It's funny to me that while John was quick to bagsy the Indy DF review, I bet that Ara has a really interesting tech story.
What does bagsy mean?
Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2024]
- Thread starter Shifty Geezer
- Start date
What does bagsy mean?
Claim, call dibs on, bag, first shout, etc.
It's not a term I hear so much any more!
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cheapchips
Veteran
I'm sure I've used it in front of my kids and been given some funny looks. Middle age is another planet as far as they're concerned.
Flappy Pannus
Veteran
I was surprised at no reconstruction too, but if we're going by the PC port with FSR2...nah. There are some very significant issues with specular aliasing with FSR2 (at least IME). Part of the reason is an aspect that even DLSS struggles a bit with in this game too (although not as obvious in 4K/quality): the flashlight halo has a post-process effect that will produce some aliasing even at native res to a small extent, but reconstruction amplifies this, and it becomes significant when you drop below the highest quality level at high output resolutions. FSR2 though will have specular aliasing issues even outside of this too. Usually FSR2 Quality at 4K would be 'fine' to me if forced to use it over DLSS, but in this game it's a pretty rough implementation. I would probably just use regular scaling in this game if I had a Radeon card over FSR2.
So sure, this could be just the implementation done in this port, hand-tuning FSR for this game for a fixed platform could potentially produce better results. But from other ND games with their relatively heavy TAA solution, it seems Naughty Dog really values image stability. One of the ways you can improve artifacts with image reconstruction and post process effects is just to eliminate those post effects from the reconstruction pipeline (frankly I wish there was an option in TLOU PC to do this for the flashlight), but that then makes the cost of said reconstruction that much more.
Yeah I know, that's what I mean with 'engine' - it's got 2 games under its belt now with the PC, and I don't have much hope of these shortcomings being addressed significantly, but we'll see.
Also worth noting is that unlocked performance mode is extremely close to the same mode in TLOU1:RM on the PS5 (80's to 100fps). When the PC port of TLOU dropped I expressed dismay at the performance, as I couldn't fathom how a game that looks so close to TLOU2, architected to run on a PS4/Pro, required something close to a 3080 to basically just double the PS4 Pro's performance in that game. A common reply I had was "No, this is a remake, you can't compare it to TLOU2, it's utilizing the PS5's special sauce to its fullest". So now we have TLOU2:RM - and it's basically identical, save for a better LOD+Aniso, and for all intents and purposes, it's shares a remarkably close performance profile to TLOU1:RM - further emphasizing in my mind that this engine as a whole is just not well crafted to DX12 atm rather than ND discovering some secret emotion engine 2.
I do like Rich basically laughing in his 4070S review at how demanding TLOU PC is though.
"Like, wtf is this?!"Yeah, you don't simply put "use fast ssd=1" in an .ini and call it a day, as has been explained by devs, a large part of those sub-3 sec loading times is how the assets/engine are architected in the first place just to assume an SSD is the storage medium regardless of all the extra logic the PS5 brings to it, which is why they can show such a huge improvement on PC regardless if Directstorage is used or not. There is no way they had the time/budget to implement 2 sec loading times and said "Nah, we need to think about the PC, which we will release at some indeterminate date in the future and which will sell a fraction of what we will on the PS5".
Regardless it's not like the load times are an issue at all, even skipping cutscenes very early you're basically waiting a handful of seconds. I really don't feel this is that out of place with most modern PS5 games.
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The very nice thing that TLOU2 remaster adds is the improved FOV. Should be interesting to do a performance comparison with standard FOV and max FOV.
Riddlewire
Regular
There's a pdf from Baker out there that goes over the tech pretty well. It's early, but I seem to remember Ara being mentioned in it.It's funny to me that while John was quick to bagsy the Indy DF review, I bet that Ara has a really interesting tech story.
I never saw the blog post that Alex mentioned about them backing away from the tech.
Not sure what the current status of the engine is.
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cheapchips
Veteran
ARA's still on the Nitrous Engine, running on DX12. Baker was the company co-founder, so exploiting technology properly is at the core Oxide really. The size of simulation in ARA wouldn't run on much (anything?) else.
Good History + Nitrous interview with Baker:
Nah you're right, that's pretty bad even by 'average eye' standards. Pretty distracting.
Regardless it's not like the load times are an issue at all, even skipping cutscenes very early you're basically waiting a handful of seconds. I really don't feel this is that out of place with most modern PS5 games.
For the main campaign, it's not an issue. But initial load up could definitely be better. And the new horde/roguelike mode could be better as well since you'll be facing those load screens a lot more frequently. 10-12 seconds isn't bad, but it's very much not what the PS5 promised, and this is supposed to be a PS5 remaster, and from a prominent 1st party studio at that. It just would have been nice if they put more effort into this aspect to make it feel more worthwhile.
Interesting ... I knew there was an Ace Attorney anime series but was unaware of the console game.
The series started as games on the GBA.
Flappy Pannus
Veteran
Yeah bear in mind that's not really on FSR2 as a tech, that's certainly not something I see with other games and specular - FSR2 would be unusable in any game if that was the norm, in fact I've seen it actually handle specular+post process effects better than DLSS in some cases. Just another aspect that was never addressed with this port, some pretty egregious errors with specular that few, if any sites covered as they all evaluated the reconstruction in daytime scenes - you've got to always include post process effects when evaluating reconstruction as that's a big bugaboo for the tech often.
Now the Pro...that's another question. If it comes with machine-learning assisted upscaling, I would expect there would be a patch to enable that. Just from even the conservative estimates of raster % uptick you would be getting 4K/60 natively, but with both temporal + frame gen upscaling you could likely get "4k" + ~120fps in TLOUP2.
DavidGraham
Veteran
I love the hidden sarcasm from John here (timestamped).
I wouldn't call the sarcasm hidden.I love the hidden sarcasm from John here (timestamped).
Would just like to point out that in (YET ANOTHER) next/current gen only game the Series X with it's big compute and bandwidth was a bit better than the also good smaller compute and bandwidth console. Like I predicted. Years ago. Back when I still had hope. About the future of Star Trek.
I found the upscaling comparisons interesting. So TSR beats FSR2 here. But consoles seem to use FSR1 or something similar due to occlusion issues with FSR2. Presumably TSR would have been better but John noted it was heavier so they likely couldn't afford it.
Also notable that TSR with native res looks better than DLSS quality. Not that surprising given the res difference though. Big shame there's no DLAA option.
Also notable that TSR with native res looks better than DLSS quality. Not that surprising given the res difference though. Big shame there's no DLAA option.
davis.anthony
Veteran
It's not the first time FSR2 has lost out to another none ai based upscaler.
It really does seem to need a lot more work.
No DLAA but at least we can still mod it in to the game easily.
The current state of $599 level PC GPU's in comparison to consoles:
Performance is good of course but given we're now over 3 years into the generation and we're still talking about a $600 price point, I see this as disappointing.
What I really appreciate about this format though is the demonstration of the DLSS benefits in the comparison which are usually ignored despite being central to the end user experience.
I'd like to see this taken even further by showing relative performance at what DF judges as equivalent image quality settings irregardless of internal resolution and then seeing what level of GPU are needed to match the console experience.
Performance is good of course but given we're now over 3 years into the generation and we're still talking about a $600 price point, I see this as disappointing.
What I really appreciate about this format though is the demonstration of the DLSS benefits in the comparison which are usually ignored despite being central to the end user experience.
I'd like to see this taken even further by showing relative performance at what DF judges as equivalent image quality settings irregardless of internal resolution and then seeing what level of GPU are needed to match the console experience.
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