Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2015]

[Cyan]

I have BF4 so I'm well used to it and I'm also familiar with the lush tropical environments of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. Lush forests are almost passé but it's Endor so it's a lush forest.

You are going to make VFX_Veteran cry.

I'm not seeing it. It's a nice forest, the laser blast is very Star Warsy.

I think @pjbliverpool might have a point there. The dense of forest and the imperfections of the terrain look amazing!! Not even a modded Skyrim looks like that. I just hope they actually deliver on consoles but that's what I am not seeing either... Still I am not going to spill over those graphics and the game, not because it's not amazing, but because I am not into Star Wars so if the game is not specifically tailored to me, I have plenty of games I want to play.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I think @pjbliverpool might have a point there. The dense of forest and the imperfections of the terrain look amazing!!

Imperfect terrain like 2007 PlayStation 3 games Motorstorm and Uncharted. This is indeed the future!!!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Imperfect terrain like 2007 PlayStation 3 games Motorstorm and Uncharted. This is indeed the future!!!

A checkbox feature isn't the same thing. Motorstorm didn't look anything like as good as that video. The footage certainly did get pretty much everything right when watched for the first time. The jungle felt rich and solid, the snow convincingly snowy. It might start to fall apart on close inspection, but it was impressive to the less bitter and jaded of us...

 

[mpg1]

Imperfect terrain like 2007 PlayStation 3 games Motorstorm and Uncharted. This is indeed the future!!!

You either have a visual impairment or are just simply trolling...the level of detail shown in those clips of the in-game engine are far above those games and much better than anything I have seen yet.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I've nothing against enthusiasm for graphics, but this is a DF technical thread, and there's no place for it here. Any discussion on graphics should aim to stick within technical considerations. And TBH it doesn't belong here anyway. SW:B talk should be in the SW:B thread.

The latest DF contribution was Hardline multiplayer performance.

 

[Cyan]

Imperfect terrain like 2007 PlayStation 3 games Motorstorm and Uncharted. This is indeed the future!!!

hahah, like a beautiful big woman it's the perfect imperfection. (too thin women aren't my favourite, and beauty is genetic, there is anything you can do about it, no matter how thin or fat you are, in my opinion beauty is a matter of genes) In that case I fancy imperfections.

 

[Alucardx23]

Face-Off: Assassin's Creed Rogue

"Designed with last-gen consoles in mind, Assassin's Creed Rogue slipped under the radar somewhat owing to the controversy surrounding its Unity stable-mate's bugs, glitches and questionable performance. Built using the same technology behind Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, Rogue may not deliver the same graphical punch as the next-gen Unity, but some might say that it offers a more liberating gameplay experience when freed from the shackles of on-land exploration. Perhaps more importantly, it doesn't suffer from as many bugs - even if it still features a few random glitches of its own, such as enemy characters disappearing in battle...."

 

[DrJay24]

I'd like a PS4 port, certainly looks more fun than Unity.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I'm curious to revisit Black Flag after Unity so see how the visuals compare. DF

I'd like a PS4 port, certainly looks more fun than Unity.

I'd be quite surprised if PS4 and Xbox One ports didn't appear something between May and August. But I had tremendous fun with Unity, I liked it more than Black Flag.

 

[Arwin]

Yep, it's all a matter of taste in the end. They have something in common too though - stealth almost always sucks.

I'd updated this already earlier today by the way:

http://www.techingames.net/embed/Details/242?selectedTab=Overview

 

[Laa-Yosh]

The Order 1886 isn't quite using standard perspective projection.

They're probably adding some good old lens distortion on top of it, should be a fairly simple 2D effect...

 

[HTupolev]

They're probably adding some good old lens distortion on top of it, should be a fairly simple 2D effect...

MJP confirmed that they're adding barrel distortion after perspective rasterization.

https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/1830339/

 

[temesgen]

Face-Off: Assassin's Creed Rogue

"Designed with last-gen consoles in mind, Assassin's Creed Rogue slipped under the radar somewhat owing to the controversy surrounding its Unity stable-mate's bugs, glitches and questionable performance. Built using the same technology behind Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, Rogue may not deliver the same graphical punch as the next-gen Unity, but some might say that it offers a more liberating gameplay experience when freed from the shackles of on-land exploration. Perhaps more importantly, it doesn't suffer from as many bugs - even if it still features a few random glitches of its own, such as enemy characters disappearing in battle...."

360 has better frame rate and PS3 offers 720P and some additional effects.... the examples used for both consoles was decent imo, for their time the hardware was pretty incredible.

 

[Nesh]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-battlefield-hardline-face-off
The difference here is 900p vs 720p but strangely enough the PS4 has some performance dips that werent present on BF4. Performance favors the XB1 version even though this is not exactly a demanding game and is long after their launch.

Its quite curious that the PS4 and the XB1 discrepancy is starting to become too small to the point that sometimes the XB1 has advantages.
Quite often both consoles perform at identical resolutions with similar frame rates with the occasional missing or reduced AF on the PS4

It makes you wonder what's going on under the hood.

 

[DrJay24]

The PS4 is rendering 518,400 more pixels each frame (156% of 720P), not really negligible. It would be interesting to run them at the same resolutions, both at 720P and 900P to see how the bottlenecks respond, but that isn't going to happen.

The AF issue has its own thread and confounding it with other things like res and frame rate is premature at best.

