Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]

[I'mDudditz!]

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Hell, the difference from an NVME to a HDD in this is usually just a little over twice as fast (if even that) with only the last world showing a larger difference. I don't know what texture settings they were using in this video, but the user has a 12GB 4070ti so I would assume very high, but not confirmed.

Nope, those are not very high textures.

The game is just clearly not I/O bound in any meaningful way, at least from storage. There's another bottleneck.

You're getting warmer

 

[davis.anthony]

The game is capped, it's obvious.

Every PS5 has the same SSD throughput so setting a loading cap is easy.

Bring it over to PC where an SSD can range from 550MB/s to 12GB/s and suddenly you have the potential for issues and need to make some gameplay decisions that didn't need to be made on PS5.

Do you let the loading speed run unlocked? If so the 12GB/s drive has no loading and the portals which are a visually important part of the game are no longer there.

But the portals also give the player a very short mental break, that small time window to adjust eyes, body position etc, etc.

Or do you load based on an average SSD speed and cap the loading so it remains a consistent experience for 95% of users?

I know which option I would go with and I think Nixxis went the same too.

 

[function]

Actually, he foresees all game memory to be utilized for the next 1 second of gameplay. It will be a real tech milestone.

Outside of edge cases like scene cuts and that's never going to be a thing, and even then you wouldn't dump all of your engine code.

Texel and mesh re-use between frames and across seconds will always be significant across gaming. Some textures and textures tiles and mesh data will probably persist across minutes or longer.

On demand loading isn't a new idea. It's really, really not a new idea. Rage and Trials evolution are two of my favourite 360 games. Changes in technology make how this is approached change. PS5, Xbox, and Direct Storage are all engineered with the goal of enabling basically same type of small chunk, massively parallel, low overhead, high decompression rate solution.

And probably the biggest mover in this space at the moment isn't a hardware vendor, it's Epic with UE5. And no, *that* demo didn't require "PS5 IO" to run, or anything even close to it.

 

[function]

The game is capped, it's obvious.

Every PS5 has the same SSD throughput so setting a loading cap is easy.

Bring it over to PC where an SSD can range from 550MB/s to 12GB/s and suddenly you have the potential for issues and need to make some gameplay decisions that didn't need to be made on PS5.

Do you let the loading speed run unlocked? If so the 12GB/s drive has no loading and the portals which are visually important part of the game are no longer there.

But the portals also give the player a very short mental break, that small time window to adjust eyes, body position....scratch that itch.

Or do you load based on an average SSD speed and cap the loading so it remains consistent experience for 95% of users?

I know which option I would go with and I think Nixxis went the same too.

One way or another, blinking the portals into and out of existence would royally screw up Ratchets tumbling animation.....

Instantiating things or initialising things or allocating memory might be placing a bit more strain on the CPU on PC though. Maybe leading to the odd stutter? I dunno!

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Nope, those are not very high textures.

As the video is only 1080p and with high compression, and the fact that there are texture loading bugs on the PC version to boot, not sure why you're so confident. I've posted a comment asking for clarification.

 

[Inuhanyou]

Spearheading? The same way ID Tech 5 spearheaded streamed textures in 2007, but they still aren't the norm 15 years later? I'm pretty sure by the time and notable number of games get to working with completel memory refreshes every second, PS5 will be long gone.

While true, it's fair to say how machines use SSD will not go away after this generation and become "the norm". Sony invested more into that than MS but they both were forward thinking with their designs. I think it would have still be a decent upgrade with the most basic of sata 3 SSD upgrades. Anything would be a huge upgrade from HDD. but they decided to go full nvme

 

[Inuhanyou]

He got those times with an HDD because he could compensate with higher amount of ram, and ram is faster than even the fastest SSD.

People refuse to understand this. But it's true. It's evening working on concert that gives the optimal experience for this game.

People are still arguing the concept of what defines "next gen" when we are well past the stage where that actually has any meaning.

 

[pjbliverpool]

you seem not to understand ... lets stay in your example - lets say from a raw uncomporessed 200gb game lets say one level has 35gb worth of data in assets textures and such. Its not that all of that 35gb is needed from the first second you start the level. Loaded in memory is what you see and maybe some additional 10% more around the screen edge to give the I/O system a bit of reaction time to accomodate for player movement. so lets say that viewpoint makes up for 8-10gb of data . If you turn around and other assets that are durrently missing are loaded and those who are not needed anymore go out. you turn back and the it starts form beginning again. So , if you would run through this level for an hour or so. The swapping of assets in and out would have caused maybe already 200gb worth of traffic.

