Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]

[mr magoo]

It won't be, as it does not run ray tracing. (and hence subjected to weird graphical artifacts)

Perhaps xss will have best iq of all next gen consoles. That would be something.

 

[cheapchips]

It might be a tricky one for DF to gain cooperation on, but I'd love a video/interview(s) on how wonky performance / versions happen. If not not necessarily Survivor, maybe one of the other games that's released in a poor state but is now ok and has less drama.

To pick on Survivor, it's a game coming from a clearly talented pool of developers with a big budget behind them. They're using the same engine / tools as it's predecessor. They've been able to ditch last gen consoles. Why can't they manage to hit a performance target, avoid jank and boast reasonable image quality at launch?

I'm totally naive as to why these things don't come together.

I may be asking for a really boring DF feature that only I'd enjoy.

 

[Below2D]

If you Stop any frame in motion with motion blur off, the game is extremely countable - quite different from other releases.

Even with it on it was very countable.

This surprises me because Nx Gamer has a much higher count. About 33% higher on each axis and generally, he and DF are in the same ballpark.

 

[trinibwoy]

They keep trying to force HWRT instead of making a more lightweight software RT like crytek and ue5. which the consoles just are not equipped to do without a lot of optimization around your approach(like metro exodus or insomniac). Especially on an engine like ue4 which is very limiting by itself.

This is probably a hot take, but I kind of feel like the consoles should have shipped without HWRT features this time.

RT(whatever implementation) is the future. But I feel that would have given devs more incentive to go about their own solutions rather than forcing an approach that is not ready for primetime on mainstream machines at the performance devs want.

Wait until 2027/2028 when atleast AMDs technology would have improved a fair amount and allowed for more ambition without the disasters we see now with certain games with RT features.

You could say it's up to developers to know what should and should not be possible but we have seen too many disasters on recent games even without RT features. It's just one less variable to fuck up

Every developer isn’t going to invent their own version of Lumen. It would’ve just delayed the inevitable and we would be stuck with baked lightmaps for another decade. Also we shouldn’t pretend that Lumen doesn’t rely on HWRT. It’s not a complete solution without it. There are some things that are just easier and faster when shooting rays at triangles. That wasn’t going to change whether consoles had hardware for it or not.

It’s really surprising that Respawn decided to force RT on consoles even in performance mode though. The only reasonable explanation is that RT off is so broken that they chose to force RT on where possible (PS5/XSX) and turn it off only where necessary (PC, XSS). Maybe it’ll change with future patches.

 

[Warchild]

Thankfully I have the physical version on ps5. I can imagine after this backlash that they would patch out RT GI or even reflections on big bodies of water. It’s sad we can’t have another Crysis moment in gaming without having to deal with massive backlash. The RT GI makes this game look pre-rendered at times!

 

[Flappy Pannus]

This surprises me because Nx Gamer has a much higher count. About 33% higher on each axis and generally, he and DF are in the same ballpark.

NXGamer thought the RE2/3/7 RT update on consoles was native 4K too, even though all were using checkerboarding. So they can differ, sometimes significantly. As the game is dynamic res too it depends where they're measuring.

I get at first glance the extremely low native rendering res may be questionable, but the artifacts in the video really seem to back it up for me. For example when I was trying TLOU on my 3060, I had to play with DLSS Performance when playing at 1440p to have a hope of reaching 60, and that means my native rendering res was a paltry 1712x960. You would think that would immediately look like crap but upon first boot in many areas, it held up.

The problems come when the reconstruction fails, and the frequency of these artifacts increase significantly as your starting res for reconstruction gets lower and lower. Floor gratings have significant moiré patterns out of nowhere. Specular highlights starting blinking in and out of existence. If you were to play the game natively at 960p it would look significantly blurrier so even at that low a res reconstruction definitely is doing something, but it's when you see stuff like this which reveals a very low internal rendering res to me (and I think that segment is from the resolution mode!).

 

[Inuhanyou]

I think that's the disparity between people who think the game looks good and not on console specifically.

Seeing the raw numbers definitely impacts your mindset because the game is much cleaner than the numbers would suggest, this definitely doesn't look like a 7th gen game in terms of IQ if your looking at it on a tv. Especially because it's using TAA and not trash like no AA, fxaa etc.

However it's also nowhere close to the resolutions it's supposed to be upscaling to (1440p and 2160p) and so it clearly shows the limitations of the upscaling algorithm on certain surfaces.

It's in a weird gray area.

