Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]

[davis.anthony]

I suspect it's more of a stuttering issue. We know RT has more problems with scs so perhaps they just wanted time to perfect that before launching. I doubt it's a raw performance issue because it's easy to scale performance up and down with RT (if you're a dev!)

Since they showed the game with RT back in 2018 AMD and Intel have entered the RT race with two different architectures than Nvidia's RTX.

This would have no doubt created extra RT related work.

 

[Jay]

Wish people would stop brining this one up. You would expect them to make improvements to a late port. Sticking to games released around the same time is fair game.

That's what I liked about the tourist and the medium.
Showed they made nice use of the extra time.
Didn't even back port the updates to XS.

Unlike xbox with their own 1P games like deathloop and ghostwire tokyo which just got basic port.

 

[T2098]

It can't be feasibly done at installation time because driver updates can interfere with the way the shader compiler will do codegen. Implementing compilation during installation time would be a very minor improvement when the user can change drivers or hardware at will easily thus compilation may inevitably get triggered again at bootup or during gameplay. Can you imagine how annoying it would be to have new driver xyz just after you finished installation and before you even booted up the game to have to wait again ?

This is certainly true, although I guess I don't understand why the below isn't more universally adopted, as it seems trivial from a coding standpoint.
Upon launch of the game, when it's detected that a hardware or driver change has occurred that will require shader recompilation, just show a quick dialog box before entering the game:

"Due to a change in hardware or graphics card drivers, shaders must be recompiled for optimum performance.

Press A or the spacebar to recompile the shaders now. This will result in the best possible performance, but will take about <int_EstimatedCompileTimeMinutes> before you are able to play.
If you wish to play the game immediately and let the shaders compile in the background while you play, press B or the backspace key, however this may result in occasional performance drops as the shaders compile.

Note: If you change your mind and later wish to manually trigger the full shader recompliation for optimal performance, open up the Settings menu, go to the "Graphics" tab, and click the 'Trigger Shader Recompilation' button.

Hint: While the game is compiling your shaders, feel free to hit alt-tab and do something else with your PC, or even go grab a coffee!
Don't worry, we'll play a notification chime and send you a popup in Windows' notification area when the compilation is finished so you know when to come back to the game and enjoy with the best possible experience. It's worth the wait!"

Simply giving people the agency to make that choice will cut out 90% of the noise. Both sides of the camp get to have their cake and eat it too, and for the ~90% of gamers who aren't super familiar with rendering technology, they also now no longer will feel the need to complain that the game is 'broken' if it either stutters, or sometimes takes 10 minutes to load up after a driver change, Detroit: Become Human-style. Whichever thing bothers them the most (stutter, or increased wait time before they can play), just tap the appropriate button, get exactly what you want, and everyone's happy.

 

[Lurkmass]

This is certainly true, although I guess I don't understand why the below isn't more universally adopted, as it seems trivial from a coding standpoint.
Upon launch of the game, when it's detected that a hardware or driver change has occurred that will require shader recompilation, just show a quick dialog box before entering the game:

"Due to a change in hardware or graphics card drivers, shaders must be recompiled for optimum performance.

Press A or the spacebar to recompile the shaders now. This will result in the best possible performance, but will take about <int_EstimatedCompileTimeMinutes> before you are able to play.
If you wish to play the game immediately and let the shaders compile in the background while you play, press B or the backspace key, however this may result in occasional performance drops as the shaders compile.

Note: If you change your mind and later wish to manually trigger the full shader recompliation for optimal performance, open up the Settings menu, go to the "Graphics" tab, and click the 'Trigger Shader Recompilation' button.

Hint: While the game is compiling your shaders, feel free to hit alt-tab and do something else with your PC, or even go grab a coffee!
Don't worry, we'll play a notification chime and send you a popup in Windows' notification area when the compilation is finished so you know when to come back to the game and enjoy with the best possible experience. It's worth the wait!"

Simply giving people the agency to make that choice will cut out 90% of the noise. Both sides of the camp get to have their cake and eat it too, and for the ~90% of gamers who aren't super familiar with rendering technology, they also now no longer will feel the need to complain that the game is 'broken' if it either stutters, or sometimes takes 10 minutes to load up after a driver change, Detroit: Become Human-style. Whichever thing bothers them the most (stutter, or increased wait time before they can play), just tap the appropriate button, get exactly what you want, and everyone's happy.

