Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2014]

[Arwin]

frame drop due to netcode, isnt that new and only happen in D3?

Sorry, I misremembered, it was autosave:

It isn't quite a faultless display from the PS4 version, but close; in our full playthrough, the auto-save causes the odd a hiccup, as does occasionally streaming in new segments of a just-loaded area.

Emphasis mine also on the full playthrough bit, given the discussion above.

 

[Dave Glue]

The reason seems to be that DF barely played the game at all, i.e. they didn't get to the areas that would have put the engine on both machines under stress.

Given the game starts slow (I've only played the PC/Mac version), testing those starting areas of the game is borderline pointless because the meat of the game is in the higher-populated areas of the game when things get crazy

As someone who's completed the campaign and now playing through adventure mode with a lvl 70, the PS4 version holds up the framerate incredibly well throughout, regardless of area.

The moments were it drops below 60fps are exceeding rare, at least on a single player playthrough, even with the later levels and the screen absolutely swamped with effects. When it's noticeable it's extremely short.

I have played some adventure with anohter wizard, and when things got absolutely nuts I did see framerate drops that appeared to be ~40fps for a few secs, but certainly nothing like the 15fps drops people are reporting for the PC version at times.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

The moments were it drops below 60fps are exceeding rare, at least on a single player playthrough, even with the later levels and the screen absolutely swamped with effects. When it's noticeable it's extremely short.

What's well below 60? An unfair question I know - I couldn't answer it

 

[dobwal]

Well this is the first time I've played any iteration of Diablo. And my question is, does framerate matters for other builds other than DH?

I went through a playthrough with a DH on normal with a Barbarian follower with healing powers and its was nothing but a cake walk. Regardless of the choatic mess on the screen, I spent most of my time managing my hate levels by switching back and forth between rapid fire to entanglement shot while rotating back and forth.

It didn't seem like a game where high framerates really mattered.

 

[Dave Glue]

What's well below 60? An unfair question I know - I couldn't answer it

...? I don't see what this question has to do with anything you quoted from my post.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

...? I don't see what this question has to do with anything you quoted from my post.

You said "The moments were it drops below 60fps are exceeding rare" and I asked what is "well below 60" So my question is, when it dropped well below 60, could you hazard a guess at how much below 60fps that was. 50fps? 40fps? 30fps? worse?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

He never said "well below"; just "below". Other than that, your question makes sense - what sort of guesstimate framedrops was Dave Glue seeing?

 

[Deleted member 11852]

He never said "well below"; just "below". Other than that, your question makes sense - what sort of guesstimate framedrops was Dave Glue seeing?

Oh yeah. I don't where that errant word came from

 

[iroboto]

As someone who's completed the campaign and now playing through adventure mode with a lvl 70, the PS4 version holds up the framerate incredibly well throughout, regardless of area.

The moments were it drops below 60fps are exceeding rare, at least on a single player playthrough, even with the later levels and the screen absolutely swamped with effects. When it's noticeable it's extremely short.

I have played some adventure with anohter wizard, and when things got absolutely nuts I did see framerate drops that appeared to be ~40fps for a few secs, but certainly nothing like the 15fps drops people are reporting for the PC version at times.

add 2 more crusaders to that mix in a rift and then let me know if it's still holding 40fps while spamming all abilities. It is your duty!!

 

[Cyan]

As someone who's completed the campaign and now playing through adventure mode with a lvl 70, the PS4 version holds up the framerate incredibly well throughout, regardless of area.

The moments were it drops below 60fps are exceeding rare, at least on a single player playthrough, even with the later levels and the screen absolutely swamped with effects. When it's noticeable it's extremely short.

I have played some adventure with anohter wizard, and when things got absolutely nuts I did see framerate drops that appeared to be ~40fps for a few secs, but certainly nothing like the 15fps drops people are reporting for the PC version at times.

I read reports of multiplayer games, with 4 people, where the game runs quite below the 60 fps mark from an user with the PS4, it could be slightly more pronounced on the Xbox One but I don't really know. Not an issue for me though, I usually play the game alone, or that's what I am used to.

I have the Xbox One version. One of the best games ever, btw!

Well this is the first time I've played any iteration of Diablo. And my question is, does framerate matters for other builds other than DH?

I went through a playthrough with a DH on normal with a Barbarian follower with healing powers and its was nothing but a cake walk. Regardless of the choatic mess on the screen, I spent most of my time managing my hate levels by switching back and forth between rapid fire to entanglement shot while rotating back and forth.

