That’s fine and that’s not what I’m arguing at all. It’s allowed to look alright and perform poorly. What I’m arguing is the notion that this game is impressive from a visuals or rendering perspective because it’s not. I don’t think its visuals or performance is acceptable based on the machine it’s running on.
Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]
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snc
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I mean we cant know this, didny notice antyhing so cpu heavy on starfield presentation that we would all said yeah, its anazing xsx cpu is not enough to deliver >30fps
VFX_Veteran
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I've also seen the direct and I can't tell one way or the other with the planets that were shown. How can you determine it? There was no actual gameplay of full exploration of one of those planets to make any assessment that's being argued here.
You can't dismiss procedural analytical operations as non-impressive. They completely depend on what they are doing. For example, a procedural shader is much more complex than a baked out representation of a procedural into a 2D texture map. We have no idea about that game engine and what it entails. To infer any information without actually having experience developing in a game engine or working on their team is coming off as an armchair developer.
Wrong, there are more instances in the direct. Another screenshot I posted had the same issue.
That’s certainly an interesting way to interpret that….. Games in my opinion is about intelligently merging technology and art to produce the best output possible. It’s the virtual world of “make belief”. To use an f1 example, your line of thinking reminds me of the like of thinking behind the Mercedes w13. Huge technological steps with an innovative cooling system for the engine. A new radical design that was supposed to be fastest in the simulator. They brought it to the track at Barcelona testing and it was shit. Way slower than Redbull. Lost the championship after winning 8 in a row. Huge huge error that they still haven’t recovered from… Focusing on the technology over the output is wrong because the technology is a tool to accomplish a desired output. Doing so leads to giant errors like the w13 or in this case, starfields visuals.
I mean, we’re all entitled to our opinions I guess.
I dunno, maybe we should ask hello games how they accomplished it. Obviously they don’t have “real-time GI” but they managed to find a way to light their environments….
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They showed some exploration in the direct and the planets did not look like they had 15000km diameter of explorable play space. Like I said, if I’m wrong, I’ll gladly admit it.
I don’t consider procedural generation to be impressive because its primary benefit is to the developer not the end user. It allows the developer to save time and resources while creating more content. Hooray for the developers but as an end user, unless it leads to a better experience for me, it’s of no benefit. Watch dogs legion had this system where you could recruit any Npc or take over any npc. Animations were procedural if I recall, all npcs had their own lives, etc. One of the worst games I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing.
Can it lead to a better end user experience? Of course but from what I’ve seen from Starfield, I do not think that will be the case.
VFX_Veteran
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The small slice of the game that you've seen is not going to be completely accurate. Hopefully when the game comes out you can retract your assumptions.
In any case, if you are looking for a true next-gen graphical experience, I'm afraid it's only been CP2077 OD mode. All the other games that have come out this generation is using last gens graphics features + added in ray-tracing blurps that aren't used to their full capacity to make a transformative leap in visuals.
I'm not sure I follow your argument at all. Being impressive and being acceptable are 2 different things.
The one thing I'm quite surprised to have not yet seen in all the Starfield 30fps discussion is the role the CPU, it's L3 cache, memory bandwidth and memory latency will have to play.
In general, the more open and persistent the world, the heavier the pressure on this half of things.
Bethesda's games are notoriously heavy on the 'persistent simulation' aspect of things, and historically they have been super heavy, if not the 'heaviest' on all of the above.
Trying to get Fallout 4 VR performing at a solid 120 or 144fps has been a struggle for years and remains so even now, almost 6 years after launch. (it came out in 2017!) It's largely CPU, cache, and memory bandwidth bound. The cache, latency, and memory bandwidth of the CPU side of this gen of consoles is where they have the largest deficit compared to desktop CPUs too.
Just look at Cyberpunk 2077 on the Xbox One X / PS4 Pro, a title that was spectacularly well multi-threaded and probably the absolute best case scenario for the 8 little Jaguar-class cores. It's likely a less ambitious simulation on the CPU side than Starfield, and it ate those Jaguar cores for breakfast.
