Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2024]

Most (overwhelming majority) people play with DLSS on
Curious, but did you have a chance to match PS5's settings to see how it stacks up to a mid-range PC like one with a 3060/2070S? This game runs extremely well on PS5 and the performance bottoms out at 1440p I believe and never dips below 60. That a 4060 cannot maintain 60 even with DLSS Quality at 1440p (base 1080p) suggests that the PS5 runs the game much much better than PC equivalent parts.
 
Curious, but did you have a chance to match PS5's settings to see how it stacks up to a mid-range PC like one with a 3060/2070S? This game runs extremely well on PS5 and the performance bottoms out at 1440p I believe and never dips below 60. That a 4060 cannot maintain 60 even with DLSS Quality at 1440p (base 1080p) suggests that the PS5 runs the game much much better than PC equivalent parts.
8GB VRAM cap on PC may be playing a large factor here for the 4060 coupled with 262GB/s of bandwidth; it's extremely low, I suspect it's hitting bandwidth limits here.
 

Fantastically detailed as usual @Dictator.

So like most Sony ports - relatively solid, but still needing some patches. As Alex mentioned, a lot of those are rather bizarre (especially when the PS4 version can look superior) and relegated to specific areas/configs, so I'm sure they're bugs. The devs have previously been responsive online so I'd expect most of them to be addressed.

Curious, but did you have a chance to match PS5's settings to see how it stacks up to a mid-range PC like one with a 3060/2070S? This game runs extremely well on PS5 and the performance bottoms out at 1440p I believe and never dips below 60. That a 4060 cannot maintain 60 even with DLSS Quality at 1440p (base 1080p) suggests that the PS5 runs the game much much better than PC equivalent parts.

Yeah, that's the kind of comparison I was expecting and was surprised to not see it. How a midrange PC stacks up like for like with the PS5 version in raw performance is a part of the ports quality, I think we all expect at this point for Sony studio games with custom engines to require more GPU grant than you would expect and frametime consistency is key, but the use of DLSS in the 4060 at 1440p would imply the PS5 version is running far, far better - at least in that config.

Here's a 4070 running the game at 4k DLAA Ultra for comparison:

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Now the PS5's Quality mode has a 40fps option, with an 1800p to 2160p dynamic resolution window - and that 40fps is a solid lock from all reports I've seen. So yeah, very GPU demanding - from these numbers the PS5 Pro version will probably deliver better results than a 4070 super.

Not fantastic sure, but as I've always said with these demanding Sony ports I've far more concerned with frametime consistency - you can brute force/tweak your way with bottlenecks that are purely hardware but shader/traversal stutter, you're fucked. They got some areas to iron out (UW displays) sure, but overall I certainly prefer that focus.

On the issue of the cubemap reflections not matching the PS5's quality mode btw, perhaps one of the bottlenecks is they spent a bunch of time trying to get DXR to work but couldn't do it, so they're falling back to 'basic cube maps'. The intention may have been to replace the more accurate cubemaps Quality with just DXR, but the result of that failure also meant they didn't have to time to add in the more accurate cubemap version. There is still the possibility than DXR may come to the PC version later though:

From Eurogamer's interview:

Matt DeWald: For the cube map reflection stuff, we tried to get DXR working properly with that, but we just weren't able to do it, so that's falling back to just basic cube maps in that area. What we realised is that due to the number of reflective surfaces and overall environment, ray tracing is most noticeable in the one scene that Stephen McAuley called out in his GDC talk [around 23:00 in the Realm Between Realms. Given the time of the project, we've pushed that to the side for now. We're hoping to get to that post-launch if we can get DXR working the want we want it to.
 
I could try and run PS5 like settings in a one of test for you guys next week maybe, but for the video I did not include it as it is impossible to run PS5 settings due to things like DRS and the shadow setting not matching. One thing to mention is TAAu is way cheaper than FSR, XeSS or DLSS in this game.
 
I could try and run PS5 like settings in a one of test for you guys next week maybe, but for the video I did not include it as it is impossible to run PS5 settings due to things like DRS and the shadow setting not matching. One thing to mention is TAAu is way cheaper than FSR, XeSS or DLSS in this game.

There is no DRS in the PS5 VRR performance mode. Just match all the settings to PS5 performance like you have done in the past.
 
I could try and run PS5 like settings in a one of test for you guys next week maybe, but for the video I did not include it as it is impossible to run PS5 settings due to things like DRS and the shadow setting not matching. One thing to mention is TAAu is way cheaper than FSR, XeSS or DLSS in this game.
This would be greatly appreciated. I'm really curious to see how a pure console game does in a PC environment using DX12.

There is a 1440p high frame rate mode, which according to John has the same visual make-up as the performance mode but with an unlocked frame rate on 120Hz screens. The resolution is static so no need to worry about DRS there.

The shadows are a bigger problem because if they are indeed between low and medium across the board, that's a big difference. Low seems to run about 20% faster than medium and if the PS5 has a custom value below medium and above low, it could claw back anywhere from 3-18% of the performance. That's a huge deal.

Also, disappointed in this port. Not only does it not scale above the console version, it's actually worse in terms of visuals. Those PS5 to PC ports are seriously underwhelming. I'm glad that they all include DLSS and ultrawide support, but they're often plagued by performance problems, bugs, and other issues. They also don't put any effort into scaling them much beyond their console version outside of Rift Apart and Returnal.
 
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Most (overwhelming majority) people play with DLSS on
That statement may be true but, I have no way of verifying that on my own. For performance deltas, it should be without DLSS. If DLSS data is provided in addition, that's fine but I'm not a fan of presenting performance aided by DLSS as actual performance. It's not the same thing but, that's just my opinion.
 
Fantastically detailed as usual @Dictator.

So like most Sony ports - relatively solid, but still needing some patches. As Alex mentioned, a lot of those are rather bizarre (especially when the PS4 version can look superior) and relegated to specific areas/configs, so I'm sure they're bugs. The devs have previously been responsive online so I'd expect most of them to be addressed.

Eh...on that. They've dropped a recent patch and apparently made some significant changes to how VRAM is handled, and it's breaking a lot of things. Yikes. :(
 
Eh...on that. They've dropped a recent patch and apparently made some significant changes to how VRAM is handled, and it's breaking a lot of things. Yikes. :(
Yea. They messed with analog settings on controller so now the camera judders as you recenter the stick and Kratos as well when you're moving sometimes. That might be a Steam Input thing though, never tested with it off. Textures also unload as you're in the menus after a few seconds and when you return back to the game all the LODs have to stream in.

This is quite broken now.
 
Don't worry guys Nvidia GPUs with 32GB VRAM are coming soon! And affordable :nope:
Not entirely sure what that has to do with XBOX performance issues, or VRAM in general. Care to expound?

Looks like the issue is resolved, and with the amount of time between hotfixes, it seems like something was pretty easy to resolve.
 
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