Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2024]

[trinibwoy]

You cant support the idea that perhaps we should give some leniency to developers for not making flawless pieces of insanely complex software.

I don’t see anyone demanding perfection. Setting aside gameplay logic bugs, there are some egregious rendering issues that make you wonder how these builds make it past QA. Dragons Dogma 2 is a recent amusing example of this. The NPC pop-in is so bad it’s kinda hilarious. It has other issues like bad shadow artifacting that someone clearly deemed acceptable to ship. I wouldn’t classify “stable shadows” as some unattainable goal.

So not only are there technical issues but someone also made the cynical decision that it was ok to ship the software in that state.

Passenger planes are actually less complex in many ways. They are basically all being designed to do roughly the same things as others, and the goal is usually not to be on some cutting edge of technology and performance. And a new airplane platform will usually take at least 10-15+ years of design, development and testing, especially if there's new engines and whatnot to go with it, largely because there are such stringent standards in terms of safety and reliability and all that. Nobody dies if a game has some performance issues, and I'm sure that if the average AAA game took 10+ years to make, they could probably iron out most of the technical issues as well. But that's simply not financially feasible, nor would the customers of such products be happy at all about this. Similarly, if games weren't continually trying to be more ambitious, developers would be able to produce games with less issues, but again, the customers demand more.

Exactly. Planes should take a long time to design, build and test because it’s actually critical that these things are done properly as lives are at risk. That’s what’s missing with game development. A lack of understanding of how much time, money and effort it takes to do things properly.

The idea that the 'hard stuff' in games has already been ironed out really does continue to prove that y'all genuinely do not appreciate the incredible complexity and challenges of making games. Y'all keep saying you do appreciate this, but your reasonings dont seem to support it.

No one claimed that “all” of the hard stuff has been ironed out. However a lot of the concepts, math and basic technology for rendering a 3D world has been around for a while. These guys aren’t re-inventing the wheel every time they create a new game.

You can respect and admire the effort and talent required to make games. I’m sure everyone here does. That doesn’t mean we need to make excuses for poor management or shoddy work. I’m still not getting why game developers deserve special treatment from paying customers. In what other profession do people shrug off poor work just because the work is hard?

 

[Seanspeed]

I don’t see anyone demanding perfection. Setting aside gameplay logic bugs, there are some egregious rendering issues that make you wonder how these builds make it past QA. Dragons Dogma 2 is a recent amusing example of this. The NPC pop-in is so bad it’s kinda hilarious. It has other issues like bad shadow artifacting that someone clearly deemed acceptable to ship. I wouldn’t classify “stable shadows” as some unattainable goal.

So not only are there technical issues but someone also made the cynical decision that it was ok to ship the software in that state.

Yet DD2 is highly popular and of the issues I do see people complaining about with it among general gamers, it's rarely anything technical in nature.

We also know Dragon's Dogma 2 did not have the kind of team size or budget of Capcom's bigger IP's.

Exactly. Planes should take a long time to design, build and test because it’s actually critical that these things are done properly as lives are at risk. That’s what’s missing with game development. A lack of understanding of how much time, money and effort it takes to do things properly.

What? You're suggesting that video games be treated as seriously as human-carrying flying machines? That developers/publishers should literally take TEN OR MORE YEARS to complete a game just to ensure they dont have any technical issues that some small elitist group of gamers will take major issue with?

Are you really that out of touch with practical reality and what you're asking here?

You can respect and admire the effort and talent required to make games. I’m sure everyone here does.

That is very much not my impression at all. Quite the opposite. In fact, a claim like that seem completely irreconcilable with overall arguments such as yours and others here.

 

[trinibwoy]

What? You're suggesting that video games be treated as seriously as human-carrying flying machines?

I said nothing of the sort. Are games responsible for people’s lives? Please read what I actually said.

That is very much not my impression at all. Quite the opposite. In fact, a claim like that seem completely irreconcilable with overall arguments such as yours and others here.

How do you propose we demonstrate our appreciation for the complexity of game dev?

 

[trinibwoy]

Yet DD2 is highly popular and of the issues I do see people complaining about with it among general gamers, it's rarely anything technical in nature.

Yes and it’s also irrelevant. We’re not debating whether the average gamer overlooks technical issues in context of the overall experience. We know they do. I’m in that boat too.

However DF’s content isn’t about what issues the average gamer is willing to live with. I hope the intent is to provide a platform to illuminate these issues with a critical lens and ultimately encourage higher technical quality in games.

 

[Seanspeed]

Yes and it’s also irrelevant. We’re not debating whether the average gamer overlooks technical issues in context of the overall experience. We know they do. I’m in that boat too.

However DF’s content isn’t about what issues the average gamer is willing to live with. I hope the intent is to provide a platform to illuminate these issues with a critical lens and ultimately encourage higher technical quality in games.

I'm not sure people seem to get that I'm simply explaining things, not excusing things. I tried to make that clear earlier, but I know that can get lost.

