Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2024]

New info from DF.


Good info, freeing up more memory for RT was a big concern so they've addressed that in some fashion.

It's a 'middling' upgrade in terms of raw hardware yeah, but I somewhat disagree with Alex's befuddlement of how they will market this due to this mediocre specs uplift. I get for the majority of existing PS5 owners who are more casual gamers it's not that enticing, but the refresh models have always been about extending the tail of a consoles lifespan for new buyers. Every product's worth eventually comes down to the price, and there's little confusion in the PC GPU space when you see a product with a marginal uplift in price but a more significant uplift in performance.

Like the 7700XT at launch was largely dismissed as 'pointless' because for only $50 more, you could get the 7800XT and get what...15-20% better performance? If someone was looking at a 7700XT, you would just assume they didn't know about the next tier model, as it makes little sense as a purchase from a value perspective.

So I think a $100 premium for the Pro is likely going to be the upper-tier expectation of the added MSRP. For that, you're getting a base ~50% rendering uplift, higher in RT, and perhaps significant improved image quality. From the perspective of a new buyer, relative to what you get with performance uplifts for gaming technology in the PC space, it's a pretty significant gen on gen upgrade. It's definitely weaker compared to the refreshes from the past gen, but this is expected - we've been told continuously how we can't expect those large uplifts due to the cost of new nodes, if a 50% uplift is unacceptable then Ada/RDNA3 are absolute disasters using that rationale (and some would agree).
 
New info from DF.

30fps games that may not be hitting their frame-rate target when CPU limited - and yes, we have started to see those titles
What games? Gotham Knights? It's 4K hardware RT reflections on PS5 and is very likely GPU limited. And we have just seen with SM2 that the CPU is about 50% idle at 30fps (in a very RT intensive games, in theory CPU heavy). This is 100% unsubstantiated FUD.

4 games out of 3140 are currently 30fps only on PS5. Cerny has done his job well with PS5. I am predicting 99.99% games running on PS5 Pro will be 60fps. Ignoring PS4 BC games of course.
 
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4 games out of 3140 are currently 30fps only on PS5. Cerny has done his job well with PS5. I am predicting 99.99% games running on PS5 Pro will be 60fps. Ignoring PS4 BC games of course.
Games running 60fps on pro... That isn't really in debate. Of course if a game runs at 60fps on PS5, of course it will run at 60fps on pro. The question is, how many games will be released at 30fps only on PS5 and 60fps on pro.
 
New info from DF.

it's going to be VERY interesting how DF staff are going to find out the native resolution of PS5 Pro games with PSSR applied. My guess is that they could take the easy way and see the native resolution of the same game on vanilla PS5, 'cos both are more likely to run internally at the same resolution.
 
New info from DF.

1:06:03 This part made me chuckle. They mention that MS advertised the XSX as a great ML machine and.... Sony ate their lunch sure, and you know the rest xD, guess they at least could use xess via DP4a for their games if they didn't come up with their own solution.
 
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a very well-written article, and when talking about PSSR, curiously enough it features the DLSS and Intel XeSS video of Shadow of the Tomb Raider. It is one of the best videos I've seen on AI upscaling to date, along with the initial DF videos of DLSS 2 featuring Wolfenstein Youngblood. Those videos were certainly eye-opening. The Tomb Raider one is the video that made me buy the Arc A770 in fact.

And I spent a lot of money that hurt my wallet buying new games with xess support, whether they were good or not so good games, to the point of making a collection in Steam with a list of those games with xess support. Now the fever is gone, and the money too xD, but when a game has AI upscaling support I am much more content to play it than without it.
 
Recent years 60fps already become standard of console games. Commercially most PS5 games will still have 60fps for better sales.
 
So Dragon's Dogma 2 is likely 30fps on consoles because of CPU bottlenecking:


Recent years 60fps already become standard of console games. Commercially most PS5 games will still have 60fps for better sales.
60fps became 'standard' because we went through more than two years of cross gen, where of course those games could easily scale to 60fps.

