Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2015]

[iroboto]

I thought the Halo5 beta was kind of hideous when I tried it. Would have been more interested in an article explaining some of the rendering tech, because right now I think it's ugly. I'm guessing they're shooting for some interesting things on the tech side, but it didn't come across as I was playing.

Which was partially why I was on the mindset that the beta could be a throw away renderer to test the platform and gameplay (unless you believe we have DX12 silently installed on retail units already).

343i knows they are releasing with DX12 (if they follow timelines) why waste a lot of effort on the d3d11 renderer. But then again as Laa Yosh pointed out earlier, between putting out solid gameplay and putting out solid graphics, the former is more important than the latter. The latter with poor gameplay, matching making and multiplayer will continue to tank the series, the former will allow the franchise to thrive again. Ideally they get both graphics and gameplay down, but honestly I think the timelines are still fairly tight.

It would be nice to have more from the flagship Xbox title, but it's highly possible that the graphics showcases will lie with action based games this generation (Quantum Break, RoTR, Ryse.. etc). Most of the debate online seems to be whether Halo 5 is a Halo game, which I guess is a good thing if graphics are barely coming up in discussion, just not good for B3D heh.

 

[liquidboy]

(unless you believe we have DX12 silently installed on retail units already). .

Somehow I find it hard to believe DX12 would be secretly installed in any of the OS's in XB1, as it requires a Windows 10 kernel and + latest WDDM .

Currently the 3 OS's, shared/title & Host OS's are all variants of Windows 8, and as mentioned above they would need to be Windows 10 kernel + WDDM 2.0 to get Dx12...

And I doubt that Dx11.x with "fast semantics" is the same as getting Dx12..

Bottom line is numerous times it's been mentioned that XB1 will get Windows 10, im guessing across all 3 OS's, and only then will Dx12 come across.. Total speculation on my part ...

 

[Rangers]

I am surprised about the H5 DF review...it seems that they really aren't impressed and are especially disappointed with the 720p image compared to the remaster.

They especially mentioned that for large scale and long distances, the current resolution is not very easy on the eye. This is what I also mentioned in the BF4 thread that for large scale battles, resolution matters.

I hope they go the KZ:SF route and have a 30Hz SP campaign with upped resolution and AA.

I have found the 720P thing a bit overrated...Call of Duty Ghosts almost looks "cleaner" to me than Destiny on my Xbox One, despite Destiny being full 1080P and the former only 720P.

It's almost more a mental thing.

While there's no doubt more resolution is better, next gen assets are more important than resolution.

It would be nice to have more from the flagship Xbox title, but it's highly possible that the graphics showcases will lie with action based games this generation (Quantum Break, RoTR, Ryse.. etc). Most of the debate online seems to be whether Halo 5 is a Halo game, which I guess is a good thing if graphics are barely coming up in discussion, just not good for B3D heh.

I think the beta looks quite good, and should be really amazing in single player. Especially if they dont go for 60 FPS in campaign. I am quite hyped.

 

[DJ12]

Somehow I find it hard to believe DX12 would be secretly installed in any of the OS's in XB1, as it requires a Windows 10 kernel and + latest WDDM .

I'm fairly sure they've stated DX12 is going to be available for windows 8.x. There are no hardware differences between 11 and 12 so it's just a software change.

 

[Billy Idol]

I have found the 720P thing a bit overrated...Call of Duty Ghosts almost looks "cleaner" to me than Destiny on my Xbox One, despite Destiny being full 1080P and the former only 720P.

It's almost more a mental thing.

While there's no doubt more resolution is better, next gen assets are more important than resolution.



I think the beta looks quite good, and should be really amazing in single player. Especially if they dont go for 60 FPS in campaign. I am quite hyped.

I can't comment on your COD and Destiny observations, as I played both games on PS4. But a reason could be (fitting to my argument), that COD is very limited in range and often portraits only close combat...hence 720p might be ok, whereas Destiny offers also large scale and range where 1080p is really needed...hence you experience both as equal. The real challenge would be a 720p Destiny

Of course, what we also learned here at B3D, resolution is not resolution, as different parts of the render pipeline may have different resolutions...don't know about Destiny in this regard.

But in a game like Halo, I really hope that in SP the large scale is their priority with the rest of the tec adjusted accordingly.

 

[liquidboy]

I'm fairly sure they've stated DX12 is going to be available for windows 8.x. There are no hardware differences between 11 and 12 so it's just a software change.

please find that quote as I find that very hard to believe as I mentioned Windows 8 will need to get an updated kernel and WDDM2.0 to support Dx12... And I've never heard of a previous OS getting both in an update ...

What I do know may happen is Dx11.3 vnxt will get some Dx12 features and that may be supported on downstream OS's from Windows 10, like Win8/8.1 ...

