Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]

[function]

That is a seriously weak Series S port. Worse textures than base PS4. Quarter the res of Series X, with additional significant cutbacks to lighting, shadows and background detail.

Diablo 4 it ain't.

Game still looks great fun, but disappointing to see so much of the Series S potential going in the bin.

 

[see colon]

It isn't just the textures. In the short amount of PS4/Series S footage we got, the lighting looks better in the PS4 version. Although, maybe it's because the shading is enhanced by normal maps, and the resolution of those is lower. There are random textures that are better than or equal to PS4, too, like like Ryu's red cloth here, and his lips here. Though I think they might actually look more out of place compared to his lackluster skin texture. The lips timestamp is pretty telling, though. DOF mushes out the details in the red sash and part of his back, making the image look blurrier anyway. But look at his headband. It almost completely lacks the shading that maes it look like it has wrincles near the back of his head on Series S. And the texture on his shoulder is so low quality you can actually see a polygon seam where 2 low quality assets touch. And once you see it on Series S, you can see it on PS4, but it's much better hidden.

I would describe the Series S version as tuned for performance, but not optimized.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Oh no are you guys gonna start saying “bindless is why games are bad “ and “lazy devs used bindless” now? Please stop posting niche technical argument tweets about subjects you don’t understand, bindless has gigantic advantages alongside a few significant downsides like every popular technique.

Indeed, and as I keep pointing out in the context of other changes, bindless is basically required for raytracing.

On this particular topic though, residency management issues on Windows are largely the fault of the OS itself at this point, as Timothy noted. It is insane how terrible the interfaces for this exposed to the applications are in 2023. The OS still allocates VRAM as if it were some large chunk of contiguous physical addresses and any "large" resources (that are increasingly common for things like memory pools for stuff like virtual textures, virtual shadows and geometry/Nanite) are treated terribly and mess up the completely unnecessary attempt by Windows to lay out the "physical" memory in one big block. Because of Windows, you can get *fragmentation* in the made-up contiguous address space that it uses to allocate resident resources out of... All of the modern renderers and hardware support virtual memory for this but the OS and interfaces actually prevent you from doing the efficient thing here.

From a personal POV, this nonsense has caused no end of pain for the virtual shadow map physical page pool, particularly because it's common to have the editor and a game running at the same time on low-VRAM consumer GPUs in cases like Unreal Editor for Fortnite. We are hinting all the correct things to the OS but its internal heuristics just fall on their faces with modern engines and end up kicking out critical stuff like that page pool simply because it is a large allocation that it thinks it needs to make "contiguously", despite no GPU requiring that. Add on top of that, the budgets that the OS makes up for your application are often inaccurate and it will still do unexpected things even when the application is completely under the claimed budget. It is so bad that we had to do various work-arounds with 1:1 mapped tiled resources (that have a number of other limitations and issues) simply to get it to go down a different path in the OS and try and avoid some of the early 2000's-era heuristics.

I don't normally rant about the APIs because I've been on both sides and know that the problems are a lot more complex than they appear, but this is one area where it is actually the lack of development on the OS/GPU kernel holding everyone back from doing what they need to and creating problems that don't really exist. This isn't even a case of a "regression" with DX12 so much as the DXGI memory interfaces (which underlay both DX11 and DX12 and all the other APIs on Windows) are woefully inadequate for modern engines and content.

 

[chris1515]

@Dictator send appreciation to DF teams great content with input lag measurement.

 

[Nesh]

wait the game doesnt exist on One and One X??

 

[GuardHei]

Can't wait for DF to cover ff16's demo

Idk if it's the motion blur or the poorly implemented taa, but all the moving objects look really blurry. Usually when you lock on the enemy, all the surrondings become blurry which is the DOF we expect, but in this game, the locked enemy is hella blurry. What?

 

[Dictator]

Can't wait for DF to cover ff16's demo

Idk if it's the motion blur or the poorly implemented taa, but all the moving objects look really blurry. Usually when you lock on the enemy, all the surrondings become blurry which is the DOF we expect, but in this game, the locked enemy is hella blurry. What?
View attachment 9040

The game uses DRS at least in quality mode I see - and it Kind of flcikers between resolutions even with a completely still camera, causing the Game to Look Sharp then soft ad infinitum

Does it do that in Performance Mode?

 

[GuardHei]

The game uses DRS at least in quality mode I see - and it Kind of flcikers between resolutions even with a completely still camera, causing the Game to Look Sharp then soft ad infinitum

Does it do that in Performance Mode?

The training scene looks way softer than the starting area, so I suspect DRS is in place. I don't think I have spot resolution change when it's static, but I couldn't really tell if the blur comes from DRS or temporal reprojection.

 

[Globalisateur]

The motion blur in that demo is criminal.

 

[see colon]

wait the game doesnt exist on One and One X??

Street Fighter 6? It's PS4 exclusive for last gen. I'm not sure if Capcom just didn't want to bother with Xbox One or if there is some sort of contractual issue that prevents it's release, though my money is on Capcom not thinking it was financially responsible. Street Fighter 5 was a PS4 console exclusive, for context.

 

[function]

There has to be a point where we stop excusing shit Series S ports. Regardless of the crowd that will let any amount of shit go by.

 

[eastmen]

There has to be a point where we stop excusing shit Series S ports. Regardless of the crowd that will let any amount of shit go by.

People got upset when I said it was lazy devs. I don't think anyone here an defend the series s port running the same as the ps4 port.

 

[GuardHei]

The motion blur in that demo is criminal.

somehow the foreground (character) also incorrectly mixes with the background. didn't they fix this issue back in 2011?

 

[Globalisateur]

somehow the foreground (character) also incorrectly mixes with the background. didn't they fix this issue back in 2011?

Apparently they are still in the PS2 era for this game in many aspects. This demo just me wanted to play a legitimate modern (and great) game like Elden Ring.

 

[SmooTh]

 

[troyan]

Yes? No?

I dont think that the Xbox showcase was good. Most games are only coming in 2024 and for this year there is only Forza outside of Starfield.

 

[eastmen]

Yes? No?

I dont think that the Xbox showcase was good. Most games are only coming in 2024 and for this year there is only Forza outside of Starfield.

The show was the best out of all the showcases this year imo. Lost of first party stuff with a bunch of it coming out in the next year or two. I think capcom was the worse of the bunch

 

[Flappy Pannus]

I've linked to the timestamp where John asks them about how they're tackling PSO compilation stutter.

 

[see colon]

Yes? No?

I dont think that the Xbox showcase was good. Most games are only coming in 2024 and for this year there is only Forza outside of Starfield.

Cybperunk Phantom Liberty, Sea of Thieves Monkey Island, Jusant, Payday 3, Overwatch 2 Invasion, and Persona 5 Tactica are all this year. Those 6 games, plus Stafield and Forza, mean that 8 out of the 23 titles shown are 2023 titles. That's more than a third of the titles.

I don't think any of the showcases were great this year, though Xbox's was clearly the best IMO, and Capcom the worst. Devolver gets credit for having a good skit, but their games were underwhelming. All of them lack the pomp of a real E3 showcase.

 

[techuse]

Have to agree it was the best. Ubisoft would be the runner up. These were the only 2 companies to show anything that looked substantially better than last generation games.