Allowing the driver to run shaders/pipelines compiled by an older version of a shader compiler potentially opens up another attack vector or vulnerability to run malicious code which has negative security and safety critical systems implications. D3D12 and Vulkan by design doesn't really care too much about security or safety critical features in their APIs so it becomes the drivers responsibility to prevent these possible exploits even if it means invalidating older shader/pipelines ...

If you've followed the WebGPU standard, the W3C "GPU for the Web" Community Group designs their API with security features in mind to prevent exploits ...

 

[see colon]

There shouldn't be any game where PS5 "wins"

Why not? PS5 has some clear hardware advantages over Series X, and some clear disadvantages. So why shouldn't games that leverage the parts of the hardware that PS5 is better at perform better?

 

[dobwal]

I liked the ideal of an auto update for shader compilation. Just compile while I’m sleep.

But the effort to produce such a feature seems like a huge undertaking with a lot of parties involved.

 

[Dr. Nick]

I know it is a little late but I want to bring this up but...from DF Direct 99

do you do do y'all think we could see an FSR like upscaling technique come to
1:11:11
backwards compatibility titles on consoles thinking particularly about Xbox 360 and Xbox One where many titles

Xenia for uwp now allows access to FSR1 x4 along with fxaa and I have to say I'm incredibly impressed. I did not think much of FSR1 when seeing it running in games from this gen and last but for 360 titles it would be a great thing for Microsoft to consider for games that did not get a resolution boost. It's also something Nintendo should consider making use of with backwards compatibility for their next console. I might make a comparison before the day is over between Star Ocean TLH running on BC and Star Ocean TLH running on Xenia. Maybe Lost Odessy I'll see.

 

[Remij]

The thing is you already called out the proper response in your reply here: if a game is in an unacceptable state, don't buy it! That is by far the most direct feedback you can give to the appropriate channels.

Absolutely. Though it's more complicated than just that. It's not enough that you just don't buy a game.. you have to let devs/pubs know specifically why you're not buying the game. If people didn't make an uproar about specific issues, then publishers would just assume that PC gamers aren't interested and potentially not release games there at all. Not only that, sometimes you can't even post in the appropriate channels to complain about issues unless you actually own the game. I completely understand why that is of course, but it's another thing to consider.

And I'll be honest... a LOT of the time, PC gamers are their own worst enemy in the fact that you post issues on the forums and you always have someone who comes in and claims that they don't ever have any problems and that it's your "rig" or your fault.. when clearly it's a problem with the game. I personally believe that the prevalence of people who enter threads and do that sort of thing active work against issues being solved in a more timely manner. I'm not saying everyone has all issues... but there's really no reason to come into threads specifically about issues people are facing and denying that they are facing them while claiming they never have those issues.

I think the best way to actually respond to issues, is actually purchase the game, try it out within the refund window opportunity.. report issues and then refund if the developers are uncommunicative, and state the exact reasons for refunding.

I feel like refunding sends the message that something is wrong with the game and unacceptable, but that the audience interest for the game is there and they are willing to support it, they just demand better.


Also Andrew, about all the shader comp stuttering and stuff, it's obviously a very complex issue, but part of the thing that adds to consumers frustration about it is that at least with Unreal Engine, if developers cache as much PSOs as they can, and take advantage of UE's ability to pre-compile shaders ahead of time.. by and large the issue is almost non-existent or very minor. I think what frustrates a lot of us is that some developers seemingly don't bother to do this step, despite it being a well known thing. I mean, a lot of these games which had these issues.. all you'd have to do is play them for 3 mintues and you'd know something was wrong. That's why games like Sackboy and The Callisto Protocol were so infuriating. It seems like they weren't tested at all. Once they added the pre-compilation step.. the games were like 95% shader comp stutter free and in my opinion turned them into easily the best versions of those games overall. Those fixes happened within a week of the issue being public. That's why we get mad about this stuff... it seems largely unavoidable.

So while it sounds very challenging for developers to get things "perfect" which is unreasonable anyway... it seems like with enough attention, they can get 95-99% of the way there already, and pretty much everyone is happy. So I feel like we just need devs to focus a bit more on it than they did before. Thankfully, it seems like a lot more devs are doing this now, and I believe that's thanks to Alex and Digital Foundry focusing on it.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Absolutely. Though it's more complicated than just that. It's not enough that you just don't buy a game.. you have to let devs/pubs know specifically why you're not buying the game.

Publishers and developers watch sales and the timing of sales closely. If people don't buy the game at launch (and the game launched buggy), and they improve performance and people do buy the game at the launch price, they will work it out.

But while people continue to blindly pre-order games and buy games before they have been reviewed, there is zero incentive for publishers not to publish games with issues.

