Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]

[chris1515]

Yes compared to others open world games on consoles (AC, Horizon, Far Cry, RDR etc.) the alphas + particles + vegetation and their LOD system (combined with generous PC-like FOV) can be really impressive. But obviously this has a high rendering cost.

It's such a pity the environment / monster design, artstyle and lighting are so bad and even more a pity when most of those things actually don't rely that much on rendering power. Just look at what From Software can do with environment design, lighting and artstyle on a 1.8tf machine (Bloodborne, Elden ring). It's all about creative direction that is incredibly weak and disappointing from SE after the stellar FF15.

You can push this on PC later. I find the compromise they made not good at all.

EDIT: Imo this is a fail on technical side and artstyle side. When the choice made the 60 fps mode looking so bad this is a problem like it was with performance mode of HFW before patch.

 

[Inuhanyou]

FF16 looks dated visually. A lot better than Forspoken though.

I don't think so, FF16 looks properly current gen

I am really disappointed with what happened with Forspoken. The people who worked behind it probably put their blood and sweat on it and then development woes and deadlines downscaled the project.
The downgrade is too big. The game is a mixture of quality and mediocricy as if visual elements had to be patched hastily on top of initial test production. I dont understand what happened.
How from the initial reveal, it came to this is perplexing because apparently features, high quality assets and render implementations were originally there. So what exactly happened? The original trailer was at least on par with Horizon Zero Dawn at it's worst and actually looking better at it's best.

Downgrades in many games is worrying and it is equally apparent in Tekken 8 too. The initial trailer showed much higher character polycounts, much more advanced lighting, significantly more realistic shaders especially on skin, and then the new gameplay trailers demonstrate a huge downgrade in pretty much everything. I wasnt impressed by the least. A stark contrast from my initial excitement.

This trend of showing something super impressive and next gen and then giving us a final product that looks half as good is very very annoying.

It's not like such things are new in game development (watch dogs...)

But I think the situation here is reversed from most of the console cases we have seen in the past.

Rather than making games on high end PC and having to scale it back to console like traditional downgrade in previous gens, consoles like PS5 and series X have become so strong that it becomes an actual studio resources problem to make games at such higher fidelity as a whole.

So dev issues will become more common if they are not properly managed, funded and supplied with enough staff through out development

It comes down to using ps5 hw for initial trailers vs having to scale back for resource/wider market reasons when making the actual game itself I think. Tekken 8 still has to be configured for machines up and down the stack and able to be created seamlessly without issues asset wise, so simplifying the content creation makes sense for them.

As for something like forspoken, it seems like it, like Gotham knights, faced a lot of development difficulties trying to actually utilize current gen technologies in general, as we can see many of their attempts are outright broken or not functioning and not even optimized properly as we can see with what will likely be the PC ports issues.

I mean Arkham knight looks much better than Gotham knights just at a glance and it was a relatively early PS4 game. They pretty much just dumped all the next gen hw power into a native 4k resolution with some tacked on RT effects due to not being able utilize the hardware effectively, just like forspoken. And again we saw pc issues.

 

[Nesh]

I don't think so, FF16 looks properly current gen

It's not like such things are new in game development (watch dogs...)

But I think the situation here is reversed from most of the console cases we have seen in the past.

Rather than making games on high end PC and having to scale it back to console like traditional downgrade in previous gens, consoles like PS5 and series X have become so strong that it becomes an actual studio resources problem to make games at such higher fidelity as a whole.

So dev issues will become more common if they are not properly managed, funded and supplied with enough staff through out development

It comes down to using ps5 hw for initial trailers vs having to scale back for resource/wider market reasons when making the actual game itself I think. Tekken 8 still has to be configured for machines up and down the stack and able to be created seamlessly without issues asset wise, so simplifying the content creation makes sense for them.

As for something like forspoken, it seems like it, like Gotham knights, faced a lot of development difficulties trying to actually utilize current gen technologies in general, as we can see many of their attempts are outright broken or not functioning and not even optimized properly as we can see with what will likely be the PC ports issues.

I mean Arkham knight looks much better than Gotham knights just at a glance and it was a relatively early PS4 game. They pretty much just dumped all the next gen hw power into a native 4k resolution with some tacked on RT effects due to not being able utilize the hardware effectively, just like forspoken. And again we saw pc issues.

Its better if they show realistically what is achievable, instead of aiming the sky and presenting us how the game would have been ideally

 

[Inuhanyou]

Its better if they show realistically what is achievable, instead of aiming the sky and presenting us how the game would have been ideally

While you are right, it's also true that devs are under pressure to also hype through marketing just like always in addition to not actually knowing the issues they would run into during development. So perhaps at the time they made something like verticle slice(the first trailer) and thought "we can totally do this" and then later are like "crap we totally overestimated our ability to put out this kind of fidelity across an entire game with our staff and budget in a reasonable time frame"

 

[Nesh]

While you are right, it's also true that devs are under pressure to also hype through marketing just like always in addition to not actually knowing the issues they would run into during development. So perhaps at the time they made something like verticle slice(the first trailer) and thought "we can totally do this" and then later are like "crap we totally overestimated our ability to put out this kind of fidelity across an entire game with our staff and budget in a reasonable time frame"

The marketing thing is a big problem. It routinely lies to the consumer to increase sales. I give a slack to the company only in case of unexpected issues.
But in the case of Tekken I give no excuse. It is a fighting game, with each trailer being only a few months apart.

