Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2022]

[Remij]

Resident Evil's new PC patches compromise visuals and hit performance hard

If you're not using ray tracing, don't upgrade - it's that simple.

www.eurogamer.net

Resident Evil's new PC patches compromise visuals and hit performance hard​

If you're not using ray tracing, don't upgrade - it's that simple.

Great analysis from Alex. Didn't realize there was such a big difference in performance between the old build DX11 and new build DX12 with RT off. I would have liked to have seen a direct test of the old version in DX12 vs the new DX12 though.. just to be thorough and see if there have been any regressions from there. I've always ran RE engine games in DX12 since the very beginning, as I vaguely remember it feeling smoother.

Honestly, performance in the RE engine games has always been great for me so I've never had a reason to be disappointed with it. I've also always downsampled the game, so I've never really noticed those over-sharpening artifacts before either... but as per the video they're definitely there clear as day at native resolutions.

The RT implementation is obviously based around consoles... we knew that was going to be the case because this was an AMD marketed game. Still though.. the RT implementation looks much better on PC than it does on console.. and is a MASSIVE improvement over the SSR implementations.

-The Broken TAA and resolution slider is inexcusable. Basic testing should have caught this... they outright have settings which don't work in their game. This needs to be addressed!
-The removal of AO settings is inexcusable. Just have the game change to "on" when RT is enabled.. and allow the user to choose when it's set to disabled.
-The half/quarter rate enemy animations is inexcusable. There's absolutely no reason why this shouldn't have been addressed for this update..


Hopefully Capcom will address the broken settings at the very least. But we all know that would require a lot of people to specifically complain about the issue.. and Capcom tends to drag their feet pretty hard when it comes to this stuff.

Also, unfortunately for us, them offering the old version is probably as close to a "fix" as Capcom is going to give us..

 

[cwjs]

I would have liked to have seen a direct test of the old version in DX12 vs the new DX12 though.. just to be thorough and see if there have been any regressions from there. I've always ran RE engine games in DX12 since the very beginning, as I vaguely remember it feeling smoother.

Yeah, I agree. Is this a consequence of some big bug or error (like still doing a lot of the cpu work required for RT?) or a consequence render architecture changes designed to permit RT performance that unfortunately move bottlenecks elsewhere? I feel like if it had always been like this we would have heard outcry, the game runs great on ps5 and xsx so I find it hard to believe they just can't handle the memory management in dx12 (although there have been stranger things in AAA pc ports!)

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Damn, get their ass Alex.

The RT implementation is obviously based around consoles... we knew that was going to be the case because this was an AMD marketed game. Still though.. the RT implementation looks much better on PC than it does on console.. and is a MASSIVE improvement over the SSR implementations.

Only because it's not using reconstruction though. Simply upping the resolution of RT effects is a relatively easy optimization option for PC's that most RTX cards could handle.

-The removal of AO settings is inexcusable. Just have the game change to "on" when RT is enabled.. and allow the user to choose when it's set to disabled.

I think this is an error on Alex's part - that AO binary setting of on/off only appears when ray tracing is enabled. With Ray tracing disabled, you all the previous options, including AMD's Fidelityfx cacao.

Edit: Alex is aware. Note will be added in video description - not difficult to correct mistakes for some apparently.

However, HBAO+ is actually broken in RE7 - completely destroys the contrast curve, making it unusable in that game (seems to work in RE2/3). So another regression.

Oh, they also broke motion blur in RE7.

-The half/quarter rate enemy animations is inexcusable. There's absolutely no reason why this shouldn't have been addressed for this update..

Yup. Bizarre.

Also, unfortunately for us, them offering the old version is probably as close to a "fix" as Capcom is going to give us..

Yeah I'd be shocked if they bother.

 

[Jupiter]

I've hardly played Resident Evil 2 with the new update but I'm excited about Resident Evil 3. Normally I'm sensitive about oversharpening but I have problems seeing it in Resident Evil 3. God Of War was massivly oversharped especially with DLSS but DF said nothing there. DLDSR also only works with 100% smoothing from my point of view. The Anti-Aliasing from Resident Evil 2 and 3 isn't the greatest but it's clearly better than FXAA or none at all. There are temporal steps in it. Hair did not flicker for me in Resident Evil 3 at UHD.

The resolution scaling also works in Resident Evil 3. At 200 % in UHD I got a low framerate.

Two screenshots I just made a moment ago. Maximum settings, no chromatic aberration and TAA.


Resident Evil 2 screenshot

https://share-your-photo.com/img/752adf5f03.png

Resident Evil 3 screenshot

https://share-your-photo.com/img/170f7279de.png

 

[snc]

GT8 may change to dynamic conditions, and that will be a more apt comparison in terms of quality.

Hmm ? Gt7 has dynamic daytime on all tracks.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

The Anti-Aliasing from Resident Evil 2 and 3 isn't the greatest but it's clearly better than FXAA or none at all. There are temporal steps in it. Hair did not flicker for me in Resident Evil 3 at UHD.

I mean, "better than FXAA" is a ridiculously low bar for any TAA solution especially in 2022, but Alex said this. It's not like Monster Hunter Rise or some scenes in Re:Village where it isn't present at all, it's there - the PC version just has less accumulation than the console versions.

 

[PSman1700]

If you have the hardware go for the pc version.

 

[iroboto]

Hmm ? Gt7 has dynamic daytime on all tracks.

