Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]

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The decision to use FSR performance mode and to target 4K may have come late in development - long after the art style and the animations were locked down.

Perhaps it was a due to the performance of alternative modes, perhaps it was some kind of marketing tie in. I dunno. Epic's own UE specific TSR would probably have been a better choice for working with UE5 though.

I think this is just a mismatch of artist understanding for how these effects work, what data they need, etc, and how the engine works. It's not clear that this even has motion vectors, I suspect we'd see similar artifacts in just about any engine. And a small team / smaller budget means less time to experiment, less time to iterate, and less time for knowledge transfer from one part of the team to another.
 
What I feel they should do to the game.

- Drop the frame rate from a wildly unstable 60fps to a locked 30fps

- Drop the target resolution from 4k to 1440p

- Change rendered resolution from 720p to as high as possible while maintaining 30fps lock (900p maybe?)

- Move FSR to Quality mode or use UE5's TSR
 
What I feel they should do to the game.

- Drop the frame rate from a wildly unstable 60fps to a locked 30fps

- Drop the target resolution from 4k to 1440p

- Change rendered resolution from 720p to as high as possible while maintaining 30fps lock (900p maybe?)

- Move FSR to Quality mode or use UE5's TSR

I mean, keep a 60 fps option by all means, but 3x3 upscaling to 4K using FSR is a complete mess, and for gawds sake offer a 30 fps mode with an improved base resolution, a more stable frame rate, and use an appropriate quality temporal upscaler.
 
Many devs are going to reject HWRT
Well, if we are going to count UE5 games released so far, Layers of Fear, Fortnite, Ant Ausventure and Desodre use HW Lumen. On the other side, we have Immortals of Aveum and Fort Solis using SW Lumen, so far HW Lumen games outnumber SW Lumen.

Seems AA devs are more inclined to enable HW Lumen, as their games are often limited in scope, and they can stand to maximize visual gains through HW Lumen, while AAA games might evaluate the situation depending on their needs.

It also depends on the type of game, open world games stand to benefit from HW Lumen as it covers more distance, and games with many reflective surfaces will also use HW Lumen to increase the fidelity of reflections, while games with barren areas and lots of particles will opt to use SW Lumen (like Immortals of Aveum), as HW Lumen will add little to no benefit to their type of game.
 
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We will have to see how it runs on older architectures, but it would be seriously funny if Alan Wake had better performance than Immortals, despite being path traced.

Eventually PT + ML upscaling + ML denoising should perform better than the classic pipeline for the same (high quality) output. It’s surprising that we’re already at that inflection point though.

I think it says more about the poor showing from recent AAA games than it does about advantages of PT. The perf/IQ balance in recent games is pretty terrible.
 
Well, if we are going to count UE5 games released so far, Layers of Fear, Fortnite, Ant Ausventure and Desodre use HW Lumen. On the other side, we have Immortals of Aveum and Jusant using SW Lumen, so far HW Lumen games outnumber SW Lumen.
It's not either/or - in several of those depending on your GI setting ingame it will be SW or HW.

It also depends on the type of game, open world games stand to benefit from HW Lumen as it covers more distance, and games with many reflective surfaces will also use HW Lumen to increase the fidelity of reflections, while games with barren areas and lots of particles will opt to use SW Lumen (like Immortals of Aveum), as HW Lumen will add little to no benefit to their type of game.
Indeed, although also worth noting the more geometric and instance complexity you have the less viable it is to use HWRT in general. As I've noted on multiple occasions but just to reiterate here again - the limitations around HWRT/PT are as much or more about geometry and BVH than anything else. RT-based pipelines stuff can't truly take over in all use cases until someone comes up with better solutions for that.
 
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What I feel they should do to the game.

- Drop the frame rate from a wildly unstable 60fps to a locked 30fps

- Drop the target resolution from 4k to 1440p

- Change rendered resolution from 720p to as high as possible while maintaining 30fps lock (900p maybe?)

