Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2025]

[Cyan]

waited for this review for quite a while.

00:00 Introduction
01:51 Intel Arc B570 Specs vs Arc B580
02:29 GPU Clock Speeds + Power Consumption
04:42 RT Benchmark: Alan Wake 2
05:52 RT Benchmark: Avatar - Frontiers of Pandora
06:30 RT Benchmark: Dying Light 2
07:17 RT Benchmark: F1 24
07:58 RT Benchmark: Hitman - World of Assassination
09:13 Raster Benchmark: Black Myth Wukong
10:30 Raster Benchmark: Forza Horizon 5
11:18 Raster Benchmark: Senua's Saga - Hellblade 2
12:33 Benchmarks Summary
13:22 The Problem With Budget GPU Reviews
14:56 Driver Overhead Tests: Cyberpunk 2077 1080p/1440p/2160p
17:02 Driver Overhead Tests: Starfield 1080p/1440p/2160p
18:44 Driver Overhead Summary
20:03 And Now, The Conclusion

 

[davis.anthony]

They need to get that driver overhead issue sorted as soon as possible if they're to continue to push for more market share.

 

[Charlietus]

Playing silent hill 2 remake on PS5, and I have no idea what developers are thinking as far as graphics goes. You got software lumen in a pretty much completely static world (but that's understandable if it sped up development I guess), and most of all, lumen reflections that in every single situation look horrible. Even in quality mode they are super low res.

How did they look at that and not use cubemaps or screen space, at least on console?

In this gen, more than any other, I see developers just making the most nonsense choices possible, without a good reason.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Playing silent hill 2 remake on PS5, and I have no idea what developers are thinking as far as graphics goes. You got software lumen in a pretty much completely static world (but that's understandable if it sped up development I guess), and most of all, lumen reflections that in every single situation look horrible. Even in quality mode they are super low res.

How did they look at that and not use cubemaps or screen space, at least on console?

In this gen, more than any other, I see developers just making the most nonsense choices possible, without a good reason.

Looking at the gaming industry, with mass layoffs happening seemingly everywhere, including for devs that work on hit games like Marvel Rivals, I think a lot of it is just time crunching by publishers. The devs may want to do other things, but if the bean counters say you have x budget and y time and that's it, then that's what happens.

 

[Charlietus]

Looking at the gaming industry, with mass layoffs happening seemingly everywhere, including for devs that work on hit games like Marvel Rivals, I think a lot of it is just time crunching by publishers. The devs may want to do other things, but if the bean counters say you have x budget and y time and that's it, then that's what happens.

I could maybe understand with cubemaps, since you have to create them for each environment, but screen space reflections is just a toggle in unreal engine. Just something that's difficult for me to understand.

Same thing in Lords of the Fallen. Reflections are just pixels.

It's like porting a game to the switch and leaving Ray Tracing on...

 

[techuse]

Demo launches the 18th.

 

[trinibwoy]

I could maybe understand with cubemaps, since you have to create them for each environment, but screen space reflections is just a toggle in unreal engine. Just something that's difficult for me to understand.

Same thing in Lords of the Fallen. Reflections are just pixels.

It's like porting a game to the switch and leaving Ray Tracing on...

Lumen relies on screen space traces too so there must be a good reason for devs to intentionally disable SSR. Lumen probably should’ve never shipped with SDF reflections. They’re no good.

 

[tuna]

I think PS5 Fortnite has pretty nice reflections.

 

[Charlietus]

I think PS5 Fortnite has pretty nice reflections.

Fortnite is one of the few console games that has a great ray tracing implementation.

 

[DavidGraham]

The wonderful GTA V ray tracing update for PC gets analyzed by DF, global illumination, shadows, reflections, warming up for GTA 6? (The RTGI solution in GTA V is per pixel and works on every light source).

 

[Karamazov]

by improving too much GTA5 we could get less of a wow factor when GTA6 comes out ?

 

[iroboto]

by improving too much GTA5 we could get less of a wow factor when GTA6 comes out ?

IMO, it’s hard to imagine that these bolt ons will get it anywhere close to GTA6.

Between GTA5 and GTA6 there was also RDR2 and I would say GTA5 with RT from what I’ve seen so far, cant match RDR2.

We know there has been significant time that Rockstar had to work on the engine from 5 to RDR to 6. They should have resolved any tech debt issues from older releases and had sufficient time to move the graphical bar forward if RDR2 was any indication of what they can accomplish. GTA6 could potentially be the graphically defining game for this generation as RDR2 was for last.

 

[trinibwoy]

Is there any technical reason RDR2 isn't getting the same upgrade treatment? I'm guessing GTA V is still bringing in big bucks so the work is justifiable.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

TBH it's not really justifiable. That is, they aren't going to lose money not upgrading an ancient game before GTA6 releases, nor, surely, are they going to make money with this upgrade. It seems to me to be something they are doing because they can rather than for clear business reasons.

 

[iroboto]

TBH it's not really justifiable. That is, they aren't going to lose money not upgrading an ancient game before GTA6 releases, nor, surely, are they going to make money with this upgrade. It seems to me to be something they are doing because they can rather than for clear business reasons.

Get GTA back into the news cycle I suppose. Get people back into GTA before 6 releases. It was likely an easier bolt on to accomplish.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

GTA6 is not going to be lacking for publicity!

 

[trinibwoy]

TBH it's not really justifiable. That is, they aren't going to lose money not upgrading an ancient game before GTA6 releases, nor, surely, are they going to make money with this upgrade. It seems to me to be something they are doing because they can rather than for clear business reasons.

Isn’t GTA V still printing money? Maybe this will entice some whales to get back on. The biggest benefit though is probably getting to trial run new tech in a relatively safe production environment.

 

[Davros]

Maybe they did it to gain experience of working with ray tracing

 

[Kaotik]

To inject some less-technical thoughts: I can barely tell the difference between all of the temporal upscalers. If someone held a gun to my head, showed XeSS, FSR3, FSR4, DLSS and PSSR on my TV, and asked me to label which one is which there is no way I could do it. I imagine most non-technical people that are just playing the game and not pixel-peeping probably cannot tell a real difference between PSSR and FSR4, or tbh between FSR3 and FSR4 (or DLSS!).

So, that said: I don't think PS5P buyers are majorly hurt by being FSR4 betatesters, PSSR is likely good enough for what console players are using it for. It's a bad product because consoles are mediocre products these days (for almost the same price as a PC you get 3x less freedom and locked framerates forever) not because the upscaler artifacts 10% more than one that came out 6 months later.

Calling them FSR4 beta testers seems inaccurate. PSSR and FSR4 are inherently different and PS5 Pro can't do FSR4, they're now hoping to develop something similar to it. PS5 Pro ML hardware is supposedly pure convolution acceleration which makes it less flexible in ways even compared to WMMA in RDNA 3, let alone RDNA 4s improved WMMA (FP8) and SWMMAC.
What they might share is some training data, but that should be about it.

 

[pcchen]

Maybe they did it to gain experience of working with ray tracing

They also get a lot of real world user experiences with this update. This is very valuable.