 

[Cyan]

a video from Olie. What surprised me the most is that Doom Eternal doesn't even support RT on Xbox Series S, but the Steam Deck and the RoG Ally can run the game with RT on.

edit: @Shifty Geezer , Olie says performant at the 3:50 minutes mark in the video. And well, that's a word I haven't heard of until recently so performs better is the most correct --from a non english native.

 

[davis.anthony]

a video from Olie. What surprised me the most is that Doom Eternal doesn't even support RT on Xbox Series S, but the Steam Deck and the RoG Ally can run the game with RT on.

edit: @Shifty Geezer , Olie says performant at the 3:50 minutes mark in the video. And well, that's a word I haven't heard of until recently so performs better is the most correct --from a non english native.

Doom Eternal can use 800-1000MB of extra VRAM when RT is enabled (stats from the PC version) so as he suggested in the video, I expect it's because Series-S simply doesn't have the spare memory for RT.

 

[davis.anthony]

Thought this was worthy of a post, I will be trying this mod for myself later on.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1785668252820971992

 

[trinibwoy]

I'm not sure people seem to get that I'm simply explaining things, not excusing things. I tried to make that clear earlier, but I know that can get lost.

I think people here understand that making games is not an easy job and developers work hard at it. The discussion should be how to manage that complexity to produce better results.

 

[cheapchips]

Doom Eternal can use 800-1000MB of extra VRAM when RT is enabled (stats from the PC version) so as he suggested in the video, I expect it's because Series-S simply doesn't have the spare memory for RT.

It's not apples for apples because of resolution etc, but the gen 8 version run in less than 8GB of RAM. Last gen settings with RT slapped on and jobs a good 'un.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

On the subject of smaller/more focused games vs laborious AAA grind/monetizationfests I generally agree, I'm liking more what I see from smaller studios these days.

However, on the topic of optimization, it can really be a double-edged sword at times. Smaller, more agile teams will not always go for broke in terms of scope, and as such you can get games that are playable on a wider range of lower-end hardware.

But...their lack of experience also means they can be some of the worst offenders when it comes to missing basic stuff like shader precompilation that will affect the game on any config.

For example, a newly released game that looks very interesting to me - Indika. Seems to be in the vein of What Remains of Edith Finch in terms of really utilizing the medium to tell a story in an inventive way. It's UE5 (I believe?), but goddamn - just massive amounts of shader/traversal stutter, amongst a host of other issues (settings not being saved, DLSS not working, etc). Like really, worse than the poorest UE4 experiences I've seen.

The 'suggestions' from the title's reps on Steam for improving performance just speaks to this lack of expertise - suggesting things like increasing your virtual memory. Sigh.

So yes, there are the extreme financial pressures of the industry that especially with AAA studios, are a significant contributor for the QA issues we're getting in modern titles now. But this also seems to occur with such a high frequency - at least with UE4/5 titles on PC - for titles by studios that presumably have a more flexible release schedule. It seems clear these problems are not solely due to programmers being under the corporate lash, there is a disconnect of sorts with who we are empowering to create these games and the ability of these tools to properly scale to their skillset.

 

[Remij]

On the subject of smaller/more focused games vs laborious AAA grind/monetizationfests I generally agree, I'm liking more what I see from smaller studios these days.

However, on the topic of optimization, it can really be a double-edged sword at times. Smaller, more agile teams will not always go for broke in terms of scope, and as such you can get games that are playable on a wider range of lower-end hardware.

But...their lack of experience also means they can be some of the worst offenders when it comes to missing basic stuff like shader precompilation that will affect the game on any config.

For example, a newly released game that looks very interesting to me - Indika. Seems to be in the vein of What Remains of Edith Finch in terms of really utilizing the medium to tell a story in an inventive way. It's UE5 (I believe?), but goddamn - just massive amounts of shader/traversal stutter, amongst a host of other issues (settings not being saved, DLSS not working, etc). Like really, worse than the poorest UE4 experiences I've seen.

The 'suggestions' from the title's reps on Steam for improving performance just speaks to this lack of expertise - suggesting things like increasing your virtual memory. Sigh.

So yes, there are the extreme financial pressures of the industry that especially with AAA studios, are a significant contributor for the QA issues we're getting in modern titles now. But this also seems to occur with such a high frequency - at least with UE4/5 titles on PC - for titles by studios that presumably have a more flexible release schedule. It seems clear these problems are not solely due to programmers being under the corporate lash, there is a disconnect of sorts with who we are empowering to create these games and the ability of these tools to properly scale to their skillset.

Watched a stream of it and very first thing... huge massive hitches. The damn cutscene didn't even make sense because by the time the shaders compiled the scene had switched and then it had to compile again... It's just insane that stuff like this releases.

 

[arandomguy]

Can you elaborate on this further? what do you mean by latency here? memory latency?

Not strictly but that is a facet of the overall issue.