Welp. Lol it certainly does. Should have checked

 

[iroboto]

Welp. Lol it certainly does. Should have checked

yea I don't recall if either did the dynamic TOD via baked like Forza Horizon so it's changing every 10 minutes or something like that, they bake the level for 24 hours and it's just transitioning between baked lighting, or if is dynamic TOD as in real time calculated. That part is not quite clear to me.

Does anyone actually know? I'm jaded from the Horizon version.

 

[snc]

yea I don't recall if either did the dynamic TOD via baked like Forza Horizon so it's changing every 10 minutes or something like that, they bake the level for 24 hours and it's just transitioning between baked lighting, or if is dynamic TOD as in real time calculated. That part is not quite clear to me.

Does anyone actually know? I'm jaded from the Horizon version.

imo transition between baked lighting but who cares, I today finished first time 1h Spa race with full 24h transition and looks amazing

 

[iroboto]

imo transition between baked lighting but who cares, I today finished first time 1h Spa race with full 24h transition and looks amazing

I think the new FM is also like this (at least with some high probability). No one has really moved to real time global illumination since drive club

 

[Remij]

If you have the hardware go for the pc version.

Indeed. You can still force the PC version to look and/or run better than the console versions despite Capcom's best efforts. My preferred way to play these games is at 7680x3200 Ultrawide with RT on at 30fps. Sacrilege I know.. but this isn't a twitch shooter.. 30fps feels perfectly fine to me in these games.

Pristine image quality (at least to my untrained eyes!).. I'm going to get some supersampled AA whether Capcom likes it or not! Also no terrible 1/2 or 1/4 rate zombie animations.

Now I just need a new fix for removing the vignette since you could say there's not much purpose in Ultrawide when the vignette is so strong...haha

Oh, and another thing I would have liked to have seen and compared was load times pre and post patch. I had stated before that the load times was drastically improved from the previous version.. but I'm not so sure anymore. I just tested the beta DX11 build and the new update, and old build was ~4 seconds every sample I took.. while the new update was ~3 seconds. Totally splitting hairs here... although I guess my initial playthroughs of this game were on a 3.5GB/s Gen3 NVMe drive and not the 7GB/s Gen 4 drive I have now... so that may have attributed to my memory being what it is... but I ain't bothering testing that out lol.

 

[Lurkmass]

When doing these API comparisons (D3D11 vs D3D12) do they only ever do tests against just one hardware vendor ? In that case they may never be getting the full picture in these comparisons ...

I'm pretty sure some RE Engine games automatically select D3D12 by default on another HW vendor ...

 

[Jupiter]

I mean, "better than FXAA" is a ridiculously low bar for any TAA solution especially in 2022, but Alex said this. It's not like Monster Hunter Rise or some scenes in Re:Village where it isn't present at all, it's there - the PC version just has less accumulation than the console versions.

I think it's good when mistakes are addressed by such a prominent site as DF. Maybe companies will then take more care of graphical errors.

The low frame rate of the animations is not acceptable. Even 15 years ago I would have found something like that ridiculous.

As for the AA. For me, the game mostly flickers with bright metal shaders but I know other recent games that have much more problems here. Games like Death Stranding or Horizon Zero Dawn flickered much more without DLSS and hardly anyone said anything. I'm not happy with Battlefield 2042 either. I prefer more aggressive edge smoothing like RDR2's TAA. That looks cinematic. In contrast, the DLSS looked terrible in RDR2 with a lot of oversharpening. The DIvision 2 TAA and upscaling is also always a showcase product to me.

I would like to see Capcom implement DLSS into their games. It saves resources and looks better than the TAA in many games. To compute native high image resolutions is a waste of resources.

 

[Cynicalking]

When doing these API comparisons (D3D11 vs D3D12) do they only ever do tests against just one hardware vendor ? In that case they may never be getting the full picture in these comparisons ...

I'm pretty sure some RE Engine games automatically select D3D12 by default on another HW vendor ...

In RE2’s case, they’re 2 different builds of the game. Pre-RT patch only supports DX11, RT Build is DX12 only.

 

[Remij]

In RE2’s case, they’re 2 different builds of the game. Pre-RT patch only supports DX11, RT Build is DX12 only.

Huh? No, pre-patch supported both APIs. My Nvidia 2080ti defaults to DX12 in the pre-patch build.. but the option is there to change between DX12 and DX11.

Unless you mean to say that pre-patch is the only build that has DX11 support, and not that it "only supports DX11"?

 

[Cynicalking]

Huh? No, pre-patch supported both APIs. My Nvidia 2080ti defaults to DX12 in the pre-patch build.. but the option is there to change between DX12 and DX11.

Unless you mean to say that pre-patch is the only build that has DX11 support, and not that it "only supports DX11"?

I stand corrected. I didn't realize pre-patch had DX12 support too. Been a while since I booted up the game on my rig.

 

[see colon]

Didn't nVidia used to offer some sort of TAA at the driver level? I wonder what forcing that on would do to image quality and performance. If it still works, as I've found there are settings that do nothing on newer APIs.

 

[trinibwoy]

Didn't nVidia used to offer some sort of TAA at the driver level? I wonder what forcing that on would do to image quality and performance. If it still works, as I've found there are settings that do nothing on newer APIs.

MFAA? I’ve never seen it work even in older games.

 

[davis.anthony]

You could always use Nvidia's DSR for the game.