It didn't seem like a game where high framerates really mattered.

Framerates really matter in this case, the game is easier to play, although not unplayable at 30 fps of course. I was an avid player of Diablo 2, wrote guides on the game, knew almost every little secret, and the game always run fine even on my old computer.

But Diablo 2 is a DirectDraw game, so the framerates may vary and it can still be playable. I clocked like 200 fps on my current PC when I got the game on Battlenet using my old discs and they gave me a digital copy of the game a couple of years ago when Diablo 3 came out.

30 fps is playable for a game like this, but 60 fps is goodness.

 

[Rangers]

add 2 more crusaders to that mix in a rift and then let me know if it's still holding 40fps while spamming all abilities. It is your duty!!

Why isn't DF getting us some vids on both platforms of these super demanding areas? Would be interesting.

Ok granted, I guess they actually dont just have unlimited resources and all.

 

[AlNom]

Why isn't DF getting us some vids on both platforms of these super demanding areas?

Time........

 

[NRP]

Hey Al, get D3 so we can do co-op and try to choke the Bone. I'm working on a Witch Doctor build just for that purpose.

 

[iroboto]

Why isn't DF getting us some vids on both platforms of these super demanding areas? Would be interesting.

Ok granted, I guess they actually dont just have unlimited resources and all.

Lol to be fair if you don't really play d3 ROS you wouldn't know that rift monster density is much higher than other play modes.

My PC will chug to 1 FPS LOL. I am still trying to figure out the problem it shouldn't be that bad but sometimes it's just terrible.

 

[specwarGP2]

add 2 more crusaders to that mix in a rift and then let me know if it's still holding 40fps while spamming all abilities. It is your duty!!

Even one crusader spamming fist of the heavens on the tlou rift easily drops it to 40s

 

[Deleted member 86764]

Metro Redux: what it's really like to develop for PS4 and Xbox One

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...its-really-like-to-make-a-multi-platform-game

 

[Devious]

GCN doesn't love interpolators? OK, ditch the per-vertex tangent space, switch to per-pixel one. That CPU task becomes too fast on an out-of-order CPU? Merge those tasks. Too slow task? Parallelise it. Maybe the GPU doesn't like high sqrt count in the loop? But it is good in integer math - so we'll use old integer tricks. And so on, and so on.

I have no idea what any of that meant.

 

[mosen]

Metro Redux: what it's really like to develop for PS4 and Xbox One

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...its-really-like-to-make-a-multi-platform-game

Digital Foundry: DirectX 11 vs GNMX vs GNM - what's your take on the strengths and weakness of the APIs available to developers with Xbox One and PlayStation 4? Closer to launch there were some complaints about XO driver performance and CPU overhead on GNMX.

Oles Shishkovstov: Let's put it that way - we have seen scenarios where a single CPU core was fully loaded just by issuing draw-calls on Xbox One (and that's surely on the 'mono' driver with several fast-path calls utilised). Then, the same scenario on PS4, it was actually difficult to find those draw-calls in the profile graphs, because they are using almost no time and are barely visible as a result.

In general - I don't really get why they choose DX11 as a starting point for the console. It's a console! Why care about some legacy stuff at all? On PS4, most GPU commands are just a few DWORDs written into the command buffer, let's say just a few CPU clock cycles. On Xbox One it easily could be one million times slower because of all the bookkeeping the API does.

But Microsoft is not sleeping, really. Each XDK that has been released both before and after the Xbox One launch has brought faster and faster draw-calls to the table. They added tons of features just to work around limitations of the DX11 API model. They even made a DX12/GNM style do-it-yourself API available - although we didn't ship with it on Redux due to time constraints.

Interesting.

 

[function]

Good work Leadbetter! So much interesting stuff ...

esram is fast enough to almost never be a bottleneck, esram is far too small (lol), main memory contention issues, mono driver and DX(box) 11.x a work in progress, low level DX 12 will take time to move to, Jaguar slower in some situations than last gen cores but "fast enough", Kinect reserve that's been released is variable so can't be relied upon ...

... and that's just some of the stand outs. Will read again.

 

[Xbat]

The comparison to the Tlou remastered is a very stupid one. Such a good interview otherwise.
Leadbetter just seems not to be able to help himself sometimes.