Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2022]

[Riddlewire]

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Anybody have a clue what the 8th gen metrics are?

 

[Allandor]

DF Article @ https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2022-trek-to-yomi-tech-review

Trek to Yomi: stunning aesthetics but performance falls short
PS5 and Xbox Series consoles tested.

Trek To Yomi is a fascinating, extremely stylish release. Its aim is to emulate classic Japanese samurai movies, with Kurosawa and Kobayashi the clear influences. Everything from the letterboxed, monochromatic presentation right down to the film grain and shot framing are clearly inspired by Japanese cinema, with Unreal Engine 4's post-processing pipeline used to render this stylised, cinematic experience. This isn't a massive blockbuster title but there's a deep fidelity to the source material here and a brilliant sense of aesthetics.

There's an immediate sense that the developers have tried to really achieve something special here and that starts with the camera work: most of the game's cinematics use a mix of stationary shots and slower panning shots, typical of early Japanese film. Camera framing takes a lot of inspiration from this work as well; a lot of care has been taken with shot composition, with carefully framed foreground, midfield, and background detail. The camera ends up being quite fundamental to the game itself, and it's semi-fixed during gameplay - there's no direct player control over this element, and most shots simply follow the player's movement by scrolling or panning.

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The performance of this game is really strange. It has big black bars so it already reduces the pixels to render. But maybe the black bars are just post-processing and get rendered. But even that wouldn't describe the bad performance on all systems.
VRR for the rescue shouldn't be used like this. An optional 30fps lock would be a good idea for this game.
The performance is especially interesting because of the resolution difference between xsx and xss. While the xsx uses 4k (well almost and the black bars...) and the xss 1440p (same here, black bars) it seems like the issue is inside of the engine. From the raw resolution numbers, I would expect that XSS would run worst but funny enough, it runs best. So there seems to be some code inside, that doesn't scale that well with the resolution.

 

[davis.anthony]

DF Article @ https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2022-trek-to-yomi-tech-review

Trek to Yomi: stunning aesthetics but performance falls short
PS5 and Xbox Series consoles tested.

Trek To Yomi is a fascinating, extremely stylish release. Its aim is to emulate classic Japanese samurai movies, with Kurosawa and Kobayashi the clear influences. Everything from the letterboxed, monochromatic presentation right down to the film grain and shot framing are clearly inspired by Japanese cinema, with Unreal Engine 4's post-processing pipeline used to render this stylised, cinematic experience. This isn't a massive blockbuster title but there's a deep fidelity to the source material here and a brilliant sense of aesthetics.

There's an immediate sense that the developers have tried to really achieve something special here and that starts with the camera work: most of the game's cinematics use a mix of stationary shots and slower panning shots, typical of early Japanese film. Camera framing takes a lot of inspiration from this work as well; a lot of care has been taken with shot composition, with carefully framed foreground, midfield, and background detail. The camera ends up being quite fundamental to the game itself, and it's semi-fixed during gameplay - there's no direct player control over this element, and most shots simply follow the player's movement by scrolling or panning

...

Can't watch it with sound as I'm out but watching the video on my phone it looks like everything is running at full rate and resolution?

Fire, water and everything look to update at 60fps and the particles and effects seem to be running at full resolution?

That won't help.

 

[see colon]

Can't watch it with sound as I'm out but watching the video on my phone it looks like everything is running at full rate and resolution?

Fire, water and everything look to update at 60fps and the particles and effects seem to be running at full resolution?

That won't help.

The amount of DOF and purposely noisy post processing make this game a clear candidate for the use of VRS.

 

[PSman1700]

 

[BRiT]

DF Article @ https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfo...anding-animation-bugs-adds-new-graphics-modes

Halo Infinite's Season 2 patch fixes long-standing animation bugs, adds new graphics modes
Strong progress - but serious frame-pacing and VRR issues remain.

Halo Infinite was rough around the edges on release with animation issues, frame-pacing woes and extra problems in cutscenes. Some issues were tackled post-launch, but it's with the release of the Season 2 patch that some long-standing issues have finally been resolved. We took a look at the fixes that 343 Industries has put in place on PC and Xbox Series X/S, covering animation, cutscenes and graphical modes, and identified some lingering issues with frame-pacing, v-sync and VRR that unfortunately still persist.

Let's start with the good stuff first: Halo Infinite makes a much better first impression on PC, Series X and Series S, thanks to fixes to long-standing issues with the game's pre-rendered cutscenes. After the patch, colours and black levels are now correct and the pre-rendered video sequence plays back with proper frame-pacing, making it feel much smoother and more polished as a result. This might not sound like a big deal, but this sequence cost a lot of money to make, it's key to the game's initial story-telling and for it to present the way it did at launch is a mystery. Still, the problem's now solved - and the improvement is palpable: it looks right, the washed out look is gone and the jerky playback issues are finally fixed.

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[HolySmoke]

The performance of this game is really strange. It has big black bars so it already reduces the pixels to render. But maybe the black bars are just post-processing and get rendered. But even that wouldn't describe the bad performance on all systems.
VRR for the rescue shouldn't be used like this. An optional 30fps lock would be a good idea for this game.
The performance is especially interesting because of the resolution difference between xsx and xss. While the xsx uses 4k (well almost and the black bars...) and the xss 1440p (same here, black bars) it seems like the issue is inside of the engine. From the raw resolution numbers, I would expect that XSS would run worst but funny enough, it runs best. So there seems to be some code inside, that doesn't scale that well with the resolution.