So to be clear.... you are suggesting that in a 35GB level, a simple 180 degree turn could result in a complete flush and reload of 8-10GB worth of VRAM. So by simply turning around on the spot, you have already seen around 50% - 60% of the entire art content for that level. And you suggest that playing such a level for one hour straight would not in any way be repetitive? I think you may need to rethink that argument.

But you seem to think that PS5s vram ( of wich there is a higher number available to the GPU than your mere 10GB btw but hey )

I have 12GB but well done for showing why you're really here.

needs to full swap in and out 16GB at all times just because cernys slides implied that it is technicaly possible. And it still is. It stil stands

No-one said it's not technically possible. Just that it's impractical to do based on current game sizes because the full game content would be consumed far too quickly. It's your no1 fan who claimed just a few posts back that this is something we will actually see in real shipping PS5 games that I'm challenging. As I said, not unless those games are 100TB (and yes that's a deliberate exaggeration for emphasis).

It was an example how numbers can produce alot more traffic than what they look like. And oh yeah? Nothing was established - for now it is established only that what i was saying and many others - that RTX 20xx cards are no match for PS5 in Games that REALY are programmed with only PS5 in Mind. All your fancy games so far from third party devs that probably for money sakes used only the high Level API on PS5 and that performed better on a RTX 2060 - their times are over. I here say it again even a RTX 2080ti will not be able to achieve similar to PS5 results when it is taxed on the same time with 5-9Gb/s GPU decompression on comming PS5 Exclusive Ports.

The infamous DF experiment wich revealed that Ratchet & Clank on PS5 cannot use more than 2Gb/s streaming because they taped of most of a M2 SSD contacts tolimit its bandwith was a big boomerang at the end. Yeah sure it was fun to dunk on Cernys console "oh look the fancy SSD is not actually needed yadayada" And look now - what havok that mere 2GB/s streaming causes already even with DS GPU decompression enabled - or should is say because it is enabled? Only good modern GPUs can handle the Game right now on PS5s settings.
Your arrogancy will make you eat crow later on. Or you eating it already i dont know.

That seemed a little over emotional. Anyway, I'm not going to debate your assumptions with assumptions of my own given that neither of us have the technical detail to back them up at this point. Determining where the loading bottlneck is on the PC should be a pretty straight forward task and I'm sure we'll know soon enough whether it's the GPU decompression speed, CPU speed, or something else.

 

[davis.anthony]

It's hammering the PCIEX slot!!

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1684505459120799744

 

[I'mDudditz!]

I've flipped back and forth between texture settings on my 3060, and at times doing so the Very High would get stuck at muddy textures, and reducing the setting to medium would fix it. It's clearly fubar.

Fix as in once you go back from medium to very high, the very high textures are presented on your display? Can you provide some screenshots?

 

[Karamazov]

2 years, launched in June 2021

 

[eastmen]

2 years, launched in June 2021

Thank you for the correction. So yea sony had 2 years to work on this port and this is what they turned up. They really need to focus more on pc ports or they are going to start to get a negative reputation for them

 

[eastmen]

As many have said, they clearly would not have been working on this for three years.

It's also just not fair to call this a 'low quality port'. It's a perfectly playable game with a few mostly minor technical issues. I know that there's been a spate of games with significant issues the past few years, but man, at the same time we should keep some perspective about expecting ambitious modern games to have perfect technical polish.

The game literally doesn't work with ray tracing on the same hardware that is in the ps5 and amd users are reporting a lot of crashing on their hardware. The game has the same texture bugs that are present in both of insomniac's other games on pc. There is a host of problems happening with the game.

Like I said , it doesn't really matter if they worked on it or not for the time they had. They should have been working on it for the amount of time they had and esp if they want $60 out of pc gamers.

 

[SmooTh]

 

[dobwal]

At any rate, the original claim of needing a SSD + a major decompression block to handle PS5 games doesn't hold up to reality. At least according to Ratchet and Clank, which is working just fine on any fast HDD even on systems with 16GBs of RAM, the game is not a data intensive exercise of course, but still.

