Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]

[Shifty Geezer]

My point is more without the preloading, what would you see as data is loading right in front of you? If you started loading the closest detail only and built out from there, hat degree of drawing is possible and what could be achieved at a minimal time without being uncomfortable to see?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

No, it's the SSD. A PS5 with an HDD and all the other custom IO components would load data no faster than a PS4. A PS5 with it's NVMe drive but none of the other custom IO components would be capable of much more than the PS4 from an IO perspective. A PS5 with an NVMe, a bigger CPU and none of the other custom IO components would be capable of the majority of what the current PS5 is.

Main issue here is likely random access which I figure is dependent on IOPS. What's the limiting factor for that on PC? Is it a controller thing or a CPU thing?

 

[Dictator]

My point is more without the preloading, what would you see as data is loading right in front of you? If you started loading the closest detail only and built out from there, hat degree of drawing is possible and what could be achieved at a minimal time without being uncomfortable to see?

Good question - it would be interesting to see it just transport the camera in one frame and one could see the real load speed via object draw. I presume it is also imperfect in that aspect anyway as is based on John's video (some texture load occurs when the camera moves as you would imagine).

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Good question - it would be interesting to see it just transport the camera in one frame and one could see the real load speed via object draw. I presume it is also imperfect in that aspect anyway as is based on John's video (some texture load occurs when the camera moves as you would imagine).

Also the order content is loaded will be interesting. Does it evaluate and load the nearest objects first, or is there some optimised loading pattern that fetches data independent of where it appears in the view frustum?

 

[milk]

This is literally what posts say
"Spiderman 2's presentation, fidelity and polish in the transition is what makes it feel so impressive, even though the method and time to gameplay is roughly the same..."

ofc S2 is also RT title so BVH structures gen/update as well. However RR is multiplatform and crossgen title.

The thing about asset variety is it puts way more pressure on streaming and memory management systems. If your environment consists of thousands of instances of a library of a dozen or so bushes, trees and rocks, the game only has to stream one of each once and repeat them. I wouldnt be surprised if most (if not all) of Rider's vegetation assets and terrain base textures are resident in memory at all times.

The hard thing about modern cities is they are filled with complex colorful billboards, store fronts, cars, delivery trucks, extravagant colours (pedestrians). While natural environments let devs get away with waaaay more repetition.

A city world as well realized as SM2's is almost certainly streaming way more new assets in between regions than Riders.

 

[milk]

Good question - it would be interesting to see it just transport the camera in one frame and one could see the real load speed via object draw. I presume it is also imperfect in that aspect anyway as is based on John's video (some texture load occurs when the camera moves as you would imagine).

I've seen mods/hacks allow the user to do just that in other open world games on PC, and the results ain't pretty. Depending on how far you teleport, you get to see some horrid low poly geometry blobs and blurry textures that would make the N64 seem next gen in comparison.

And you do get to see the proper higher LODs pop-in bit by bit, in some unintuitive patterns. A lot of stuff does load in in batches, as the data is probably formated in large chunks in contiguous disk space (maybe even compressed as a whole) in HDD optimized games.

I wonder if much data grouping is necessary at all in the SSD world where seek latency is near negligible (or is it?)

This same taste might be possible when SM2 comes to PC with similar hacks. It will make for an interesting case study.

 

[RDGoodla]

Good question - it would be interesting to see it just transport the camera in one frame and one could see the real load speed via object draw. I presume it is also imperfect in that aspect anyway as is based on John's video (some texture load occurs when the camera moves as you would imagine).

Some SM2 video says players can do fast travel to “anywhere” of the map. There is no fast travel
points like other open world games.

Why can’t other games design this feature of fast travel to anywhere on the map?

 

[pjbliverpool]

Main issue here is likely random access which I figure is dependent on IOPS. What's the limiting factor for that on PC? Is it a controller thing or a CPU thing?