 

[Remij]

Publishers and developers watch sales and the timing of sales closely. If people don't buy the game at launch (and the game launched buggy), and they improve performance and people do buy the game at the launch price, they will work it out.

But while people continue to blindly pre-order games and buy games before they have been reviewed, there is zero incentive for publishers not to publish games with issues.

They have to have people who let them know performance is an issue to fix in the first place.....

Before in a lot of cases... you couldn't even depend on PC game reviewers to properly assess performance. Before DF and Alex started calling this stuff out, most reviewers completely ignored the performance aspect of the reviews.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

They have to have people who let them know performance is an issue to fix in the first place.....

If devs and publishers don't know something is wrong, why are they fixing games with patches? I'd say it's likely that in most cases, the devs know more work needs to done on certain issues and day 1 and post-launch patches are already in the project timeline.

 

[Remij]

If devs and publishers don't know something is wrong, why are they fixing games with patches? I'd say it's likely that in most cases, the devs know more work needs to done on certain issues and day 1 and post-launch patches are already in the project timeline.

If a publisher releases a game and nobody is buying it.. they have to know why nobody is buying it. If nobody buys it, and they don't have a *very* obvious clue as to why... they will simply assume there is no interest.

It's hard enough to get some developers to even acknowledge certain issues... almost as if they don't want to deal with it. Kinda like what the Dead Space developers are doing right now. No mention at all, or any indication that they are looking into the constant traversal stuttering that happens throughout that game. Despite the forums being full of comments on that specific issue... patches have come and gone with no mention of working on improving it.

It's hard enough getting issues fixed which are constantly reported.. let alone assuming they'll just do it on their own in time... as nobody's buying the game.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

If a publisher releases a game and nobody is buying it.. they have to know why nobody is buying it. If nobody buys it, and they don't have a *very* obvious clue as to why... they will simply assume there is no interest.

If a publisher releases a game with technical issues and people don't buy it, but people do begin to buy it after patches fix the technical issues, how does the publisher not correlate the two things?

Reviews and technical reviews still happen regardless of people buying, and patches will typically follow fairly quickly which demonstrates that developers are aware of many issues before the game is release. Take Hogwart's Legacy for example, DF didn't get an early code because Warner didn't want DF to technically review the game before the day 1 patch. A second patch came out a few days later.

I'd wager most games have lengthy issues/snag logs and these get carved up in order of severity and timeliness to fix, which is why issues things get patches quickly, and some things get patches a little later. Now it's absolutely true to say that some issues will not be identified unltil a lot of people are playing the game. Some bugs are rare and you need a million people playing it for the odds of it occurring for it to been seen and reported.

 

[Remij]

If a publisher releases a game with technical issues and people don't buy it, but people do begin to buy it after patches fix the technical issues, how does the publisher not correlate the two things?

Reviews and technical reviews still happen regardless of people buying, and patches will typically follow fairly quickly which demonstrates that developers are aware of many issues before the game is release. Take Hogwart's Legacy for example, DF didn't get an early code because Warner didn't want DF to technically review the game before the day 1 patch. A second patch came out a few days later.

I'd wager most games have lengthy issues/snag logs and these get carved up in order of severity and timeliness to fix, which is why issues things get patches quickly, and some things get patches a little later. Now it's absolutely true to say that some issues will not be identified unltil a lot of people are playing the game. Some bugs are rare and you need a million people playing it for the odds of it occurring for it to been seen and reported.

Which publishers are going to waste time developing patches for games nobody is buying? Hogwarts is a terrible example because that game pre-sold what most games will ever sell in their entire lifetimes... That game's success was guaranteed BEFORE anyone had any idea about any performance issues.

And I already addressed the fact that reviews by and large don't mention performance to any meaningful respect. And lately the only reason why we've been seeing articles about shitty performance in certain PC games is because it's fashionable right now and drives some clicks.

Gamers can't depend on reviewers (outside of DF and a couple of others)
Gamers can't depend on developers/publishers

The only people gamers can really count on is themselves to bring issues to light and speak loud enough to ensure they are heard. Just waiting for things to happen is usually not enough.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Which publishers are going to waste time developing patches for games nobody is buying?

It's' common practice for most games to get patches for and just after launch. If it is accepted by publishers that technical issues cause low sales then given the sunk investment, it's in their interest to do what they can to resolve the technical issues so as to increase sales.

It's causality and consequences, init. But I'm not responding to you further, I know where you stand. By all means continue to ignore what I and Andrew are saying.

