Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]

[Inuhanyou]

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.

Oh absolutely, we are already seeing what your describing.

But I also think it shows value of novel solutions in regards to fundamental rendering like in ue5.

When your looking at a resource constrained platform like series s, and even PS5 and series x inevitably feeling long in the tooth in 4 or 5 years, being able to render like 10 times the polygons with nanite for a similar budget and lumen giving a good enough approximation of ray tracing, it's gonna allow for much better looking worlds at only a small portion of the cost of other current engines, plus a good enough ray tracing solution that will work even when hw RT can't even be added in the first place.

It will scale tremendously as devs get to full grips with it and last much longer than other traditional rendering engines unless they start looking in the same direction for updating their tech. So far we don't see much of that, and instead see devs abandoning their proprietary engines instead because keeping them modern and relevant is too hard on top of just creating the games which is already monumental undertaking

 

[cwjs]

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!).

Where's the gap? The game wants to render less pixels without lowering the entire screen's resolution unfiromly. The platforms with hardware VRS execute it slightly better than those without. That's the entire promise of the feature.

 

[iroboto]

Where's the gap? The game wants to render less pixels without lowering the entire screen's resolution unfiromly. The platforms with hardware VRS execute it slightly better than those without. That's the entire promise of the feature.

Considering it is a software solution largely, I don’t think manufacturers paid for them to do it this way. It was something they chose to do on their own, and their implementation problems therefore their own.

Agree that I don’t see how this is an IHV issue with the feature.

Having fine grained options to purposefully render less pixels is still going to be better than not having that option.

 

[Inuhanyou]

Where's the gap? The game wants to render less pixels without lowering the entire screen's resolution unfiromly. The platforms with hardware VRS execute it slightly better than those without. That's the entire promise of the feature.

I think he's talking about the idea of VRS itself being something that is supposed to be subtle in motion and barely noticeable for a good performance uplift.

it's not about software vs hardware. as John repeatedly says, as both implementations in this game are borked and even on PC it gives an unpleasing image from lower resolutions which isn't supposed to be the case.

Recent call of duty games have had VRS for a while and they do it right where there is pretty much zero perception to the naked eye regardless of platform.

It's a matter of implementation that is a failed promise.

Ideally, FSR2, DRS and VRS combined into games (or in UE5s case TSR, DRS and VRS) will last this entire generation. But the implementations need to be right.

 

[cwjs]

I think he's talking about the idea of VRS itself being something that is supposed to be subtle in motion and barely noticeable for a good performance uplift.

it's not about software vs hardware. as John repeatedly says, as both implementations in this game are borked.

Recent call of duty games have had VRS for a while and they do it right where there is pretty much zero perception to the naked eye.

It's a matter of implementation that is a failed promise.

Glob's original post clearly lays the blame at manufacturers (presumably amd/nvidia) -- I'm more generous to the idea that the implementation is bad here, but I also have some doubts about how quick DF and others are to accuse the developers of messing up. The game runs at a pretty solid 60 fps with crisp, high resolution characters, I think the solution is largely doing its job when compared against just rendering the whole scene at the low vrs resolution in the first place. Setting the shading rate purely based on the amount of direct light on the pixel seems a little excessively coarse, and maybe that was just a lack of time and can be improved in a future patch, but it really doesn't look that bad for a console game. Frostbite and the call of duty engine have different feature sets and different use cases.

(One big caveat: obviously this should be toggleable on PC, there's no way a 3080 or whatever can't render native 4k -- not providing a toggle is a straight up oversight imo)

 

[Inuhanyou]

I won't put words in his mouth, but I interpreted him as talking about the developer as he mentions them right after.

This iq certainly does not look good "for a console game" under any circumstance, especially on PS5 and series X. I'm not sure which console games you have been looking at recently. Just take a look at those two pictures and say they look any kind of acceptable.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1619264329517522946

This clearly isn't how it's supposed to look which is why the devs have said they are looking at it.

