Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2014]

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Article up on Eurogamer: Digital Foundry's final assessment of 343 Industries' mammoth remastering effort.

Great article. If it wasn't for the GTA V remaster next week, I think I'd be caving in grabbing an Xbox this weekend and this collection. Awesome value at under £40 in the UK :)
 
Considering the load it's not a bad idea to wait until you get a perfect experience. Live and Halo are having issues ATM, from what I'm reading more issues that TF launch. Hopefully they resolve it soon 6pm EST is going to crush them.
 
Pretty interesting that the Halo collection really struggles to hold that 60fps mark. I had my suspicions when these next gen consoles were reveled that developers would ultimately have to make choices, increase resolution from 720p to 1080p, framerate from 30fps to 60fps, or increase the graphical fidelity; the developer can pick any two of the three, but the consoles simply weren't going to have the grunt to do all three.
 
DF is a little wrong, Halo 4 does have subsurface scattering (approximation) both on 360 and on X1. It's just not overdone look-at-me style, it's more subtle but to me it looks very good. Very evident when you first meet Palmer, for example.

Edit: what I would've liked to know however was if the X1 would allow to remove some of the limitations in the original game; for example cutting of shadows at a short distance and so on.
 
I'm not a big fan of Assassin's Creed, but I did find the huge crowds of people interesting. I thought we'd see more that this gen. Maybe not, if the CPUs are struggling this badly.
 
iroboto said:
LOL.

I don't know what to say, edit: I mean only internet meltdown will follow this. They did make note of the game being CPU bound, so there's that aspect. I'm out of ideas honestly. Crap. I was planning to buy this, but I decided to clear my schedule for DA:I, and I was cheering for this game to do well it being co-developed where I live.
Click to expand...

I would hope that there can be a reasoned discussion about this as opposed to a series of knee-jerk reactions. Does it make sense for this game (being what it is) to be CPU limited due to having to process the AI for the crowds, for example? And can this explain the performance differences knowing what we know about the hardware of the two systems?
 
DF summary : PS4 dropping about 20% framerate in some places (busy scenes). Both comparable in typical play. PS4 having an advantage in cutscenes.

What's the audio like? Large crowds with lots of audio processing will have some additional overhead on PS4, possibly. The clock advantage is 6%*, so that's clearly not the only issue in play here. What about IO speed? Have they tried an SSD versus an HDD?

* scrub that, that's GPU upclock! :oops: CPU is an unknown on PS4, but it was a 9% upclock on XB1. If PS4 was also 1.6 GHz, XB1 would have a 9% CPU advantage ignoring other features.
 
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According to the video it's more like 3/4 fps advantage on average for XB1 in busy places (more like 15% advantage on average, not 20%), both comparable or even slight PS4 advantage (2/3fps) on less busy areas.

I think it's possible Microsoft recently unlocked a seventh core of the XB1 CPU for the games (15% is roughly a 1/6) and that this game only runs on 6 cores on PS4.
 
mrcorbo said:
I would hope that there can be a reasoned discussion about this as opposed to a series of knee-jerk reactions. Does it make sense for this game (being what it is) to be CPU limited due to having to process the AI for the crowds, for example? And can this explain the performance differences knowing what we know about the hardware of the two systems?
Click to expand...

Without knowing how the engine operates its going to be tough to figure out. I assume that if CPU bound is an issue the small uptick on X1will play a small factor. With my limited knowledge on the subject I think that the Shared memory contention on PS4 between its GPU and CPU would start to be a real problem if the CPU is taking too long to do its work and is constantly taking priority away from the GPU. If the charts were accurate we would see a steep decline in available bandwidth which despite all the performance advantages ps4 has the ROPS wouldn't have enough available bandwidth to operate fully so a decrease in resolution was necessary??
 
Globalisateur said:
According to the video it's more like 3/4 fps advantage on average for XB1 in busy places (more like 15% advantage on average, not 20%), both comparable or even slight PS4 advantage (2/3fps) on less busy areas.

I think it's possible Microsoft recently unlocked a seventh core of the XB1 CPU for the games (15% is roughly a 1/6) and that this game only runs on 6 cores on PS4.
Click to expand...

Doubtful on the core unlock. MS are not willing to silent patch this close to holidays with the possibility of messing up. Unlocking that 7th core is not trivial considering I imagine many apps depend on both being there. My friends work for third party software companies that deliver encoding apps for TV on Xbox. I can't see that happening on 1 shared core with the OS.
 
iroboto said:
Doubtful on the core unlock. MS are not willing to silent patch this close to holidays with the possibility of messing up. Unlocking that 7th core is not trivial considering I imagine many apps depend on both being there. My friends work for third party software companies that deliver encoding apps for TV on Xbox. I can't see that happening on 1 shared core with the OS.
Click to expand...

When the game OS is running, what is running beside the system OS? When running an app with the game OS suspended, there are 4 cpus available not two. If the system OS can run comfortably on one cpu core, then why should this present a problem?
 
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Ignoring the performance difference for now... it's quite a sin in my opinion to have this game perform THIS badly. I really hope they fix it. It's not just the framerate that suffers. It's (from what you can read on the internet) also quite prone to other massive errors like characters faces not showing. They should've really delayed this game... but that probably wasn't an option for Ubisoft, I guess.
 
temesgen said:
Didn't they say they were CPU limited? PS4 has lower clocked CPU than XB1 so game should struggle a bit more if it truly is CPU issue.
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I was expecting that answer but after reading the digital foundry article it appears to not be the case.
 
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