Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]

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I don't see anything THAT special about Jedi Survivor if I'm honest. It's fine, but the animations are very janky and are what really separates higher quality AAA games apart from it. The image is a noisy mess on consoles most of the time regardless of mode. FSR2 is just garbage at lower resolutions.

Now Redfall.. looks pretty bad period.
 
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
from the dev perspective, HWRT is just easier to implement. Sure UE5 has the software RT pipeline, but that adds too much engineering complexity cuz you need to maintain a bunch of other stuffs (sparse sdf generation, mesh cards, surface cache etc). also for a presumably ue4 title, i don't think there's an easy way to do this.
And to be fair even Epic themselves choose HWRT on console when they ship the matrix demo because they want that sharp reflection. Fortnite on the other hand does software RT on console, and that's also because most of the visual style doesn't require too many glossy surfaces besides water reflection.
i don't want to you to think my next argument as an excuse to the poor optimization, but I think not every tripple A studio can afford the cost of developing their own next-gen features instead of using what's already on the table. The engineering complexity has bumped up significantly and I seriously don't think Respawn actually has enough man-power to do so.
 
from the dev perspective, HWRT is just easier to implement. Sure UE5 has the software RT pipeline, but that adds too much engineering complexity cuz you need to maintain a bunch of other stuffs (sparse sdf generation, mesh cards, surface cache etc). also for a presumably ue4 title, i don't think there's an easy way to do this.
And to be fair even Epic themselves choose HWRT on console when they ship the matrix demo because they want that sharp reflection. Fortnite on the other hand does software RT on console, and that's also because most of the visual style doesn't require too many glossy surfaces besides water reflection.
i don't want to you to think my next argument as an excuse to the poor optimization, but I think not every tripple A studio can afford the cost of developing their own next-gen features instead of using what's already on the table. The engineering complexity has bumped up significantly and I seriously don't think Respawn actually has enough man-power to do so.
I think that's fair argument my friend. But my argument would be to simply reserve them for the 30fps mode or drop them entirely. RT performance isn't good enough for it to be something that is by default yet on console. People forget just a few years before the consoles came out we still thought RT in games was decades out. The consoles are still operating early RT HW comparatively speaking to what will be possible in the future.


It's also an excuse to actually use ue5. You can't create next gen features? That's fine, the engine exists for it to license.
 
RT can potentially lower the development cost for lighting in games.

However, it comes at the cost that developers have to be very very careful in how they use it. I think what we're seeing more and more of now is developers thinking they can just move to RT and it'll solve some development issues only to find out that RT + large worlds + complex geometry = a nightmare issue that they have to figure out how to solve.

If you have relatively simple geometry (Cyberpunk 2077, for example) with generally low visibility distance (again Cyberpunk 2077 with buildings generally limiting how far you can see) then it's certainly far easier to implement without it causing significant issues.

So, if you just implement it without figuring out how to work around RT's current hardware limitations, then developers are just asking for poor performance in their games.

We're at a crossroads where RT needs highly complex and dense geometry to really good, but performance takes a nosedive in that case. OTOH, highly complex geometry needs RT to really look good, but introduce hardware RT and performance takes a nosedive.

Regards,
SB
 
RT can potentially lower the development cost for lighting in games.

However, it comes at the cost that developers have to be very very careful in how they use it. I think what we're seeing more and more of now is developers thinking they can just move to RT and it'll solve some development issues only to find out that RT + large worlds + complex geometry = a nightmare issue that they have to figure out how to solve.

If you have relatively simple geometry (Cyberpunk 2077, for example) with generally low visibility distance (again Cyberpunk 2077 with buildings generally limiting how far you can see) then it's certainly far easier to implement without it causing significant issues.

So, if you just implement it without figuring out how to work around RT's current hardware limitations, then developers are just asking for poor performance in their games.

We're at a crossroads where RT needs highly complex and dense geometry to really good, but performance takes a nosedive in that case. OTOH, highly complex geometry needs RT to really look good, but introduce hardware RT and performance takes a nosedive.

Regards,
SB
There is nothing simple about Cyberpunk. In fact Cyberpunk is much harder will all these dynamic objects. Jedi Survivor is mostly a static game with no geometry animations outside of a few enemies. So BVH rebuilding and refitting should happen a lot less than in Cyberpunk.
 
There is nothing simple about Cyberpunk. In fact Cyberpunk is much harder will all these dynamic objects. Jedi Survivor is mostly a static game with no geometry animations outside of a few enemies. So BVH rebuilding and refitting should happen a lot less than in Cyberpunk.
To add on top of that, cityscape like 2077 also requires far distance raytracing to show the best result.
This is addressed and compared in Epic’s talk on the matrix demo, where distant raytracing is essential to achieve accurate specular occlusion and lighting at night time (where the major lighting comes from distant emissive surfaces).
 
In regard to Spiderman 2 I'm curious to see if they've ditched cube maps entirely and just gone with a pure RT reflections implementation as they no longer have to support PS4.
 
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Another game, another bad port.

Seriously, what's the problem at this point? No one can deliver a competent PC port anymore? Is it DX12? UE? Game complexity? All of those? This is insane. We've gone backwards. 8th gen delivered better PC ports 90% of the time but now I can practically count the number of good AAA ports of the last 12 months on one hand.
 
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