Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2022]

Any good examples you can think of a game and an area where I could see if disocclusion stuff is happening? Preferably a game where I can turn of TAA to double check?

 

DF Direct Weekly #45: Microsoft/Activision, RX 6500 XT, Kingdom Hearts on Switch, FF7 Classic 60FPS!

 

I went back to get screenshots of this with no luck. I think I might have hit a refresh range in my VRR monitor where pixel response is much slower compared to without DLSS/native res rendering and mistakenly thought of it as disocclusion artifacts

 

no 40 fps mode, no dynamic res, slighlty better draw distance, underwhelming port edit: tough loading times are great from over 40s to less than 3s

 

Slightly more than I was expecting but still pretty bare bones. The win here is we can finally get it on PC.

 

How is this not a free upgrade. It's not about the money, it's just the fact that they basically unlocked the framerate, pushed a toggle or two up, and selling this for $10 if you already have it. Meh.

 

The old Sony died end of 2019. The new Sony is more like a new Ubisoft or Activision. Cash grab mode and all. PS3/PS4 era is over. Just move on and accept Sony is now Activision (or Microsoft, whatever) 2.0.

 

Ok. It’s really not that deep, but I do share the frustration.

 

thats a good point, in the end we got plenty free 60fps updates and 10$ upgrade is still better than full price games

 

For $10 it’s not that bad, surely some work had to be done to support 120fps, improved motion blur, dualsense haptics, rebuilt data for PS5 etc. It’s very clearly an attempt to sell some more copies now with the movie coming out though

 

So they are seling the update for $10 for the disks I own for PS4? I dont get it

 

I take your point, but it should not be shocking that companies want to make money. This kind of work is not free. If companies do this work for free then they are spending money they can not recover. Good will does not pay the bills.

It's popular stuff, and I definitely appreciate Microsoft doing this, but I'm also a realist in that if a business unit cannot make a profit then that business unit may just go away. If your business unit is making losses it calls into question the reason your business unit even exists. Sony buried a bunch of non-profitable business units over five years starting 2011. Vaio PC were axed because they were not profitable. The 30+ Sony Ericsson phones released every year were axed because they were not profitable. All the Sony DSLRs? Massively rationalised.

They want money for the work they did to improve the game for a different console than you bought the game for. The wider market will decide whether this model is going to fly going forward. Like Oblivion's horse armour. There should be a discussion predicated on the commercial realities. And by discussion I do not mean fanboys, I mean people will vote with their wallets and Sony will know who bought it on PS4, who has since upgraded to PS5, how many people are willing to pay to upgrade and how many all of these person play the PS4 and PS5 versions and how often, and whether this move was resulted in more play time.

It's a lot of numbers which we'll never see.

 

If thats how things go going forward in gaming, its ye, lol.

 

No no, you dont get me. I m not criticizing. I m trying to understand. I thought they rereleased a separate PS5 version.

 

Ah, gotcha. Yes, they have. You can buy a PS5 disc version on Amazon for £39.99 *Other retailers are available.

For those who own the PS4 games, the upgrade is £10. I have still to decide when I am going to update. I probably will because I have realised I bought Lost Legacy, started it but never completed it and I'm not super enthused to return to 30fps gaming.

 

I wonder if they improved the low res shadowmaps at all, I remember they looked surprisingly low res in some maps. TLOU 2 was a massive improvement in that regard for their engine.

 

The only thing making it underwhelming is the price. Honestly, 60fps updates at higher visual quality are great, and 120 fps is a bit unexpected.

Are we talking about the same company the sold PS2 games digitally after they removed PS2 backwards compatibility for the same console? Or the one that made proprietary memory cards for PSPgo and Vita that are basically the same physical size but incompatible? Or the one that remastered many of their PS3 titles on PS4 while claiming backwards compatibly wasn't important because nobody wants to play old games?

I don't disagree with this in concept, but it's annoying to pay for an upgrade for a game so that it can use the hardware you already purchased. Most of this update seams focused on framerate, and that's often a matter of changing some settings. If they were doing wholesale reworks of the rendering pipeline or art that would be a different thing altogether. QA is probably the most expensive part of it.

 

Or the one that said to believe in generations - as opposed to the competition - while going full on balls to the wall crossgen half a year later, with no end in sight basically.