I'm also not confident that 60fps creates better sales. Most '60fps or bust' console users are just loud people on the internet and not representative of the average gamer at all. And I bet like 99% of those same people would absolutely be fine playing many games at 30fps again if that was their only option. I remember I went through that same phase of '60fps is everything!' back when I got into PC gaming, but I ultimately realized I had very little issue going back to playing games at 30fps for certain console exclusives and whatnot. I'm currently playing Tears of the Kingdom and after more than 200 hours, I dont think I've ever once thought about how it's 'only 30fps'.
 
So Dragon's Dogma 2 is likely 30fps on consoles because of CPU bottlenecking:



60fps became 'standard' because we went through more than two years of cross gen, where of course those games could easily scale to 60fps.

I'm also not confident that 60fps creates better sales. Most '60fps or bust' console users are just loud people on the internet and not representative of the average gamer at all. And I bet like 99% of those same people would absolutely be fine playing many games at 30fps again if that was their only option. I remember I went through that same phase of '60fps is everything!' back when I got into PC gaming, but I ultimately realized I had very little issue going back to playing games at 30fps for certain console exclusives and whatnot. I'm currently playing Tears of the Kingdom and after more than 200 hours, I dont think I've ever once thought about how it's 'only 30fps'.

It is unstable on many PC. I don't think next gen consoles Ps6 and Xbox Next will be able to run it t 60 fps...
 
A R5 5600X has CPU drops to 36 fps without ray tracing? What is this game doing that is destroying performance like this?

This also means that a hypothetical PS5 pro with a upgraded CPU would still have drops no matter what.
I think that RE engine just isn't ready for open worlds, and there is a lot of work to do for Capcom.

Ps: I'm looking at some gameplay videos and in the city npc's are fading in and out a couple of meters in front of the camera 🙄
 
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So Dragon's Dogma 2 is likely 30fps on consoles because of CPU bottlenecking:

It's the problem of optimisation which causes 30fps. Lowest 1% framerate with 14700KF can drop to 33fps.


60fps became 'standard' because we went through more than two years of cross gen, where of course those games could easily scale to 60fps.
PS5 first party games and exclusive games all support 60fps. It's standard now.

I'm currently playing Tears of the Kingdom and after more than 200 hours, I dont think I've ever once thought about how it's 'only 30fps'.
A lot of switch games are 30fps only. There is no comparison.
 
It's their bad optimisation which causes 30fps. Lowest 1% framerate with 14700KF can drop to 33fps.



PS5 first party games and exclusive games all support 60fps. It's standard now.


A lot of switch games are 30fps only. There is no comparison.
Ok, but 'bad optimization' exists.

As for lots of Switch games being 30fps, I dont see how that changes anything. The point is it's still an entirely decent and playable framerate. 30fps isn't somehow a 'better' experience on Switch than on PS5.
 
So all the bruhaha about DD2 having cpu limits is due to poor code/optimization? The game has barely any destruction, the npc density isn't high, what reason does it have to run so poorly? From just watching gameplay videos, I can't see why it should run so poorly? Seems like another Gotham Knights to me.
 

Looks like it's very good.
Great vid. Looking pretty darn good so far. Those issues raised there should be fixable in a patch soon enough.

Did I miss it, or did Alex not talk about DLSS Frame Generation at all?

Perhaps there wasn't enough time and it just makes more sense to wait to see if FSR Frame Gen will be coming and then do a comparison then? I would have liked to know if it's at least working properly atm however. I'll know tomorrow anyway :p
 
Disappointed with the lack of real upgrades compared to what the first game received when it was ported over, but this also doesn't seem to have the same performance issues either.

Nixxes must have had an easy job determining the quality mode settings.

Low - Base PS4 settings
Medium - PS4 Pro settings
High - PS5 settings

Easy 🤣
 
I get the disappointment, and I'm sure it's possible to get a game like dd2 running at 60fps, but if games with actually interesting and novel ai, enemy behaviors, environmental interactions, etc, are going to be cpu bound I give them a pass. It's easy to make a game with fairly simplistic interaction run well (a similar (same?) team at capcom got made dmc6!), but making something experimental, varied, and unqiue in a normal development schedule without a few slow systems is pretty rare.
 
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