 

[Dr. Nick]

 

[cwjs]

This is not like other games have good character assets and environment scale and run much better. Horizon Forbidden West have good environment scale and run much better. I won't talk about Death Stranding 2. Another open world with an impressive GPU based particles system is Ghost of Tsushima, it is used for the leaves and for NPC impostor.

Yeah sure death stranding, a game coming out years from now from one of the industry’s most skilled studios, looks better. Still impressed by the crazy dense seemingly lit particles, it’s a cool effect thst it looks like a lot of good work was done in service of.

 

[chris1515]

At least the game will stay the first Direct Storage title and it is great. Developer will have all tools to use better fast storage everywhere.

 

[Dampf]

It doesn't matter if its just loading times. Devs have to use it for texture loading (preferably in combination with sampler feedback streaming) that will be a game changer.

 

[Inuhanyou]

Yeah sure death stranding, a game coming out years from now from one of the industry’s most skilled studios, looks better. Still impressed by the crazy dense seemingly lit particles, it’s a cool effect thst it looks like a lot of good work was done in service of.

Square enix is no slouch in terms of technical ability, kojimas studio is definitely not somehow more advanced than them. The people specifically in luminous studio seem to have issues for various reasons but I wouldn't say it's down to lack of technical knowhow

 

[chris1515]

 

[BRiT]

Published Article @

Xbox Series S vs ray tracing: the story so far

The Xbox Series S is, on paper, every bit as feature-rich as the Series X. It's based on the same fundamental RAM, stor…

www.eurogamer.net

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Xbox Series S vs ray tracing: the story so far​

Support is thin on the ground - but there is promise for the future.

The Xbox Series S is, on paper, every bit as feature-rich as the Series X. It's based on the same fundamental RAM, storage, CPU, and GPU technologies - which of course means that it is ray tracing capable. You can absolutely get RT acceleration on the system, just like any other RDNA 2-based hardware platform. In practice, it's a bit more complicated. The Series S has a modest 4TF GPU paired with a meagre 10GB of RAM, which makes it challenging to implement complex ray-tracing effects on the console. Most recent games lack ray-tracing on Series S, even if they pack one or more effects on Series X and PS5.

Series S ray-tracing games are so scarce, even two years in, that you can almost count meaningful implementations on two hands. By my count there are just 15 titles in total that use hardware or software ray tracing techniques on the platform, though perhaps there are some low-profile titles we've missed (and maybe there's a case for Gears 5-style screen-space-based global illumination). While the diversity of RT titles might not be there, that's not to say that there isn't software on Series S where ray tracing isn't key to the experience - and by reckoning, there are three experiences where the technology is present and correct on the junior Xbox and works beautifully.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition is the standout example. The per-pixel RTGI is very high quality, realistically shading scenes and ensuring that everything looks grounded and correct within the game world. There's a consistency to the lighting that really impresses here, and is a cut above most titles that rely on precalculated solutions. Dynamic objects like characters particularly impress, with rich and grounded lighting. Stacked up against its last-gen predecessor, the improvements are hugely obvious. Metro Exodus used a real-time lighting system in prior console versions as well, although the hardware wasn't capable of handing in anything more than a relatively basic GI pass. RTGI is totally transformative to the general look of the game - and the fact we're looking at a 60fps game (albeit one that can run at a very low internal resolution) is another remarkable aspect to the game.

...

 

[Cyan]

the performance of the future Steam Deck 2

 

[Cyan]

some reviews of Dead Space are out, but shader compilation shouldn't be an issue, I guess.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1618681452983615488

 

[Dampf]

Really hard to find out how a game might run on my 2060 laptop nowadays. I have the performance of a 3050 but less VRAM. So does Dead Space run good with 6 GB VRAM? Computerbase only tests 8 GB cards and up now. Reviewers should get their priorities straight. Instead of testing a 2060 Super and a 2070 at the same time (WHY? They perform identical...) Replacing one of these cards with a 6 GB 2060 would be much more useful to gamers.

Really hope @Dictator considers testing the 6 GB 2060 in games again for people like me. Not to mention its the most popular RTX card on Steam!

 

[Dr. Nick]

 

[Inuhanyou]

Confirmation they are already using FSR2 and switched over to it after using frostbites checkerboard solution originally.

So they are using DRS, FSR2 and VRS all in combination with one another, and their VRS implementation is messing up the image quality. John even compared the IQ distortion to doom eternal on the switch which doesn't do it any favors.

 

[Globalisateur]

Yes this whole and inevitable VRS mess (big gap between manufacturer promises and what gamers actually get) reminds me that sometimes developers really lose focus on what really matters (but I think it's due to them working too much!).

It's similar with the lack of self reflection in Fortnite on PS5 / Series. In the pursuit of one aspect of the graphics, they completely omit what used to be the most important (our own reflection that even a potato hardware like N64 could perfectly render in Mario 64). Here to gain a few % of performance they create an outcome (fist sized pixels!) that we thought we'd never see again since PS1 era.

Also John confirmed in this case XSS can't do RT because of a lack of memory. Direct from the developer.

 

[Inuhanyou]

memory requirement is only gonna increase but this also shows merit of software solutions

 

[Seanspeed]

memory requirement is only gonna increase but this also shows merit of software solutions

Shader/compute demands are only going to go up as well. Series S is going to age badly. Devs will make it work, but I can see it getting more and more neglected over time as devs tire of the extra work needed to make the necessary cutbacks. Omitting ray tracing is gonna be one of the go-to ways to do this as it's gonna instantly provide a large bump in headroom. I also expect plenty of Series S versions over time to lack Performance/Quality options, in favor of a simple 30fps default.