I'd rather this not be like horizon forbidden west where the performance mode had terrible IQ and there were a minority of people calling others ungrateful for calling it out and saying the hardware just can't take decent IQ with good performance.

Because what happened in that scenario was guerilla came back with a performance mode that fully fixed the issue and was able to keep the exact same performance profile. And that game is far more technically ambitious than this game.

We don't need people trying to dismiss issues that are clearly there when there's no reason to do so. No one is unaware of these being fixed boxes with limited resources. No one is expecting miracles. But we know the hardware is capable of better than what we are seeing in certain titles.

 

[cwjs]

I won't put words in his mouth, but I interpreted him as talking about the developer as he mentions them right after.

This iq certainly does not look good "for a console game" under any circumstance, especially on PS5 and series X. I'm not sure which console games you have been looking at recently. Just take a look at those two pictures and say they look any kind of acceptable.

Yeah, I mean, if you zoom in on the most down-resed part it looks bad, we've been over this with every game using VRS. I agree this is the game with the least subtle/most degraded IQ from vrs, but I think the game looks fine right now playing it. Some of you guys act like if you see one bit of the screen which is under 1080p it will kill you. Personally I suspect there are certain features which have an outsized fragment shading cost compared to their visual benefit which maybe could have been toned down instead of using such aggressive vrs, but I didn't work there and don't want to speculate too far -- really, the game looks good to fine. The parts of the image that are scaled down via vrs are noticably blurry and aliased, but it's just not that big of a deal, not the worst looking AAA game that released this month.


Edit: to clarify a bit more, look at some other screenshots of the game, like this other one john tweeted:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1618954011847319552

How does a game which supports as many decals on screen as ds, with as much dynamic lighting, with that many motion blur samples, with those volumetric fog particles (in the background) run at 60fps on ps5/xsx? Well, some bits are very low resolution!

Edit again: As I said in my first post, I do think the vrs is overly aggressive -- using only the direct light to drive the shading seems very coarse, especially seeing as many rooms are almost entirely directrly lit and so run at a much higher average resolution than other scenes. My expectation is that unless for some reason calculating a more complex VRS image is too expensive it can probably get much better in a patch -- there seems like plenty of headroom to render more pixels.

 

[Remij]

I don't know if it's just because I follow a lot of developers on Twitter, but I'm seeing a hell of a lot more people calling out PC stuttering issues than before. Alex and DF have definitely got people talking about it.. good or bad. The good being that it's bringing awareness to the issue.. the bad of course being that some people can jerks.

Even some developers themselves are essentially like "we focused a lot on shader compilation and optimization to ensure no (or minimal) stuttering and hope it passes the DF test" lol... Both Hi-Fi Rush and Dead Space developers have put forward sentiments like that. So I feel that the ball is rolling a bit. If you look at it, we got games from all the major engines doing shader pre-compilation steps. Unreal and Unity for general purpose engines.. which we see more and more developers utilizing the pre-compilation process. We have Frostbite, Anvil Next, Naughty Dog's Engine, Decima, RE Engine (Monster Hunter Rise) and a lot of other proprietary engines which do the same. When you break it down by studios, most of the bigger studios now understand the necessity. I'm sure Naughty Dog's TLOU Part 1 will do the exact same as the Uncharted Collection.. and I really hope Returnal's developers have understood the importance by now.

So hopefully in that regard, things are looking up. Forspoken Demo doesn't seem to have any shader compilation stutter issues for me either and it loads extremely fast. I think a new driver that I downloaded fixed the issues I had with it before, because before it was stuttering while traversing the overworld, and I deleted all the caches + driver caches and installed the new driver and it's been smooth sailing. I'm probably going to buy that game soon enough.

So that's all great, but Dead Space and of course other games as well, point to the next stuttering issue, which is also become more prevalent which is traversal stuttering. Ok, yes there are differences in memory management and how assets must be handled and streamed in... but honestly in Dead Space it's pretty ridiculous. There's no way a new game in 2023, which is essentially corridors, should be having issues loading in the next section without stuttering, especially on top of the like multi-core CPUs. Why is garbage collection such an issue on PC when it doesn't seem to be on console?