IOPS is a measure of SSD controller processing performance and usually falls generally in line with bandwidth throughput. I don't know what IOPS the PS5 is rated at but it's certainly slower than a lot of modern high end PC drives which are approaching 2m I believe.

 

[function]

The thing about asset variety is it puts way more pressure on streaming and memory management systems. If your environment consists of thousands of instances of a library of a dozen or so bushes, trees and rocks, the game only has to stream one of each once and repeat them. I wouldnt be surprised if most (if not all) of Rider's vegetation assets and terrain base textures are resident in memory at all times.

The hard thing about modern cities is they are filled with complex colorful billboards, store fronts, cars, delivery trucks, extravagant colours (pedestrians). While natural environments let devs get away with waaaay more repetition.

A city world as well realized as SM2's is almost certainly streaming way more new assets in between regions than Riders.

There's still a lot of repetition though, and the particular urban environment in SM2 lends itself somewhat to fast travel. Skyscrapers and sidewalks are basically repeating chunks of structure (I mean in real life), and things like pedestrians and cars will have a lot of elements common to the group as a whole and common to certain subsections of those groups.

SM2 can also spend a little longer loading in some sections of the map than others if it needs to (which is perfectly fine).

SM2 looks great - one of the best looking games of the year from what I've seen - but an urban environment like that screams repetition or duplication or instancing or whatever to me. And that's fine.

 

[Seanspeed]

Why can’t other games design this feature of fast travel to anywhere on the map?

I'm sure most could, it's just a game design choice not to. Devs do still want to encourage players to actually travel within the game at times as well. If you can just instantly travel anywhere, at any time, and especially almost instantaneously, there's very little incentive to not just use that as your primary way to get around the game. Which is lame.

Sometimes, developers need to be very well aware of the basic psychological aspect of 'humans will tend to take the path of least resistance'. This goes for many things in life, but it applies to how people play video games as well.

 

[Picao84]

Some SM2 video says players can do fast travel to “anywhere” of the map. There is no fast travel
points like other open world games.

Why can’t other games design this feature of fast travel to anywhere on the map?

I think it's less of a technical issue, but of gameplay style. Spiderman 2 is less of an exploration/discovery game but more of a narrative one, especially if like SM1, it barely has any side quests worth of that name. It's more action game, than RPG, versus the Witcher 3 for example. A game that encourages you to explore and immerse yourself in the world will probably not allow you to fast travel from any point, so it "forces" you to explore the world and find things you otherwise wouldn't. When I played Skyrim VR I forced myself to not use fast travel at all until I had explored 90% of the map. It paid off in spades as I kept finding new adventures and places to explore. In VR that is the best thing, feel immersed in a world. Fast travel kinda ruins immersion to be fair.

 

[GuardHei]

Incidentally I just finished JS a week or so ago. #1 - I'd turn off RT. It has gotten better but it's not great in Jedi Survivor and IMO not worth the tradeoffs.

In terms of the heavy performance areas... it's honestly just the first part of the game. The Coruscant stuff and parts of the Koboh open world. The rest of the game runs perfectly fine and the gameplay and plot/narrative is well worth it IMO. Obviously it sucks that those scenes are overly heavy but it's also a shame that people are avoiding the game due to the fixation on those areas. I mostly played through the main plot and didn't do a ton of the side stuff on Koboh and other than the odd time you come back there to talk to someone or similar I didn't really experience any significant issues on my admittedly high end machine. Was mostly north of 100fps outside those initial areas.

That's very insightful. I wish I read your posts before deleting the game.
Anyway, I allocated my time for Mario Wonder, and I'm 100% sure performance's not gonna be a problem for that one

 

[Allandor]

Some SM2 video says players can do fast travel to “anywhere” of the map. There is no fast travel
points like other open world games.

Why can’t other games design this feature of fast travel to anywhere on the map?

Often such features as fast travels to almost everything kill the game world, because players then often don't feel integrated into the world and just travel from mission to mission. Well it just not easy.