That portal sequence could very well be designed to be streamed in advance while the player is traversing ahead, especially as each portal contains just a very tiny playable area. Environment swap is nothing new, we've had Dishonored 2 and Titanfall 2 do a full swap in real time in several levels, with unique textures and assets and all, and on last gen hardware. Careful data planning and proper streaming by the developer is the key to this, SSD and decompression block may accelerate this even further, but I would argue that the CPU and GPU of the PS5 may not handle a data intensive game anyway. They are barely able to do current gen games with standard assets at sufficient quality, many times falling into the 30fps lock, or the -frankly quite miserable- 720p~1080p/60fps modes. The main benefit of the SSD and decompression block so far seems to be extremely fast loading times, nothing more.

I don't think he was referencing PC hardware when describing capabilities not possible before. That statement was made by a dev whose franchise has been relatively exclusive to the Playstation since inception. Consoles don't have the option to cache to system RAM to deal with the bandwidth limitation presented by HDDs.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Latest hotfix is included in the review btw.
Edit: lol @Dictator



Only thing I would have liked to see covered as well was the DLSS3 implementation, I'm hearing reports that it's not great - visible macroblocking even at high frame rates.

Also mention on my system, I don't have the low GPU usage problem at the main menu. It fully utilizes the GPU so I'm at 60fps.

Have you tried deleting the DirectStorage dll from the game files to force it to not use GPU Decompression (if indeed that works)?

Ok I'll give that a shot, albeit do we know if there isn't a dstorage system component shipping with a Windows update that the game would default to? Regardless I'll report my results later.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Amazing video which answered so many big questions about the game. How Alex managed to produce it so quickly, especially given the patch that landed just today, I have no idea, impressive stuff!

My absolute highlight was the load speed test. Alex confirmed, or rather ruled out GPU speed (so decompression speed is not an issue here - certain posters take note) along with memory speed, drive speed (which we already knew) and surprisingly CPU speed (above a certain level at least as one would expect). So perhaps starting to look more likely now that the game engine really does cap this, or is at least code limited in some way. I guess it does make sense as these transitions still need to work in a way that makes sense on future hardware, so allowing them to run completely unlimited would be a bad idea. So what speed to you limit them too? Maybe Nixxes asked Sony lol....

I also really loved the section about the background programs and how that effects framerate with both vram and system ram usage. Very illuminating.

Clearly the game performs better on PS5 than it does on the 2070S as we should really expect, but the gap is smaller than I expected it to be based on this video. 8GB is obviously limiting things but it's not a bad showing for the old GPU overall, although DRS does muddy the comparison somewhat.

I definitely appreciated the additional bugs picked up at the start. Nixxes seem to be very responsive at fixing things like this so the more they are brought to their attention the better. This is a game I'd really like to see perfected on the PC. Unfortunate that it will have to be post launch, but such is the way of the world atm.

Regarding the section on HDD, again, some brilliant info around how the game performs on first run after boot vs cached to system RAM with an HDD. This could explain some of the videos out there showing HDD performance that is very reasonable. It's also very interesting that Nixxes have not implemented a pre-caching system for this date and simply rely on the Windows file cache.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Uh, why was NXG brought into the DF thread again? Isn't there another thread for that?

Well counterpoints are obviously part of discussion. However, that leads to this obviously being an overloaded thread. The topic at hand is not "DF article" but "R&C Performance" which warrants a discrete discussion referencing all sources.

Edit: R&C discussion moved to its own thread.

This thread needs to be kept focussed on DF's content, with feedback directed at DF, and not for generally discussing topics raised. Bigger topics need their own threads. If a topic is getting hot and active, it's worth calling for a spawn earlier.

I'll also state a number of posters need to check the OP's rules of engagement because they are posting like they never read them. Notably...
"What this thread is not,

• is a place to complain about a port's quality and make accusations of developers,
• to offer feedback on the quality of the Digital Foundry writing or the writers' biases,
• trumpet your preferred console over the other,"

 

[I'mDudditz!]

"People don't seem to have grasped the storage situation with Ratchet and Clank..."

" I think the thing people should consider is that there's more to data access speed than just the drive that the game is stored on..."

In other words, all of these DirectStorage drive speed benchmarks are really a moot point when considering the application of I/O in actual games.

Fantastic insights from DF here.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1685260985815166976

 

[Dictator]

"People don't seem to have grasped the storage situation with Ratchet and Clank..."

" I think the thing people should consider is that there's more to data access speed than just the drive that the game is stored on..."

In other words, all of these DirectStorage drive speed benchmarks are really a moot point when considering the application of I/O in actual games.

Fantastic insights from DF here.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1685260985815166976

John is not talking about direct Storage here - here He is talking about why it runs on a hard drive at all on high end systems (aka why lot's of RAM and CPU make it somewhat work).