This again to me seems to come down to a QA issue where games aren't properly being profiled and acted upon by management. It's basically a "good enough" "we'll try to fix it later" situation... although it's anything but in reality. Developers go through all this effort to create a "seamless" world or experience... and you have massive stuttering issues while assets are loaded or cleared from memory which completely detracts from the experience.

The shader compilation struggle is far from over, but this issue also needs attention.. as in recent games like Dead Space and even The Callisto Protocol exhibit this behavior.

 

[yamaci17]

I just hope or wish DF also points out the lack of Dualsense support in those games. :/ Seems like they would be the only ones that could be our (the niche community that use Dualsense on PC, hi) voice. If it is a real hassle to support it... okay... I just want some answers however, as to how Asobo supported Dualsense fully in their A Plage Tale Requiem game. Or if it is really indeed a hassle, what kind of motivation Ubisoft had when adding adaptive triggers to their Rainbow 6 Siege, or Blizzard had when adding haptics+triggers to their Overwatch. These niche games (when it comes to using gamepad, that is) getting Dualsense support but games like Callisto/dead space not getting it just makes me... very sad. Something tells me that... if they already did the work for PS5... it should be relatively easy to migrate that work to the PC version. :/

 

[Remij]

Also, while I'm complaining.. what is it with 100GB+ download sizes from certain games these days on PC?

Gears 4 and 5 - 100GB+ each
COD games - 100GB+ each
Hitman - 100GB+ each
Master Chief Collection - 100GB+ total
Forza Horizon 4 and 5 - 100GB+ each
FF15 - ~150GB
Red Dead Redemption 2 - 150GB
Destiny 2 - 150GB+
Quantum Break 175GB+ with series download
COD Modern Warfare - 230GB
COD Black Ops Cold War - 250GB

Like WTF.. lmao. Ok I understand some have had DLCs and they've also been integrated into the base games at some point.. I get it.. but still these are massive downloads and commitments for people.

Some of these games visually don't look like they should be requiring THAT much space... So what's going on? Is it that the games are still designed on PC around having HDD support so there's duplicate copies of data stored around for quicker seeking/loading? Or are developers just simply not bothering compressing PC textures and audio to the same degree as they do on console? Or perhaps some other reason? What's going on there?

Downloading a 100GB+ game on the Steam Deck is certainly a commitment. It would be nice if developers could recompress some of these games or remove redundant data if that's what's actually going on here.. because while I'm all for games being those sizes... they have to visually or content-wise warrant it. I look at a game like RE2 Remake, and it's just 26GB.. looks visually fantastic, and runs like a literal dream. RE Village 29GB.. same thing. RE4 Remake will probably be in the 30-40GB range.. and that game has tons of different locations and assets to it.

I wonder what's going on? Consoles can't compress that much better outside of those potential reasons I pointed out, right?

 

[Nesh]

Also, while I'm complaining.. what is it with 100GB+ download sizes from certain games these days on PC?

Gears 4 and 5 - 100GB+ each
COD games - 100GB+ each
Hitman - 100GB+ each
Master Chief Collection - 100GB+ total
Forza Horizon 4 and 5 - 100GB+ each
FF15 - ~150GB
Red Dead Redemption 2 - 150GB
Destiny 2 - 150GB+
Quantum Break 175GB+ with series download
COD Modern Warfare - 230GB
COD Black Ops Cold War - 250GB

Like WTF.. lmao. Ok I understand some have had DLCs and they've also been integrated into the base games at some point.. I get it.. but still these are massive downloads and commitments for people.

Some of these games visually don't look like they should be requiring THAT much space... So what's going on? Is it that the games are still designed on PC around having HDD support so there's duplicate copies of data stored around for quicker seeking/loading? Or are developers just simply not bothering compressing PC textures and audio to the same degree as they do on console? Or perhaps some other reason? What's going on there?