I'm not sure what the issue is on console but the game flies even on my ancient i7-3770 + 1060 PC. It seems entirely bound by resolution and runs in the 150-200fps range at 720p. My newer 9900k then takes it even further into the ~300fps range when removing the GPU bottleneck.

I also noticed that VRR seems broken in this game on my Xbox. I don't know if it's my display but there's visible tearing and the overlay never fluctuates from 60hz.

 

[Jay]

Halo Infinite's Season 2 patch fixes long-standing animation bugs, adds new graphics modes
Strong progress - but serious frame-pacing and VRR issues remain.

I never got to watch all off it, but there was a recent GDC Halo slipstream rendering presentation.
I'm guessing it's probably inherent in the way that its processing the frames. So wouldn't be an easy fix.
Hopefully will get sorted soon though as that's the last really big issue, be nice for it all to be sorted for co-op etc.

 

[BRiT]

Moved all the Sales discussion out to the sales thread @ https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...les-rumours-and-anecdotes-2022-edition.62709/

 

[Riddlewire]

The Hyperscan has no games, John.

 

[BRiT]

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfo...s-ps5-remake-hitman-3-rt-and-starfields-delay

DF Direct Weekly on The Last of Us PS5 remake, Hitman 3 RT and Starfield's delay
Plus: thoughts on the controversial PS Plus games line-up.

Is The Last of Us being remade for PS5 - but is it really arriving this year? Do Hitman 3's ray tracing hardware requirements make sense? And what's up with the PlayStation Plus games lineup? These answers to these questions - and more! - are all covered in this week's Digital Foundry Weekly show, hosted this time by Rich, John and Alex.

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[PSman1700]

Thanks for the FSR2.0 on console coverage. Aswell your conclusion that dlss is both faster and higher quality, tensor hw/ML being very usefull.

Edit: John's killing it, Unreal 1 and Doom 3 RT treatment. Just what i want too.

 

[davis.anthony]

Some guy on Twitter tested FSR2.0 cost on 6700XT using a profiler and found it took ~1.4ms

https://twitter.com/x/status/1529209745483399168

 

[BRiT]

Some guy on Twitter tested FSR2.0 cost on 6700XT using a profiler and found it took ~1.4ms

Nice find. One of the follow-up tweets says most of the time after the 1.4ms is from post-processing shaders running at output resolution [4K versus 1440p].

 

[davis.anthony]

Nice find. One of the follow-up tweets says most of the time after the 1.4ms is from post-processing shaders running at output resolution [4K versus 1440p].

Looking at some old presentations from Gorilla Games they're checkerboard implementation in Horizon Zero Dawn was ~1.8ms on PS4 Pro.

 

[Riddlewire]

Does the original Xbox One still have what it takes to run modern cross-gen games?
The Xbox One S replaced the original hulking Xbox One set-top box design back in 2016 with improved silicon, a slightly overclocked GPU and a far superior design - but where does that leave the original 'Durango' model console when playing the latest cross-gen games? Oliver Mackenzie finds out.

Great video from Oliver.
Wish he had tested Dying Light 2, since that's a 2022 game that has to scale from base 8th gen up to top 9th gen machines.
I believe DF's DL2 video only used the One S for testing.

Add: I also wish DF would include performance tests of the Hybrid HDD that came with the Xbox One Elite model. Assuming they have one available.

 

[Cynicalking]

Does the original Xbox One still have what it takes to run modern cross-gen games?
The Xbox One S replaced the original hulking Xbox One set-top box design back in 2016 with improved silicon, a slightly overclocked GPU and a far superior design - but where does that leave the original 'Durango' model console when playing the latest cross-gen games? Oliver Mackenzie finds out.

Great video from Oliver.
Wish he had tested Dying Light 2, since that's a 2022 game that has to scale from base 8th gen up to top 9th gen machines.
I believe DF's DL2 video only used the One S for testing.

Add: I also wish DF would include performance tests of the Hybrid HDD that came with the Xbox One Elite model. Assuming they have one available.

There was an Xbox One Elite?

NVM Didn't find much info at first but just did. First I've heard of it.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Nice find. One of the follow-up tweets says most of the time after the 1.4ms is from post-processing shaders running at output resolution [4K versus 1440p].

Something which based on my experience with some DLSS supported games that clearly don't take that approach, I'm definitely in favour of. I'm sure it can depend on the effect, but it can really stand out when games that utilize reconstruction base those effects on the internal and not output res - far more than the incidents of ghosting imo.

 

[PSman1700]

PlayStation Plus PS1/PS2/PSP Classic Games Emulators Tested - And They're Not Good Enough

 

[BRiT]

DF Article @ https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfo...ssic-games-emulators-simply-arent-good-enough

Sony's new PlayStation Plus classic games emulators simply aren't good enough
The first PS1, PSP and PS2 titles tested on PS5.

This week, Sony has started rolling out the new PlayStation Plus service with its various tiers including classic games such as PlayStation 1, 2 and PSP titles. Thus far, however, the service is only available in Asian territories. Thankfully, with help from backers of the DF Supporter Program, we have access and have spent time with Sony's official emulation for the original PlayStation, PlayStation 2 and PSP. Consider this a preview of sorts as it may not reflect the experience of UK/EU/US gamers, but it is our first insight into the nuts and bolts of the emulation - and there are clearly major issues the platform holder has to address.

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