Just a higher level example take streaming which was brought up. Available main memory (or equivalent) hasn't increased in density enough to just rely on the simply method of loading everything. While NAND over NVMe is orders of magnitude faster and lower latency then hard drives it's correspondingly orders of magnitude worse than DRAM. Would things be better with more DRAM (such as maybe 128GB this generation)? I'd guess so, but we don't have that kind of scaling and so we have 16GB.

When we say performance has gone up in practice performance (or really capability) hasn't really increased uniformly. This has some important considerations if we want to go down the route of comparing with the past in that not all aspects of computing has increased at the same rate. So it's not so simple to say just because computers are X faster on average everything is just uniformly "easier" on the software side to leverage compared to the past.

 

[arandomguy]

Yes and it’s also irrelevant. We’re not debating whether the average gamer overlooks technical issues in context of the overall experience. We know they do. I’m in that boat too.

However DF’s content isn’t about what issues the average gamer is willing to live with. I hope the intent is to provide a platform to illuminate these issues with a critical lens and ultimately encourage higher technical quality in games.

I do think there's seems to be several voices in terms of the severity of this issue and how the industry should respond which seems to be the point of contention.

Personally I feel the issue does exist and there likely needs to be more emphasis on looking for it and addressing it, in which raising awareness of it does help. However at the same time I'm far from agreeing with the viewpoint that it's the most pressing issue in games these days and that the entire industry should fundementally shift to priortize this.

 

[trinibwoy]

I do think there's seems to be several voices in terms of the severity of this issue and how the industry should respond which seems to be the point of contention.

Personally I feel the issue does exist and there likely needs to be more emphasis on looking for it and addressing it, in which raising awareness of it does help. However at the same time I'm far from agreeing with the viewpoint that it's the most pressing issue in games these days and that the entire industry should fundementally shift to priortize this.

Are you referring to shader compilation stutter or poor quality in general? I think DF makes a bit of a meal out of the whole stutter issue but I think it’s important that somebody does. It also serves as a useful lightning rod to draw attention to the poor state of game releases in general.

 

[chris1515]

 

[Cyan]

Thought this was worthy of a post, I will be trying this mod for myself later on.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1785668252820971992

first game I've ever ever played using native path tracing. Glad I tried it on one of my favourite games to date. It has some impressive moments. I am surprised at how well it performs taking into account it's path tracing on a humble system like mine.

The enemies at very close range look incredibly detailed with this lighting system.

The noise is unbearable though. Made a quick gallery.

https://imgur.com/a/10WaanB

My favs:

The red light reflecting on the lockers, not only on the water, depending on the angle at which you are looking.

The lighting up close looks really nice to me.

 

[davis.anthony]

There's no excuse for Fallout 4 performing like it is on console.

Looking at old PC benchmarks, an R9 290x released in late 2013 can run the game at native 4k, with ultra settings at 34fps.

PS5 and Series-X are easily double the performance of that GPU so there should be no need for a performance and quality mode, there should just be a single 4k60fps mode.

It's a poor showing from Bethesda.

 

[Caayn]

Call me crazy but I still don't like that games change their render settings based on the system display settings. I don't want to change my system settings for each game.

It's a neat trick but why not expose those settings in the game itself.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Are you referring to shader compilation stutter or poor quality in general? I think DF makes a bit of a meal out of the whole stutter issue but I think it’s important that somebody does. It also serves as a useful lightning rod to draw attention to the poor state of game releases in general.

Bear in mind DF could basically hold a biweekly update on this if they wanted to - they don't cover all the indie/AA EU4 games that suffer from this too. Sandland is another title (albeit not really AA) that has no shader precompilation with the expected results. That's Alone in the Dark, Indika and that game I've run across in just the last month that have tons of shader stutter.

It seems that the only chance these games have for this problem to be addressed is to be featured in a DF piece.

Pretty pathetic showing all around. Also discovered that the patch on PC doesn't even fix the issue of the loading times being affected by framerate, you still need a mod that unlocks the framerate when transitioning between indoor/outdoor areas which can significantly reduce loading time in some areas. Jesus.

There's no excuse for Fallout 4 performing like it is on console.

Looking at old PC benchmarks, an R9 290x released in late 2013 can run the game at native 4k, with ultra settings at 34fps.

PS5 and Series-X are easily double the performance of that GPU so there should be no need for a performance and quality mode, there should just be a single 4k60fps mode.

It's a poor showing from Bethesda.

It is no doubt a sad showing, but load can vary wildly depending upon the scene - both in area and time of day (night can deliver 50%+ boost to framerate). Even in an area without heavy use of God rays which can really impact Nvidia in particular on Ultra (there's a mod which fixes this), I can easily drop below 30fps on my 3060 at 4K/Ultra (no HBAO or physx) - hell even 4k/high will teter close to the 30fps edge - so I'd have to see where that measurement of the 290x was taken. PS5/SX can be around 3060ti in pure raster performance, so they would still need to employ cut back settings or dynamic res heavily to maintain 4k/60, even with more attention given to this port.


edit: Just putting the shadow distance and godrays to medium, leaving everything else at Ultra more than doubles my framerate to a solid 60 at 4k, yowza