Downloading a 100GB+ game on the Steam Deck is certainly a commitment. It would be nice if developers could recompress some of these games or remove redundant data if that's what's actually going on here.. because while I'm all for games being those sizes... they have to visually or content-wise warrant it. I look at a game like RE2 Remake, and it's just 26GB.. looks visually fantastic, and runs like a literal dream. RE Village 29GB.. same thing. RE4 Remake will probably be in the 30-40GB range.. and that game has tons of different locations and assets to it.

I wonder what's going on? Consoles can't compress that much better outside of those potential reasons I pointed out, right?

Its as if these games are redownloading the whole thing, not just portions to patch. Does it uninstall previous installations? Or do they add on top of the original installation?
Those are massive. I am curious why!
Was there an analysis about this? They make zero sense.
These are part of the technical issues that made me abandon gaming on PC.
We spend large amounts to get the max experience, and a smooth sail with new AAA games is never guaranteed, not because the horse power is not there, but because there is something going wrong at the back end.
It is also very confusing that often games running on DirectX 11 are performing better than if they are on 12. There must be something causing extra trouble for devs on how the OS and API's are working.
Because I can't really fathom that this is just "lazy dev" work.
Especially the stuttering has been a very common reoccurrence. At first glance it makes zero sense, considering how similar consoles and PCs are architecturally, and consoles have less of an issue while being less powerful.

 

[Inuhanyou]

Also, while I'm complaining.. what is it with 100GB+ download sizes from certain games these days on PC?

Gears 4 and 5 - 100GB+ each
COD games - 100GB+ each
Hitman - 100GB+ each
Master Chief Collection - 100GB+ total
Forza Horizon 4 and 5 - 100GB+ each
FF15 - ~150GB
Red Dead Redemption 2 - 150GB
Destiny 2 - 150GB+
Quantum Break 175GB+ with series download
COD Modern Warfare - 230GB
COD Black Ops Cold War - 250GB

Like WTF.. lmao. Ok I understand some have had DLCs and they've also been integrated into the base games at some point.. I get it.. but still these are massive downloads and commitments for people.

Some of these games visually don't look like they should be requiring THAT much space... So what's going on? Is it that the games are still designed on PC around having HDD support so there's duplicate copies of data stored around for quicker seeking/loading? Or are developers just simply not bothering compressing PC textures and audio to the same degree as they do on console? Or perhaps some other reason? What's going on there?

Downloading a 100GB+ game on the Steam Deck is certainly a commitment. It would be nice if developers could recompress some of these games or remove redundant data if that's what's actually going on here.. because while I'm all for games being those sizes... they have to visually or content-wise warrant it. I look at a game like RE2 Remake, and it's just 26GB.. looks visually fantastic, and runs like a literal dream. RE Village 29GB.. same thing. RE4 Remake will probably be in the 30-40GB range.. and that game has tons of different locations and assets to it.

I wonder what's going on? Consoles can't compress that much better outside of those potential reasons I pointed out, right?

Consoles deal with their own space issues trust me call of duty is not that much smaller. It's why I stopped buying call of duty games outright after a while. It's just not worth it. Especially when I'm just normally gonna play single player. we are a far cry from call of duty only being 6 gigs with all the base content in the 7th gen.

It's just certain games do certain things. And space isn't related to visuals in those cases, nor is performance

 

[davis.anthony]

I stopped caring about game sizes when I got fibre installed as I could download them in less than an hour rather than over a few days.

 

[Remij]

Consoles deal with their own space issues trust me call of duty is not that much smaller. It's why I stopped buying call of duty games outright after a while. It's just not worth it. Especially when I'm just normally gonna play single player. we are a far cry from call of duty only being 6 gigs with all the base content in the 7th gen.

It's just certain games do certain things. And space isn't related to visuals in those cases, nor is performance

It's only an issue for me on the Steam Deck really, I've got storage space in abundance on my PC.. but more than any of that it's whether the game actually has the content to validate the requirements. I dunno, it seems like some games do a far better job of this than others.