 

[DJ12]

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/9-004

5:20 in

 

[liquidboy]

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/9-004

5:20 in

you're misinterpreting what Ales Holecek is saying ... I was there at \\build\ ... as he answers in that build video "the goal is to support Dx12 on ALL windows 7 HARDWARE" ... The operative word there is "HARDWARE"... so you don't need new hardware to get "feature level 12" ... Doesn't mean Windows 7 or Windows 8 will get Dx12 ... far from it (that's a very big assumption and flies in the face of how previous Dx versions have arrived in OS versions in the past)

All Ales says is that your PC that ran Windows 7, will be able to support DX12 feature level. You will probably need to install Windows 10 to get DX12 or DX11.3 ...

 

[AlNom]

Of course, what we also learned here at B3D, resolution is not resolution, as different parts of the render pipeline may have different resolutions...don't know about Destiny in this regard.

Destiny should be mostly straightforward for the main scene geometry. Otherwise it's the usual suspects - shadows, cinematic post-processing and transparencies (neat method to mitigate mismatched depth artefacts for the latter).

But in a game like Halo, I really hope that in SP the large scale is their priority with the rest of the tec adjusted accordingly.

Yeah, I'd be concerned more about what 16ms means on the CPU side.

 

[shredenvain]

I have found the 720P thing a bit overrated...Call of Duty Ghosts almost looks "cleaner" to me than Destiny on my Xbox One, despite Destiny being full 1080P and the former only 720P.

It's almost more a mental thing.

While there's no doubt more resolution is better, next gen assets are more important than resolution.



I think the beta looks quite good, and should be really amazing in single player. Especially if they dont go for 60 FPS in campaign. I am quite hyped.

While I agree that assets are the most important thing when it comes to current gen graphics. I don't agree with your COD ghost vs Destiny comparison. Ghost has a God awful amount of jaggies and shimmering throughout the SP campaign
especially compared to Destiny ( both Xbox one). When it comes to compromise though, I find 900p to be pretty tolerable especially with decent AA. Ryse comes to mind at 900p with Smaa. Bf4 on the Xbox one had less shimmering on close objects than COD ghost did though they were both 720p.

 

[nggamer]

I have found the 720P thing a bit overrated...Call of Duty Ghosts almost looks "cleaner" to me than Destiny on my Xbox One, despite Destiny being full 1080P and the former only 720P.

It's almost more a mental thing.

Actually, according to this article, the way the human eye/brain work, framerate may indeed make an image look more appealing than resolution under certain conditions. It's an interesting read, worth checking out.

you may get better results in some circumstances at > 43fps with 720p than at 30fps with 1080p with jittering or temporal antialiasing – although past a certain point, the extra resolution should paper over the cracks a bit. At least, that is, as long as you’re dealing with scenes with a lot of motion – if you’re showing mostly static scenes, have a fixed camera, or are in 2D? Use more pixels.

http://accidentalscientist.com/2014...uncanny-valley.html?linkId=11289717#more-1031

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Actually, according to this article.

You mean this theory. Discussed in another thread.

 

[nggamer]

You mean this theory. Discussed in another thread.

I wasn't aware it was already being discussed (or controversial).

 

[Shifty Geezer]

https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/a-potential-link-between-frame-rate-and-resolution.56354/

 

[Newguy]

Digital Foundry vs Resident Evil on PS4

 

[AlNom]

RE:R2

hm... frame pacing issue? Funny drops like Mario Kart 8 to 59fps.
The bigger drops.. close-ups really poop on the framerate. Wonder if their shadows & lighting are expensive. The last hallway bit is pretty nasty. Hopefully they've already fixed these... Just strange given how literal a corridor this is.

 

[Newguy]

It's strange how a transition like that can drop it to 23fps, it's not even a sudden dip as it flatlines for a little while.

 

[AlNom]

Maybe loading during transition? I must have missed the drop to 20s. I suppose if it's still a debug version they could have other funky things going on too.

hm....

 

[Newguy]

Drops to 16, 3m 29s if it doesn't work properly. Interesting to say the least.

 

[Allandor]

Maybe loading during transition? I must have missed the drop to 20s. I suppose if it's still a debug version they could have other funky things going on too.

hm....

well, there shouln't be any limit. nether the CPU nor the GPU nor the bandwidth.
But after all, RE1 is "just" a port. Well a port with a higher resolution and new models, but nothing that should even bother the last gen. There is not much to render, if these are really still 2D background (I thought the gamecube version was already 3d, but after seeing no lighting on the walls when shots are fired, I also thing it is fully 2D )
The only thing that come to my mind that could possibly limit is the HDD. But because of all the available memory there should be no need to stream something. Also the framedrops occure when there is almost nothing happening on screen. Maybe just an old glitch that wasn't relevant to fix. Resident Evil is not one of the fastest games