Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2024]

God, the 4 pro checkboard in this game was the blurriest game I had ever played at the time, only surpassed by the great forscopen demo on PS5 in performance mode.
It certainly seemed like they didn't properly fix CB sampling locations.
Heavy TAA doesn't really help.

I wonder if the 'geometry scaling' would have been any worse.
 
It certainly seemed like they didn't properly fix CB sampling locations.
Heavy TAA doesn't really help.

I wonder if the 'geometry scaling' would have been any worse.
No idea about the technical reason for it, but the fact that they never fixed it is even more maddening. I guess 60 milion copies isn't enough for rockstar.
 
Out of the 3 Stalker games released so far I thought the first one was the best, Not sure which of the other 2 were better but if it was Clear Sky that would indicate Stalker games are getting worse
Clear Sky was the worst. It did get an engine upgraded, so it had some additional graphical effects (one of the first DX10 games IIRC), but it's story was dumb and irrelevant, because Clear Sky was a group no one knew about and they are all dead by the end of the game. The reworked anomaly/artifact system was frustrating as well. Call of Pripyat was better, maybe lacking some of the original wow from the first game because a lot of it is retread. But better than Clear Sky. It's a little more focused, and polished up, but the plot is basically the same as the first game, because you end up just following Strelok on one of his runs to the wishgranter. But Pripyat had the newer engine from Clear Sky and the better story/plot from the first game and, at least when I played it, was less glitchy than both. Now, though, the first game with mods is usually the way to go. I believe some of the earlier ones used the renderer from Clear Sky or Pripyat, but newer mods like Anomaly use a custom 64bit fork of X-Ray. And I might be misremembering things, but I think there was a mod that merged the maps from all 3 games into one big map.
 
This ground-up remake of Ark Survival Evolved moves to UE5 with a bevy of new visual features - starting with Lumen, Nanite, volumetric clouds and updated physics. The performance cost runs deep on console though, leading to a 20-40fps range with full screen tearing. On the plus side, Ascended offers a small reprieve via a console command menu, letting us tweak select settings on PS5, Series X and S - so can we better optimize the game ourselves for 60fps?

00:00 Intro/Ark Survival Ascended Upgrades
03:28 PS5 vs Xbox Series X/S Visual Comparisons
06:59 PC's Epic Settings Tested
08:13 Command Console Explained
10:04 Xbox Series S Frame-Rate Test
14:07 Xbox Series X Frame-Rate Test
16:19 PS5 Frame-Rate Test
19:08 Verdict
 
Weird how much worse the textures are on consoles compared to PC. PC version looks quite a lot better, damn.

Also noticed that textures on the PS5 look ever so slightly more detailed than the Series X version.. and the Series S... well... we won't talk about that lol.

But is it just me, or perhaps I'm just misremembering things, but Series X seems to be doing fairly well compared to PS5 in some recent UE5 games. Honestly after the uncertainty at the beginning of the gen, and Epic and Sony seemingly having a closer relationship along with the demos being either focused on PS5, or running a bit better on PS5 (Matrix) it seems like in real world examples, Series X is doing a bit better.

Perhaps over time the improvements Epic have been making to the engine are disproportionately improving Series X performance over PS5. Maybe it's all in my head and just very per-game dependent.
 
It's a very compute heavy game, and the Series X has a minimum 18% compute advantage and 25% more memory bandwidth. Very demanding games are more likely to see the PS5 throttling, seeing the compute disparity grow.

Being 20%+ faster isn't something that seems outlandish in parts of a UE5 games that's really going for it.
 
Nice, glad to see this get some coverage! It's definitely rough on console. IMO rather than chase 60 it would be a much better experience for them just to put in a properly paced vsync/2 30fps cap by default. Yes it can still fall below that occasionally but it would still make the majority experience a lot better. It's a shame that they decided to use volumetric clouds *as* fog as the performance cost is just ridiculous, but turning them off you lose a lot of visual appeal.

Having played many dozens of hours at this point though I'm sticking with my take that the game looks amazing, but it is definitely super heavy and doesn't scale down as well as one would like. You basically need a 4080+ class card to enjoy it at anywhere near max settings, although of course "max settings" are always kind of an arbitrary thing. I don't think the console versions necessarily strike a great balance out of the box, although having a smoother 30fps capped experience to start would go a long way IMO. The compromises for 60fps are just too much.

I also have no idea why the textures were slashed so much. Maybe on Series S there's always a memory argument but in general virtual texturing works very well...
 
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Heavy UE5 open world survival game, 30fps will do, sure.

It does look pretty great overall, especially in the world of survival games. These games are never super refined and a bit of jank is kind of just part of the experience.
 
Hmm, I wonder if the Series X version's worse texture detail comes from a somewhat aggressive VRS implementation, where there is none on PS5?

Screenshot-2024-06-13-140912.png
 
Hmm, I wonder if the Series X version's worse texture detail comes from a somewhat aggressive VRS implementation, where there is none on PS5?

Screenshot-2024-06-13-140912.png
Or simply VRS Off vs VRS On? Sure with VRS you increase framerate but is it worth it here? Texture resolution seems to be 4 times less on XSX, this is a significant sharpness gap, whatever the reason.
 
Hmm, I wonder if the Series X version's worse texture detail comes from a somewhat aggressive VRS implementation, where there is none on PS5?

Screenshot-2024-06-13-140912.png
I don't think there is any VRS in this title. It's certainly not a setting on PC.
 
seeing this, i'm a bit worried about the future performance of Wukong.
There should hopefully be some emphasis on performance optimization given the fast+timing based nature of the combat and everything.

We've seen UE5 can run ok running Lumen and Nanite. It's not gonna be light, but no high fidelity games this gen will be.
 
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