Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2015]

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Borderlands: big fat tears - and loads of them - in the middle of the screen.

Drop the resolution on the bone and limit that tearing to the extremities.

More 1080p madness. Madness, I say!
 
Why would you want to reduce the resolution on the XB1 edition for minor screen tears?

Because on some long passages screen tearing is pretty much constant on XB1 while only occasional on PS4.

though the Xbox One is far more heavily affected, with near constant tearing occurring during both large and smaller scale skirmishes.
 
Exactly!

Resolution and even framerate don't tell the whole story. Here, even with a relatively small difference in frame rate there is a big difference in the amount of tearing. And that tearing is not confined to the overscan area or even the top or bottom quarters where it would be less intrusive. It's everywhere, and it's often.

And unlike upscale blur, or frame rate fluctuations that not everyone is so sensitive to, tearing is a potentially huge, sharp artifact that is clearly visible at range and affects both the quality of a single screen and motion continuity: tearing 'wobble' - as the top and bottom elements appear to move at different speeds - is a load of old balls.

Middle screen tearing is the triple whammy of: affecting IQ, affecting motion continuity, and being HAHA YO GUYZ HERE I AM visible.

Tears are my personal kryptonite. I stopped playing the original Assassin's Creed on PS3 because of the tearing, which is just as well the repetitive gameplay would have caused me to quit anyway! :yep2:

Yah. Worst case scenario tearing is easily as annoying as wildly fluctuating frame rates. Only "unlplayable slideshow" fps can beat centre-screen mega-tears IMO.
 
There is simply no excuse in this day and age for those painful mid-screen tears. Makes the video look like when I was trying to watch other types of videos in the 90's with a VGA card in my first ever PC. And that's a time in my life I do not want to remember.

Zayn left One Direction?:runaway:

There's a phone helpline. I know it's tough. But it will be alright.
 
Just want to say I own The Handsome collection on the X1 and Borderlands 2 runs pretty good. You get a frame hitch here and there when the world is loading and some texture pop in. Overall I wouldn't lower the resolution of BL2 at all. Now the Pre Sequal is a constant tear fest with a pretty unplayable frame rate.
 
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I think " 'middle aged' man discovers Clarkson is being let go from Top Gear for punching a colleague" would be the better ref in context. Struggling to recall an audience member on that show who didn't buy singles on vinyl.

On topic I agree with 'lower the res, banish the tear' school of thought, they just look so damn ugly and distracting
 
GOW on PS2 had horrific tearing. And I think it's notable that I remember that so vividly. I also remember tearing on PC in games like NeverWinterNights. One of the things I hated about PC gaming back then - framerate could race and tear the screen several times or judder horrifically when VSync was enabled; it was a no-win situation unless you had enough power to VSync always.

Other traumatic experiences include FFX image quality, or lack thereof. I don't recall such an averse response to blurry floor surfaces, so I guess I'm anecdotal evidence that dropping AF in favour of other qualities is definitely the right choice.
 
I guess this update confirms also that the 'issue' with junctions on PS4 was not due to the slower CPU as some had speculated at the time.


From DF:

Put simply, in areas where junctions are stacked up one after the other, the Sony platform suffers more prolonged frame-rate drops when burning through traffic with your foot jammed to the floor. It's an interesting, recurring scenario that points to a CPU bottleneck, where Xbox One's increased clock-speed has an advantage when racing around these busy sections.

Maybe this will teach DF not to draw conclusions from one data point. Their record this gen has been pretty bad, they need to stick to the facts and stop editorializing.
 
Exactly!

Resolution and even framerate don't tell the whole story. Here, even with a relatively small difference in frame rate there is a big difference in the amount of tearing. And that tearing is not confined to the overscan area or even the top or bottom quarters where it would be less intrusive. It's everywhere, and it's often.

And unlike upscale blur, or frame rate fluctuations that not everyone is so sensitive to, tearing is a potentially huge, sharp artifact that is clearly visible at range and affects both the quality of a single screen and motion continuity: tearing 'wobble' - as the top and bottom elements appear to move at different speeds - is a load of old balls.

Middle screen tearing is the triple whammy of: affecting IQ, affecting motion continuity, and being HAHA YO GUYZ HERE I AM visible.



Yah. Worst case scenario tearing is easily as annoying as wildly fluctuating frame rates. Only "unlplayable slideshow" fps can beat centre-screen mega-tears IMO.

I whole heartedly agree with everything you said, but it never seems to hold as much weight as framerate on the forums, and that's not just here, but across all the forums on the web. Screen tearing was atrocious on many 360 and PS3 games, but because it was so common, it was practically dismissed when analyzing games. Even Titanfall on X1 has terrible tearing, and that just shouldn't happen on a modern console. Triple buffering all but eliminates the downside of Vsync, so the fact that Titanfall didn't use it is baffling.
 
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Triple buffering all but eliminates the downside of Vsync
No it doesn't. By waiting for the refresh, triple-buffering delays and stutters its output, causing the appearance and controls to feel unresponsive and janky compared with just turning vsync off. Assuming good implementations, at some performance levels it can even do worse than double-buffered vsync (i.e. if you're hovering just faster than a harmonic fraction of the refresh; in this case the buffer flip is capable of being a good frame kickoff timer, which triple-buffering can't benefit from).
 
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