Time will tell, of course, and we will have to wait for PC benchmarks with CPU, memory, and cache scaling to see the full picture, but don't be surprised if the GPU wasn't the limiting factor here. I expect the AMD v-cache CPUs to clean up, as well as it being very sensitive to memory bandwidth/latency.
In general, the more open and persistent the world, the heavier the pressure on this half of things.
Bethesda's games are notoriously heavy on the 'persistent simulation' aspect of things, and historically they have been super heavy, if not the 'heaviest' on all of the above.
Trying to get Fallout 4 VR performing at a solid 120 or 144fps has been a struggle for years and remains so even now, almost 6 years after launch. (it came out in 2017!) It's largely CPU, cache, and memory bandwidth bound. The cache, latency, and memory bandwidth of the CPU side of this gen of consoles is where they have the largest deficit compared to desktop CPUs too.
Just look at Cyberpunk 2077 on the Xbox One X / PS4 Pro, a title that was spectacularly well multi-threaded and probably the absolute best case scenario for the 8 little Jaguar-class cores. It's likely a less ambitious simulation on the CPU side than Starfield, and it ate those Jaguar cores for breakfast.
Time will tell, of course, and we will have to wait for PC benchmarks with CPU, memory, and cache scaling to see the full picture, but don't be surprised if the GPU wasn't the limiting factor here. I expect the AMD v-cache CPUs to clean up, as well as it being very sensitive to memory bandwidth/latency.
arandomguy
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That seems like a subjective game play preference.
Bethesda knows it's audience and a core appeal for their games for a lot of users is they can basically live in the that one single game with hundreds to thousands of hours. That type of game play is simply not practically possible with a heavy reliance on procedural content.
arandomguy
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From my experience in the beta test with 16GB system memory at medium (? cant' remember) settings the game would actually hard crash if had a limited page file size which does suggest it was pushing over 16GB system memory.
Unique assets from the cosmetic system?
arandomguy
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I brought this up actually a few pages back but no pick up.
In term of the actual discussion from my understanding the simulation aspect and game logic isn't entirely the issue in terms of CPU (and memory latency demands) of Bethesda's games. The rendering setup requirements are I believe are quite heavy. For instance in terms of draw calls Bethesda's games are quite high and due to the gameplay systems they pursue as well as how they author content (which as a by product enables the rather accessible modding) from my understanding causes some limitations in terms of optimizations with respect to lowering draw calls.
But Starfield will be their first DX12 game, so we will have to see what impact that has in this aspect. Which in itself could also be a problem in terms of their first foray into DX12.
I'm not sure about that from a technical perspective. Current gen consoles have a much closer gap relative to todays CPUs than the PS4 era Jaguars had to the PC CPUs back then. Even prior the PS4's launch we had PC CPUs with something like >x4 the per thread performance (and that's with the massive OC headroom back then) whereas we're only just reach maybe x2 now relative to the console CPUs.
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Sorry, I should clarify. What I meant by that is that I don’t think it’s impressive based on the machine it’s running on.
The PU only has 4 planets , 9 moons and a planetoid. The majority of the locations in star citizen are small and devoid of things to do. I am a backer who has always had access and has tried multiple times to get into the broken mess of a game.
I am not putting star citizen down. Its an unfinished product with a fraction of the content that starfield has and the game has been in development for an additional 3 years over starfield. Only one of these games is releasing now. Star citizen can be the second coming but if it takes 20 years to release we may be playing starfield 2 at the launch of star citizen.
Star citizen is great a tech demo but its not a game yet
Yea and I can do the same with star citizen within a 15 minute gaming session and I have a 3080 + ryzen 7700x + 64gigs of ddr 5 and 8gb/s nvme to put it on. Game struggles to get 30fps for me at 1440p inside of any of the ports on far superior hardware to star citizen.
No man sky is a game that failed at launch. It was unplayable on amd hardware at launch. The prototype for NMS started in 2011 and then full development started in 2012. The game didn't even launch with all the features it promised.
