Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2022]

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As expected GT7 is another PS4 game upresed + better settings on PS5. It's no next-gen graphics. They also need to badly modernize their engine in order to have DRS + RT + 60fps.

The director may well talk about framerate >240fps and such but is still only interested into the higher res possible at 60fps, finally reaching its old goal of native 4K.
If cross-gen is what it takes to get 120fps, I’m all for it. I’d love to see two PS5 1080p options: 120fps and 60fps with RT.
 
Gran Turismo developers were usually a step ahead of the competition but nowadays some titles of western developers just look more technologically advanced. Imho, no racing game will probably be as defining as GT4, which was the pinnacle of everything good, technology wise, back then. What changed in the lighting since GT4? GT and photorealism were synonyms -not that the competition is better in that regard though-

What changed in the lighting from GT4 to GT7? How about that it is all real-time now with real-time shadows from dynamic volumetric clouds, with day night cycles and the sun (and moon and stars) rising and setting in the correct location and throwing matching shadows, the headlights of the cars lighting other cars and then throwing correct shadows, advances in the shading layers and how they respond, and a best in class HDR implementation? And I’m limiting myself here on purpose to racing mode, as there is no raytracing there.
 
And the load times … transformative! It is easy to forget that they are gone.
 
They should have at least read through the API documentation and asked anyone on developing DX12. :LOL:

This is pretty difficult to find help for Japanese dev. Kojima complains one day than the biggest problem of studios in japan they don't share tech knowledge as much like western studios in GDC.
 
Nice to watch the DF Direct with their conversation about shader compilation issues facing PC games! I'm SO glad they are continually talking about it. They hit most of the points I've already touched up on this forum multiple times.

The big problems are (and in the order I feel they should take priority) :

The developer's ability to capture all the required shader/material data required to build proper PSO pipeline caching systems. This requires a lot of upfront work/time from the developer, having to continually rebuild their projects, replay through levels of their games, or even build specialized levels to gather the necessary data.
--- This should be their job... there's no reason why these big AAA studios can't have people running through their games and generating the required data for them.
--- If they are smaller or unable to do so, then there should be an infrastructure to crowdsource that data from your players. (all the major engines should support this) And developers can then update the game.

Developers not opting to pre-compile at first launch. The developers SHOULD be doing a good enough job generating the required compiling/caching pipeline that they are able to pre-compile most everything eliminating most stutters in the first place. That should be done upon first launch (or after driver/gpu change).. This should become standard practice.
--- Either give gamers the option, or force it
--- Augment that process with the ability to connect to a server which detects your system config, and then compiles the required shader/PSOs and downloads them to your PC. Ready to go.


Ideally, it could be a general service provided to all developers on a given platform (let's say in this case, Valve, with Steam) where the developer has uploaded the game to their server, the server detects the hardware configuration of the PC downloading the game, it runs the game, generates the required pipeline caches for a given hardware configuration, and downloads it to the user's PC by the time the user's download has finished.

I honestly think something like that could work. Companies like Valve, AMD, Nvidia, and Intel... they're doing far more complicated things than that in the server space already. I don't think the onus should be on Valve... but I think as the platform provider.. they have the ability to remain neutral and provide the same quality service to all users of said platform.
 
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