 

[Remij]

It's' common practice for most games to get patches for and just after launch. If it is accepted by publishers that technical issues cause low sales then given the sunk investment, it's in their interest to do what they can to resolve the technical issues so as to increase sales.

It's causality and consequences, init. But I'm not responding to you further, I know where you stand. By all means continue to ignore what I and Andrew are saying.

You don't live in reality. Gamers move on... you don't get another first impression, and you don't get another launch... It's in developers best interest to do that BEFORE they release the game... my god I can't believe I have to explain that.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

You don't live in reality. Gamers move on... you don't get another first impression, and you don't get another launch... It's in developers best interest to do that BEFORE they release the game... my god I can't believe I have to explain that.

Most games sell more copies after launch than at launch. This means that most players get a better first impression because they are first playing a patched version of the game. That is the reality.

 

[Remij]

Most games sell more copies after launch than at launch. This means that most players get a better first impression because they are first playing a patched version of the game. That is the reality.

Not at full price. You think publishers are going to support a platform where everyone waits for their games to be fixed where they buy the game only after it's been on sale? If people didn't buy the game at launch, many pubs would not bother releasing future games on the platform. It's that simple.


Look at console hardware... The majority of console sales happen after the first 2 years you could say.... and yet those first 2 years are massively important. If nobody bought the console within those first 2 years because they were waiting for whatever reason, such as for it to have more games, or be a better value/cheaper.... then that console would die off.

If you want to believe that developers/pubs understand the importance of patching and fixing a game that nobody is buying and that they'll do it on their own without any pressure... then I dunno what to say. Perhaps that's why we're in this mess to begin with? We should not be waiting for games to be patched to be acceptable... they should launch that way first, and then improve from there.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Not at full price. You think publishers are going to support a platform where everyone waits for their games to be fixed where they buy the game only after it's been on sale?

I'm confused about what you are lobbing for. I thought your complaint was the state of games at launch but most games sold over time will mean it is available on sale at a lower price than at launch. From my DF viewing, it feels many games are launched with technical issues, some/many of which are resolved in post-launch patches.

I don't know if there is hard data, but most games generally don't go on sale on any platform immediately after launch - regardless of sales numbers and patches seem fairly prolific post-launch. If there are technical issues with games that can be fixed with patches in the first few weeks, then in my experience is that games stick to their launch price but there may be some outliers.

But if there is a theoretical published who release games in a poor state and then cannot fix them due to poor sales, is that really the kind of publisher you want to support with pre-order/early sales? It feels like you are railing against this practice.

 

[Remij]

I'm confused about what you are lobbing for. I thought your complaint was the state of games at launch but most games sold over time will mean it is available on sale at a lower price than at launch. From my DF viewing, it feels many games are launched with technical issues, some/many of which are resolved in post-launch patches.

I don't know if there is hard data, but most games generally don't go on sale on any platform immediately after launch - regardless of sales numbers and patches seem fairly prolific post-launch. If there are technical issues with games that can be fixed with patches in the first few weeks, then in my experience is that games stick to their launch price but there may be some outliers.

But if there is a theoretical published who release games in a poor state and then cannot fix them due to poor sales, is that really the kind of publisher you want to support with pre-order/early sales? It feels like you are railing against this practice.

The complaint from the consumer side of me is the state of games at launch. The issue with not buying games at launch... is publishers/developers interpreting correctly the reason why people aren't buying their games at launch.

Now... if everyone waits for a game to be fixed... and let's be real.. if a game has issues at launch, PC gamers move on to the next thing and *if* publishers are lucky they'll catch them during a sale down the line. Games go on sale mere months after release... ESPECIALLY if they fail to sell well initially at launch. The problem with that... is that it's hard to be as successful when people aren't paying $60+ for your game... Hell the Days Gone developers even flat out said.. "don't complain if you don't get a sequel if you didn't buy it full price", the reality of the situation is that you need to buy the game when it's full price... otherwise those games will not meet expectations and sequels will not be granted.. and studios go out of business.

So you see, my concern.. is that publishers get the right message. That being they can't blame anyone but themselves. They can't operate on the hope that people will buy their game if they fix the problems it launches with.. because gamers wont pay full price for the game any longer.. They need to get the message that they have to get it right the first time... and NOT rely on patching. You don't send them that message by buying the game if they fix it after a month or so... That just reinforces the behavior that they can launch games in a shitty state and then fix it later.

This is why I said it's more complicated than just "don't buy it".. If PC gamers don't buy games... they risk not getting them at all. I don't want the message to be "we don't want your game"... I want it to be "we want your game, we want to spend $60... but it needs to perform well at launch".