- Move FSR to Quality mode or use UE5's TSR

I thank the devs for all their hard work.....
But just a technical curiosity I'd Love to know the image quality and perf imapcts of
of the existing solution, and the set of technical trade-offs they made
vs.
TSR + 30fps + whatever every internal res they could sustain. 1080p? 900p?

And just to throw a real spanner in the works, what about
FSR3 @ 900p, - does that hold a solid 40fps?
Pity there is no VRR support of FSR3 yet. 40fps + FSR3 on a VRR display might be the sweet spot for a lot of modern titles..
 
I thank the devs for all their hard work.....
But just a technical curiosity I'd Love to know the image quality and perf imapcts of
of the existing solution, and the set of technical trade-offs they made
vs.
TSR + 30fps + whatever every internal res they could sustain. 1080p? 900p?

It will be interesting to see if they add a 30fps mode with a higher native resolution.

And just to throw a real spanner in the works, what about
FSR3 @ 900p, - does that hold a solid 40fps?
Pity there is no VRR support of FSR3 yet. 40fps + FSR3 on a VRR display might be the sweet spot for a lot of modern titles..
AMD recommend a minimum frame rate of 60fps before enabling FSR3.

That requirement alone means consoles are going to be shit out of luck in a lot of cases.
 
The developer of Immortals of Aveum just stated they are going to support HW Lumen in a future patch.

The biggest change from software to hardware Lumen is that it goes from 200m to 1000m. There's a surprising secondary problem when you start adding light sources from five times the distance away, which is you're now getting reflections of lights from five times the distance away. Lumen really, really likes to handle reflections on everything, and we have a lot of lights, so now you start playing with other parameters to stop having too many reflections on all your shiny materials. Julia's team loves shiny materials, we have a lot, so it's a constant balance between having too few and too many reflections. If you optimise in the wrong direction, it either becomes muddled or it becomes like a glitter sparkle fest, neither of which are awesome. So we're threading the needle really tightly to [balance frame-rate and visual fidelity]. That requires a lot of testing, and you can't break other things while doing that.
Our current min spec is a RX 5700 XT and RTX 2080. I assume the updated specs are somewhere in people's hands; we've actually been able to lower minimum specs a little. We've been pushing really hard to drop that down well outside of anything that supports RTX. The side effect of that, obviously, is we need to make sure that software [Lumen] on PC does not go bad as we begin to optimise for hardware [Lumen].


 
With Rich, John and Alex meeting up together at Gamescom for the first time since 2019, this one is a very different, very special DF Direct Weekly. The team discuss Starfield at Gamescom and their meeting with Phil Spencer and Todd Howard, before ploughing on into their reaction to the FSR and AMD Fluid Motion Frames demonstration they saw at the show. Meanwhile, Nvidia takes things to the next level with DLSS 3.5 ray reconstruction, there's reaction to the latest PlayStation Portal disclosures, STALKER 2 hands-on and much, much more.

0:00:00 Introduction
0:00:45 News 01: Gamescom Starfield impressions!
0:12:06 News 02: AMD shows off FSR 3
0:27:54 News 03: AMD demos Fluid Motion Frames
0:36:54 News 04: DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction revealed
0:56:12 News 05: PlayStation Portal named, detailed
1:00:09 News 06: MGS Collection targets 1080p, 720p
1:06:31 News 07: STALKER 2 demoed at Gamescom
1:14:24 News 08: New Nightdive remasters unveiled
1:23:51 Supporter Q1: What are the benefits for DF to go to Gamescom? What does a typical Gamescom day look like?
1:30:10 Supporter Q2: Could XeSS be viable on current-gen console hardware?
1:31:11 Supporter Q3: How do you feel about your various signature phrases?
 