 

[mpg1]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-battlefield-hardline-face-off
The difference here is 900p vs 720p but strangely enough the PS4 has some performance dips that werent present on BF4. Performance favors the XB1 version even though this is not exactly a demanding game and is long after their launch.

Its quite curious that the PS4 and the XB1 discrepancy is starting to become too small to the point that sometimes the XB1 has advantages.
Quite often both consoles perform at identical resolutions with similar frame rates with the occasional missing or reduced AF on the PS4

It makes you wonder what's going on under the hood.

Hard to say using this game as an example because it doesn't seem like any real work was done on improving/refining the graphics from BF4....which itself was a launch game.

But in more general terms it seems like most games on PS4 are usually pushing out a higher resolution while Xbox One seems to have slightly better framerates/more consistent framerates. But the frametrate dips on PS4 may be simply because it is running at a higher resolution. Or maybe it's because of the slightly lower clocked cpu...or some sort of cpu bottleneck.

For me the real battle of these consoles will be the exclusives. How will Halo 5 look compared to Uncharted 4? That will be interesting.

 

[Rangers]

Well those resolution differences are a big performance deal. 720P vs 900P is some 50% pixels! Of course they dont make a title look 50% better onscreen though, luckily for Microsoft. Then again the PR differences have resulted in >50% better sales for the competitor, so maybe not so lucky.

Of late it seems remasters or easier performing titles are 1080 on X1, but Evolve, Dying Light, and BF4 Hardlines still show the resolution deficit on X1 since the new year, so far there isn't sign of that letting up yet for new demanding 3D titles rather than remasters.

Mainly it seems the X1 SDK was in a really terrible state at release really handcuffing the console, which already had deficits, but it made those deficits even worse. For that matter, we wont truly see the full fruits of the ongoing X1 SDK improvements for some time, so we dont really know where things will settle out yet imo.

What's interesting to me is how BF/Dice have gone from lauded as technical wizards with BF3 to seemingly almost having quite poor graphics (judging by some GAF opinions for example) in the space of just a couple years, and being derided for putting out below standard resolutions on both consoles. Quite the downfall for the studio. Although I guess googling BF:H is not made by Dice, it still uses Frostbite obviously.

 

[iroboto]

If you guys would like, I would also love to talk about FrostByte 3 wrt PS4 and Xbox One, maybe in a different thread. But I think there are several possibilities as to why they might be suffering, with enough brainstorming we might be able to come to a reasonable speculation.

 

[dobwal]

I imagine work on Frostbite wouldn't be wasted on DX11 paths but rather focused toward supporting DX12. Later releases may benefit at the expense of newly released or relatively close to release titles.

Battlefront, ME and the next BF are all in the pipeline.

 

[iroboto]

Hard to say using this game as an example because it doesn't seem like any real work was done on improving/refining the graphics from BF4....which itself was a launch game.

But in more general terms it seems like most games on PS4 are usually pushing out a higher resolution while Xbox One seems to have slightly better framerates/more consistent framerates. But the frametrate dips on PS4 may be simply because it is running at a higher resolution. Or maybe it's because of the slightly lower clocked cpu...or some sort of cpu bottleneck.

For me the real battle of these consoles will be the exclusives. How will Halo 5 look compared to Uncharted 4? That will be interesting.

Considering that one has the aim for 60 fps and the other has the aim for 1080p. I think we're going to see a divide in graphics, something along the lines of Drive Club and Forza 5/6. Generally speaking, I expect Uncharted to look better. We haven't seen many perfect locked 60fps games that can hold very well versus 30fps locked games. But I have expectations that the Xbox One will be working much more efficiently than before, we might even to start to see it in some sort of top utilization form. Fingers crossed that we hear the fan start whirling.

As for frame rates wrt BF:Hardline

On to performance, and this is curiously where the PS4 starts to slip. Unlike Battlefield 4's preference for Sony's hardware in the frame-rate stakes, Hardline clearly favours Xbox One across the spectrum of our tests. Both target 60fps with v-sync permanently engaged, but it's only Xbox One that manages to hold this number in areas, particularly with alpha effects involved.

A GPU-side bottleneck is the likely culprit on PS4, though it is unusual to see the stronger console buckle, even with its higher resolution. In one example, a warehouse filled with transparency effects prompts the PS4 to waver between 50-60fps, while Xbox One clears it without an issue. Only one hotel shoot-out prompts any major drops on Microsoft's hardware, while PS4 draws closer to the 50fps line in almost every case. It is worth emphasising that these are the worst-case scenarios though, and the rest of play unfolds at 60fps for each console.

Alpha effects seem to be a culprit? I'm going to quote Sebbbi directly here:

DSoup:My understanding of alpha blending is that's is basically compositing two or more things so surely you need more reads than writes!?!

Sebbbi:
You need equal amount of backbuffer reads and writes. Blending = Read the backbuffer value, combine existing value with pixel shader output, write the value back to backbuffer. One read and one write.

The shader itself obviously reads the particle texture as well. I explained this in my post. However the particle texture is DXT compressed (1 byte per pixel) and the backbuffer is RGBA16F (8 bytes per pixel), so the particle texture read is insignificant in usual case. In the tiled case, the particle texture read is much more significant because the backbuffer reads and writes come mostly from the cache (and thus consume zero BW after the first read and first write). That's that why I concluded that in the tiled case you'd likely have roughly 2x reads compared to writes.

That was from the esram pros and cons thread - particle effects is something that esram should be naturally strong at. We could be seeing such evidence here. Thread on particle effects begins here: https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/1614540/