I mean here is NMS
They show the original release and it was a huge mess and even with this patch it still had problems and that is outside of its controversial promises that weren't met like multiplayer . Not only that but the graphics don't touch Starfield.
As for what they did 8 years ago and console specs. Remember Bethesda was a PC house. The first console game for them was a port of Morrowind for the xbox. large developers will develop for future hardware not already existing hardware that will not be the target for them when the game releases. That is why you can see large graphical jumps from the last bethesda wrpg .
Here is Bethesda's last wrpg on console Fallout 4
and here is benchmarks. Its 1080p temporal aa . You can see the game can't even lock on to a 30fps and I have seen as low as 24fps .
Starfield is a generational leap for Bethesda.
A reason why there can be mismatching shadows on a planet that I can think of is not necessarily two light sources (two suns), rather two techniques meshing together.
Planetary Terrain can use height map based Ray marched shadows which are cheap and have near Infinite range - but that would only affect the underlying terrain. Any normal assets scattered ontop of the Terrain (Like the big Alien Arch Thing) would use Shadow Maps.
Depending on the Set Up, they could misalign or Update at different Rates.
I agree. I'm not making any assertions about the engine - only analysing a piece of evidence for my take on it. (I haven't actually watched the presentation yet
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That’s fine; apparently only one of us has played and stress tested the game and they’re keen to point out how unimpressive it is by using this edited video Direct that could span months of builds as proof of their results.I agree. I'm not making any assertions about the engine - only analysing a piece of evidence for my take on it. (I haven't actually watched the presentation yet
Subtlesnake
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Your original claim was that Starfield represents "a colossal mismanagement of resources". That's a lot stronger than the claim that it is merely not impressive, and gives the impression that Bethesda are being actively negligent in their decisions.
I don't get the impression DF or people in general are blown away by Starfield's graphics. John was comparing them to previous Bethesda titles, not what we have seen in UE5 demos, and his claim was simply that through the art style and the specific technical tradeoffs they made, they can now produce scenes that are truly beautiful. That's compatable with the claim that Starfield will not be the "best looking" next-gen title and even that the technical underpinnings are not in themselves "impressive". Indeed in the video they talk about how Bethesda is relying on a lot of old school techniques and then go on to criticise elements of the presentation such as the character rendering.
The main message I took away is that Starfield looks good for a Bethesda game and that the performance can be justified by the sacrifices involved in creating a procedurally generated world with an NPC simulation layered on top. You can not be impressed by what Bethesda is doing technically and also not think that it represents "a colossal mismanagement of resources". Indeed given that we have basically no information on how the game performs in different areas I think it's essentially impossible to assess how well Bethesda is managing the resources they have. As I said, the areas you found visually unimpressive could be running at super high FPS compared to other parts of the game.
AMD Radeon RX 7600 vs Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 vs Intel Arc A750: the 1080p graphics shoot-out
As price cuts dominate the entry-level GPU market, we bench them all to see which is the best budget GPU.
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Flappy Pannus
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AMD Radeon RX 7600 vs Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 vs Intel Arc A750: the 1080p graphics shoot-out
As price cuts dominate the entry-level GPU market, we bench them all to see which is the best budget GPU.
Goddamn Rich rules these videos.
The only aspect I would have liked to see covered with the problematic older DX11 titles on Arc is to see if DXVK could help some of the more egregious failings. That's not to say Arc shouldn't be critiqued heavily for its lack of improvement in some legacy titles, heck Intel is already using DXVK in some DX9 titles (I think Counterstrike?), so if say DXVK can help Unity, Intel should be forcing the Vulkan layer already.
Just to give a heads up though that some titles can be 'saved' through a little .dll drop-in until Intel officially addresses them - assuming they ever will. Arc is still too finicky for me to recommend it anyone outside of hobbyists who expect to deal with this stuff though, and the 8GB crippling that card is a big concern as well that I haven't seen addressed in other reviews.
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