With Rich, John and Alex meeting up together at Gamescom for the first time since 2019, this one is a very different, very special DF Direct Weekly. The team discuss Starfield at Gamescom and their meeting with Phil Spencer and Todd Howard, before ploughing on into their reaction to the FSR and AMD Fluid Motion Frames demonstration they saw at the show. Meanwhile, Nvidia takes things to the next level with DLSS 3.5 ray reconstruction, there's reaction to the latest PlayStation Portal disclosures, STALKER 2 hands-on and much, much more.

0:00:00 Introduction
0:00:45 News 01: Gamescom Starfield impressions!
0:12:06 News 02: AMD shows off FSR 3
0:27:54 News 03: AMD demos Fluid Motion Frames
0:36:54 News 04: DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction revealed
0:56:12 News 05: PlayStation Portal named, detailed
1:00:09 News 06: MGS Collection targets 1080p, 720p
1:06:31 News 07: STALKER 2 demoed at Gamescom
1:14:24 News 08: New Nightdive remasters unveiled
1:23:51 Supporter Q1: What are the benefits for DF to go to Gamescom? What does a typical Gamescom day look like?
1:30:10 Supporter Q2: Could XeSS be viable on current-gen console hardware?
1:31:11 Supporter Q3: How do you feel about your various signature phrases?

Whoa. Once in a year company party!
Great vid, happy to see you guys meeting up after covid! Much needed!
 
The developer of Immortals of Aveum just stated they are going to support HW Lumen in a future patch.





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Maybe PS5 Pro teaser.
 
I think Immortals of Aveum should have allowed you to disable Lumen on pc. I know the art people probably don't want that, but the best way to show people performance differences is to show people what things look like when a feature isn't there. They could have done like fortnite and had lumen gi and lumen reflections toggle to ao and screen-space reflections and then off. Nanite they'd probably leave because it would be a huge amount of work to have an alternate lod system. If they're using virtual shadow maps, which I assume they are, having those being toggled to off would be useful as well.

And to be honest some people are okay with that kind of "low" experience, so just let them do it and play the game.
 
Does it even have the baked light maps to even disable Lumen?

What they don't want is the baked lighting looking just as good as Lumen as that will really piss people off.
 
If they're using virtual shadow maps, which I assume they are, having those being toggled to off would be useful as well.
Nanite without VSMs is often a performance disaster with no real upside... the two were designed to work together.

Something heavy-handed like turning off GI entirely might be interesting from a technical user point of view, but just flicking a switch would probably make the game completely unplayable with regions that are just black or otherwise. Sure you could probably make it look like a PlayStation 2 game by just putting in some constant ambient term but no self-respecting game dev would want their art portrayed in that manner.

Really what people would "expect" in such a version is a version with baked lighting which - as noted explicitly in the interview - would be a whole lot of work... effectively re-doing the graphics and lighting largely from scratch.

Personally I'd rather more they go in the other direction if anything in future content: you're paying for dynamic lighting, so would love to see them make more use of it. More moving/animating lights and so on. That said they are if they can find more console performance it is probably best used on resolution on those platforms.

game doesnt have any baked lighting and the "fallback" looks like this:
You've posted that a few times, but that's specifically from the "the path" sequence in the crazy dreamscape type world, right? If you look at the skybox there I can only assume the weird flat look is intentional. Could be some sort of bug but the same assets look regularly lit and fine when they are in the context of the real world.

Interesting interview in any case, thanks for doing that DF. Curious to see where they go from here!
 
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The first PS5 Demo did not use TSR, it used TAAU Gen 4.

Oh really, I always thought it was tsr. Well it was great results so now I'm even more confused about the hype over fsr and tsr from amd and ue5, respectively. Maybe it was the 1440pish avg internal resolution from the ps5 demo that made the difference. If so then developers should design games around 1440p on consoles if they wish to utilize the upscaling tech. This 720p native resolution nonsense has got to stop. You can throw all the fancy tech in the world at your game but if iq is so grainy and unstable to where the features can't be appreciated, what's the point?
 
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