To be honest, I think people would be fine with the trade off if the performance was actually good and stayed closer to it's target. But here we are seeing quality mode in the teens and fps mode on the 30s on worst case scenario. Definitely unacceptable

 

[iroboto]

Looks great. I think they made the right choice to push RT over 60fps. Hopefully things smoothen out over time, but I like the look, that's next gen to me.

I stopped watching DF videos to stop buying games, but here we go again.. rust and ruin
The lighting at 4:45 ... perfection.

 

[Inuhanyou]

Looks great. I think they made the right choice to push RT over 60fps. Hopefully things smoothen out over time, but I like the look, that's next gen to me.

Did they actually make that choice though. According to a lot of people they aren't even utilizing the CPU properly with only a few cores doing much. Seems like an actual bad optimization time than knowingly going for 30fps intentionally. Or else they would have just done something like a 30fps mode and 40fps mode like plague tale

 

[chris1515]

The game looks good in quality mode at least on PS5 and XSX.

 

[iroboto]

Did they actually make that choice though. According to a lot of people they aren't even utilizing the CPU properly with only a few cores doing much. Seems like an actual bad optimization time than knowingly going for 30fps intentionally. Or else they would have just done something like a 30fps mode and 40fps mode like plague tale

It runs 30fps well, 60fps looks like best effort here.
Given the age of the engine, and how far they pushed it, yea, I could see this being pretty heavy. UE5 would have done this better I think, for obvious reasons. But the cost to switch over may have been too large and impactful for their development process.

PC is the where I think the major challenges are. Consoles, don't look so bad. It could use some more smoothening, obviously it would benefit from multi-threading, but I'm not sure how much further they can go on UE4 - it's not that type of engine.

 

[chris1515]

If they want they can add another performance mode without raytracing on PS5 and XSX like the series S version. I am sure it will run at a locked 60 fps. This is an easy fix to do.

 

[Below2D]

Looks great. I think they made the right choice to push RT over 60fps. Hopefully things smoothen out over time, but I like the look, that's next gen to me.

Just no. They tried to do both at once in performance mode when ray tracing should be disabled there. You push ray tracing and 60fps on consoles and sacrifice performance for ray tracing. You give a performance mode without ray tracing and a quality mode with it.

 

[Inuhanyou]

It runs 30fps well, 60fps looks like best effort here.

You say it runs well in 30fps mode..but it frequently goes into the teens in many areas according to DF. That's something not even acceptable on the jaguar cores last gen. The fps we had last gen was far smoother at 30fps. Star was is going back to 7th gen territory 30fps which is not where we want to be

 

[chris1515]

You say it runs well in 30fps mode..but it frequently goes into the teens in many areas according to DF. That's something not even acceptable on the jaguar cores last gen. The fps we had last gen was far smoother at 30fps. Star was is going back to 7th gen territory 30fps which is not where we want to be

It seems an outlier from the two DF videos, this is not frequent.

 

[iroboto]

Just no. They tried to do both at once in performance mode when ray tracing should be disabled there. You push ray tracing and 60fps on consoles and sacrifice performance for ray tracing. You give a performance mode without ray tracing and a quality mode with it.

yea, I think that makes sense. They can go back and remove RT for performance mode.
But if they think they can get 60 on it, then maybe it's just a few patches away. It seems like a massive drop off to leave RT out. There is VRR

 

[Inuhanyou]

It seems an outlier from the two DF videos, this is not frequent.

Hmm

 

[chris1515]

It is one of the best technological showcase having RTGI, selective RT Reflection, very good geometry complexity and high quality texture, It it is one of the best game in the market visually in quality mode. Performance mode is blurry and worse framerate is not good.

 

[trinibwoy]

It is one of the best technological showcase having RTGI, selective RT Reflection, very good geometry complexity and high quality texture, It it is one of the best game in the market visually in quality mode. Performance mode is blurry and worse framerate is not good.

The environment and geometric complexity is really nice. DF’s side by side with fallen order was really illustrative. It’s a real struggle to see the GI improvement with RT on though. Probably more obvious when actually playing.

 

[BitByte]

Looks great. I think they made the right choice to push RT over 60fps. Hopefully things smoothen out over time, but I like the look, that's next gen to me.

I stopped watching DF videos to stop buying games, but here we go again.. rust and ruin
The lighting at 4:45 ... perfection.

I’m sorry but 648p in performance mode for these graphics? Absolutely embarrassing from respawn. It’s been a while since I’ve seen incompetence on this level.