side is clearly CPU limited on the PC and I'll bet on the PS5 too since 4s is obviously quite a long time to fill it's memory given the SSD speed. So in this case the IO is probably more than fast enough and the PS5's real advantage is the bypassing of the CPU for the IO processes leaving more CPU time available for all the other stuff. I would imagine if Direct Storage were integrated with this game the PC would offer comfortably faster load times on all the CPU's tested in the DF video unless they start bumping up to the limits of the slower SSD.

Things are going to get really interesting when (if at this stage??) Direct Storage shows up.

 

[chris1515]

You still have to do all the level and rendering setup so you're always going to have to contend with CPU speed as well as IO speed. Sifu despite being very efficient on the IO side is clearly CPU limited on the PC and I'll bet on the PS5 too since 4s is obviously quite a long time to fill it's memory given the SSD speed. So in this case the IO is probably more than fast enough and the PS5's real advantage is the bypassing of the CPU for the IO processes leaving more CPU time available for all the other stuff. I would imagine if Direct Storage were integrated with this game the PC would offer comfortably faster load times on all the CPU's tested in the DF video unless they start bumping up to the limits of the slower SSD.

Things are going to get really interesting when (if at this stage??) Direct Storage shows up.

Again you do like all code is fully optimized on CPU side. Tons of teams can improve CPU code. This is the reason Unity is preparing to use ECS on CPU side. Insomniac devs told they are currently CPU limited for loading but they told into the Spiderman postmortem the current CPU performance was enough but they need to change to improve it for futures games. The problem is not the CPU power but the code optimization. When they will optimize it it will go faster on PS5 CPU but it could help on the PS4 Jaguar. Insomniac release games very often and have less time to fully improve their architecture but 2022 is the first year since 2016 they won't release a game.

Naughty dog CPU code architecture is better for example.