 

[cheapchips]

I'd imagine Spider-Man 2 gets away with fast travel, as the interesting things about the first game's New York are all in mission / cut scenes. Wandering around doesn't have much going on beyond an enjoyable bit of virtual tourism.

 

[B m A]

No, it's the SSD. A PS5 with an HDD and all the other custom IO components would load data no faster than a PS4. A PS5 with it's NVMe drive but none of the other custom IO components would be capable of much more than the PS4 from an IO perspective. A PS5 with an NVMe, a bigger CPU and none of the other custom IO components would be capable of the majority of what the current PS5 is.

The rest of the IO components simply reduce - not eliminate, the CPU burden of dealing with the higher IO throughput that the SSD provides. And most of those components aren't even unique to the PS5 in the first place.

Well, it can be the SSD but others things as well. The PS5 IO apparently was a critical focus of the PS5 engineering team, according to interviews from devs and Cerny itself. If the reduction of the CPU burden is so considerable that enables developers doing really good things like we see in this game that otherwise would be difficult or even not viable, that should be praised, alongside the work on the game itself.

Ultimately, I think it’s not just one or another, but both.

 

[dobwal]

IOPS is a measure of SSD controller processing performance and usually falls generally in line with bandwidth throughput. I don't know what IOPS the PS5 is rated at but it's certainly slower than a lot of modern high end PC drives which are approaching 2m I believe.

Idk the PS5 figures but the Xbox Series SSD supports 400K IOPs. However, DS is designed to support 50K sustained while using only 5-10% of a single CPU core. At a 4K block size thats only 200 MBps but at 64K (size of a DX12 texture tile) that works out to 3.2 GBps or more than the SSD can support bandwidth wise. Nevertheless, DS can only guarantee 2.0 GBps over a 250 ms window.

 

[davis.anthony]

Watching the DF Clips video on Spiderman 2's RT.

I would love to know what going RT only for reflections allowed them to save in terms of disk space and dev time from reducing/removing the need for cube maps.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Idk the PS5 figures but the Xbox Series SSD supports 400K IOPs. However, DS is designed to support 50K sustained while using only 5-10% of a single CPU core. At a 4K block size thats only 200 MBps but at 64K (size of a DX12 texture tile) that works out to 3.2 GBps or more than the SSD can support bandwidth wise. Nevertheless, DS can only guarantee 2.0 GBps over a 250 ms window.

These are Series X specific figures right? I don't think they can be extrapolated back to the PC as DS doesn't remove as much of the CPU overhead there as it does on Xbox.

To be clear I don't think there is any hardware limitation at all on the PC side to achieving whatever the PS5 is doing in Spiderman 2 and more. The limitation on the PC side is the unpredictability of the systems behaviour with the interactions between the API's, drivers, Windows and varying hardware specs. This has been demonstrated aptly in Ratchet & Clank where we can see IO performance in line with or even a little better than the PS5 on good hardware (and I still maintain that the max performance is likely capped on PC or else we could see even bigger improvements), however that is dependent on disabling PSO caching which adds unpredictability to the portal sequences.

Nixxes are clearly learning a lot from R&C though as demonstrated by the improvements they've made in the games various loading sequences. ANd they've stated previously that they are aware of the PSO caching issues and are looking at other ways of doing that. So hopefully by the time they come to port Spiderman 2 (I assume it will be them), they will have streamlined things sufficiently to provide an equivalent or even better experience on the PC.

 

[Dictator]

Watching the DF Clips video on Spiderman 2's RT.

I would love to know what going RT only for reflections allowed them to save in terms of disk space and dev time from reducing/removing the need for cube maps.

There are still going to be cubemaps in the game (reflections in reflections are cubemaps) as well as cubemaps being used for rough materials.

 

[DavidGraham]

AMD is developing a GI solution, with the cost of 6ms @1080p on a 7900XTX.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1715305495802654813