Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2022]

This has to be a budget, time and manpower issue. Can't really see anything else. If we look at the ridiculously absurd development lenght since the last game - SIX years - and what we got is a 4 to 5 hour demo-like game, with zero things to do after that. This probably was rebooted at least once in development. It might be that they were going nowhere with the game, then Doom Eternal came out in 2020 and they had a reboot to copy that, so we ended up with this game that you finish in a morning, since they couldnt spend a lot of time after being rebooted. The dev is not a large one, the publisher isn't rich.

They probably also gambled on console sales for some bizzare reason, and the PC version got the least amount of money and time. Shadow Warrior 1 and 2 were PC only releases and console versions were released after a year. Unfortunately for them, the game performed about 20 times worse than the first game did back in 2013.

 

I wonder why they changed engine in the first place.

 

Wonder why they even created the game to begin with.

 

Yea I figured. Because I saw someone respond to your post at ResetERA and they claimed the stutters were fixed. I immediately commented on the youtube video they posted asking if that video was made with a cleared shader cache... because all they're doing is "testing" by replaying levels which they'd already created caches for.

That happens so damn often, it's frustrating.

 

What I meant behind that was this studio seems to have the experience needed to create an engine, since they done it in the paste. A custom engine *may* be easier to work on the shaders compilation stuff (and other stuff).

 

Ooof, if I owned HFW and didn't have a way to toggle off the changes that they made, I would be an extremely angry owner. Thankfully, I don't own it so it's not an issue for me. But just thinking about a developer doing something like that in a game I own and play makes me so angry.

[edit] Also, looking at the Elden Ring section of the video. I've never ever seen stutters like that in game except ... when I had a controller plugged in briefly. Without a controller connected to my PC, I've never seen a stutter even remotely like what they've shown ever, and I'm now over 80 hours played.

Regards,
SB

 

I would have preferred a proper TAA with more frames of accumulation in HFW.

 

What is this referring to - the very (very) slight changes they made to mip levels to try and lessen the shimmering or something else that I missed in the video? I wouldn't even have noticed unless it was brought up in the change logs, if anything I'd prefer they do something far more drastic than these minor tweaks. As Alex indicates though, that would require substantial more work so I doubt we're going to see anything like that regardless.

Alex also mentioned that CB doesn't play well with distant details, and yes that's where it definitely shows it weaknesses, however we do have plenty of other games like Days Gone and the original HZD where small detailed foliage does not exhibit anywhere near this level of shimmering using checkerboarding. Jumping back and forth between this and HZD and it's startling how much more stable the image is in HZD compared to FW at 60fps. The difference in CB between the two is 2160p (HZD) vs 1800p (FW), but even I don't think that can account for this drastic difference, my only guess is that the dynamic res is significant in some scenes and perhaps doesn't play well with the non-'native' CB implementation.

 

I can honestly say that I've never had any stutters like the new ones Alex has ran into either. Mostly it was just the shader compilation stutters in the beginning, and then during loading in the overworld. Inside of dungeons or whatever was always 60fps locked.

But after watching that DF direct, I decided to completely clean my drivers and my shader cache.. and started a new game.. and the shader complilation stuttering is completely gone. In that first area doing any attack, or rolling and breaking boxes or whatever the first time would hitch. When the first section where the mini boss is who jumps out and sends you to the tutorial area.. that would hitch just before he jumped out, and then just as he lands there would be a massive hitch. NONE of that happens now. It's perfectly smooth 60fps now. Before, when running up the "loading" stairs in the tutorial dungeon, I would get massive lurches down and it would very noticeably slow the game down as it loaded then catch back up... now there was just a much smaller dip in FPS but it didn't slow the game down, it still looked smooth to me. So then I ran out to the Tree Sentinel, and did some battling with him.. I noticed some drops, but it wasn't close to anything as bad as before. It was like typical FPS drops and not "slowing the game logic down" type of stuff it was before. Mostly 60fps locked.

So then I went and looked at my graphics settings.... and I'm running at 5184x2160 in borderless windowed mode... I changed it to my monitors native resolution 3840x1600.... and fought him again... it was a smooth 60fps.

So... something DEFINITELY changed. And like I said.. I haven't noticed any real stuttering for many hours now in my first ongoing game. So it seems to be better for sure.

Pretty happy those compilation stutters seem to be gone!

 

Maybe you made enough noise about this one

 

Something tells me I doubt that.. but I'll take what I can get!

 

Min 1620p in dense areas. Anyways if they use the same tech used in 1 then they use a very specific kind of CBR. They don't use ID Buffer (we know it improves the reconstruction) and they do some trick by using FXAA vertically. I think both features could explain the problems seen in vegetation. Their engine was great for Pro because it was rendered natively (2160p CBR) but now this is completely obsolete on PS5 with DRS.

 

Diff must be very subtle and if I dint hear/read about I wouldnt even notice

 

Well shimmering is a problem of highly detailed games. Especially if you can't use native resolution it gets more and more obvious. But the problem will remain. The smaller the details the more pixels will shimmer in motion. Reconstruction techs don't make that problem really better, they might just hide that problem in favor of other problems. The only thing that really helps with that are higher resolutions (e.g. "inverted" VRS could help, not to decrease resolution of such points but to increase the resolution), lowering the details (e.g. through a more aggressive LOD system) or blurr the image a bit (last one is the thing why TAA might help a bit). But even that at some point it will again be visible. HFW is a bit special there because it also has extreme contrasts in one picture, this make such detail-shifts much more visible.

 

Maybe you're too angry to notice but you're unsure what you're angry about?

 

The trade-off between a sharper, more detailed image that consequently shimmers more (original) or a blurrier far less detailed image that consequently shimmers less (new patch). For me, the blur is so bad, IMO, that I would absolutely hate it when compared to how it was before. Now, I understand that some people prefer a blurrier less detailed image if it also reduces shimmering, so hopefully those people are happy about the changes. But for me, I'd absolutely hate it if there was no way to revert it back to the, IMO, superior image quality from before.

I guess it's just one more reason that I should stay away from consoles. At least on PC, I can generally control things like that. However, there are still games that don't offer options controlling things like that, and in those cases where the game's rendering is too blurry for my taste, I'll just choose not to play the game.

Regards,
SB

 

Not that it would be an option here, but DLSS cleans up shimmering on grass and trees quite a bit. When Back 4 Blood came out, I was tempted to leave DLSS off because the performance was good without it, but the shimmering on grass was really noticeable, so I turned it back on.

 

As far as I've seen it, even DLSS is most times just blurrier in motion (always when I activate DLSS in 1440p mode e.g. in Control). Also DLSS introduces additional artifacts (like ghosting) just like TAA does. But in DLSS it is most times much more extreme at 60fps than many TAA algorithms. So far DLSS and TAA are full of compromises. Also HFW uses CBR, which also has it's flaws, especially with shimmering as moving details get lost.

In the end, the developer must decide what's best for the game. I would always prefer native resolutions (with native I just mean "not reconstructed") + optional TAA as this has the most consistent look.

 

Absolutely And i do agree its something devs should improve upon. Alex is going to cover more about this.