For example:
ME Legendary Edition - 120GB

(stand alone versions)
ME1 - 12GB
ME2 - 15GB
ME3 - 15GB

...now, yes I understand there's been improvements to the various games, they've enhanced some of the models and upres'd a bunch of textures, but I can't believe that there's been 78GB worth of texture, graphic, or audio upgrades over the course of this collection to justify the increase in install size... I feel like there's probably a lot of waste going on here and that things could be much more compact than they are.

 

[Remij]

I stopped caring about game sizes when I got fibre installed as I could download them in less than an hour rather than over a few days.

I have gigabit internet as well, and it's not about the download.. it's just the unnecessary waste of space or time. There's no way some of these games can't be better and more compressed than they are.. I refuse to believe it lol.

Unless of course someone can explain to be a legitimate reason why this might be the case.. which I'm open to.

 

[DavidGraham]

Regarding RT in Forspoken, ComputerBase says that RT ambient occlusion relies on the SSAO effect and works in tandem, which explains why it doesn't seem to do any thing. RT shadows also complement shadowmaps and screen space shadows, that's why they don't add much, just like the ones in Godfall.

 

[davis.anthony]

Unless of course someone can explain to be a legitimate reason why this might be the case.. which I'm open to.

The last generation consoles play a major part, with decompression largely happening on their CPU developers choose compression methods that require less CPU time (which typically means lower compression rate) at the expense of install size as they need every cycle they can get from those Jaguar cores.

Once they're out the picture then asset duplication can be scraped entirely and higher compression ratios can be used.

 

[Allandor]

Its as if these games are redownloading the whole thing, not just portions to patch. Does it uninstall previous installations? Or do they add on top of the original installation?
Those are massive. I am curious why!
Was there an analysis about this? They make zero sense.
These are part of the technical issues that made me abandon gaming on PC.
We spend large amounts to get the max experience, and a smooth sail with new AAA games is never guaranteed, not because the horse power is not there, but because there is something going wrong at the back end.
It is also very confusing that often games running on DirectX 11 are performing better than if they are on 12. There must be something causing extra trouble for devs on how the OS and API's are working.
Because I can't really fathom that this is just "lazy dev" work.
Especially the stuttering has been a very common reoccurrence. At first glance it makes zero sense, considering how similar consoles and PCs are architecturally, and consoles have less of an issue while being less powerful.

Today almost everything is signed. Problem with this is if the data changes just a bit the signature (well the hash value) will change and so the whole package must be exchanged.
The times that you just download a small program that inserts something into the compressed files are long gone.
So the bigger the game files are, the more you must redownload when a patch arrives.
SSDs can change this as the files than can get much smaller. Small files on an HDD cripples the bandwidth of the HDD so big files were always preferred. That is also why e.g. 50MB/s on a SSD can bring a big improvement over 50mb/s via HDD. With the SSD solution you can load just what you need so the 50mb/s can be used much more effectively.
That is also why I say the Xbox SSD is more than fast enough for games running on that machine. Problem is more that games are still delivered in big file packages. I really hope that stops soon. This should also quite heavily reduce the patch sizes as only the small patched files must be exchanged an no longer the resources in the currently big compressed files with many other resources in it.
Deduplication is another thing that can greatly reduce games size. Currently we only see that is done only fir PS5 exclusive games. I guess because the build pipelines had to be rewritten they also did that while Xbox still largely sticks with "one build (with optional packages) for every plattform"-dogma.
I don't think we have yet seen an Xbox title produced with the SSD in mind other than using the SSD as a much faster HDD.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I thought it was different on XB, but apparently that changed with XBSeries. XBO supported delta patching, but XBS does not.

 

[Caayn]

I stopped caring about game sizes when I got fibre installed as I could download them in less than an hour rather than over a few days.

I've got gigabit fibre (and Cat6a internal network) but even then download times can be rather annoying, especially as the CDN on consoles doesn't consistently deliver more than 500Mb/s in my experience.

When you share a console with your household (children, etc) you quickly reach the limits of the available storage with current game sizes and extra storage comes at a hefty premium (at least on the Xbox side for XSX|S enhanced titles).