Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2015]

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Face-Off: Journey on PS4
Much to our surprise, certain visual effects have been removed or diminished in this new version of Journey, sapping away just a touch of the visual perfection that came to define the original game. Motion blur, which is beautifully utilised on PS3, has been completely eliminated, which has a small impact on the presentation: speeding along the sun-drenched slopes feels a tad less dramatic without this effect in place. It's likely that Trick Pixels felt that at 60fps, motion blur was no longer a necessity. We disagree and feel that even at higher frame-rates, motion blur can add greatly to the presentation.

Motion blur removed? :nope:
 
@Globalisateur will probably be the only one pleased with that! In a dreamy game like Journey, moblur makes a lot of sense. Though as I mention in my comment there, you could think of it as changing the camera perspective from a person there watching to a camera. That's why it'd be nice as an option.

The other differences should just be tweaks, but it's pretty irrelevant. Will like to hear the opinions of people who play both, if there's any meaningful difference in experience with the PS4 variations.
 
The heavy amount of motion blur begging in 60fps games coming from Digital Foundry writers seriously begins to annoy me. Soon they are going to make whole articles about their obsession about that particular dramatic* effect.

speeding along the sun-drenched slopes feels a tad less dramatic without this effect in place

Journey on PS4 is using a lot of post processing, the clarity is already not that great IMO. Maybe the devs realized they couldn't seriously add another vaseline effect particularly in motion, and you are almost always in motion in this game.

* dramatic = cinematic
 
Not impressed with the removal of effects plus at AA could have been better, definitely less sparkly than PS3 version. Not the best port.
 
what the heck... i wonder will sony contract other developer to fix the port?

like when kojima contract other developer to transform HORRIBLE PS3 zone of the enders port to the best port.
 
That last paragraph is weird. Journey is too slow paced to really benefit from a framerate boost to the point of now neglecting the missing effects that were made a bigger deal out of earlier.
 
Tricky Pixels commented the article:

Just to mention a few things here:
- The removal of the motion blur was intentional and carefully considered. The post process motion blur of the original gave a very different feel at 60FPS. It's difficult to describe but it really detracted from the cinematic style - it just really stuck out as an obvious post process effect at 60. The best way I can describe it is being akin to switching on some of the frame processing on an old movie with a modern LED display - the effect started to make Journey feel like a modern racing title and really compromised the original artist vision. Additionally with the increase to 1080p, a global increase in anisotropic filtering and a reduction in texture compression the game gained a new solidity and clarity - a lot of this got lost when re-enabling motion blur, so we stuck with the much more natural blur from POV at 60.
- One of the compromises made in the original PS3 version was the resolution of the sand texturing, which is procedurally generated. For surfaces near or low to the camera the illusion of sand was often broken by texture magnification - so we opted to use some of the extra power available on PS4 to double the resolution of this system. The result is a finer grained surface (like sand!) at the loss of some of the coarseness you sometimes see in the original. You can see see this improvement most clearly in the open sections of the dune surfing section after 'landing' (level 4).
- Early on in the development process we received a bunch of fan emails asking us to keep various glitches and exploits that people use in the game - nearly all of these have been intentionally kept/replicated to make the game as true to the original as possible.
- This was a non-trival re-master - the original PS3 version of Journey is a master-piece in PS3 Cell/SPU programming and utilized all of the power of the original system. Translating all of this to a new CPU (and GPU) was an immense technical challenge. We'd recommend people read around some of the Naughty Dog articles/posts about their experiences in bringing a late generation PS3 title to PS4 - it really is/was a tough job. There were many thousands of hours of time spent making the re-master as faithful as possible.
 
Comments from a Journey PS4 dev on DF article:

TrickyPixels said:
Just to mention a few things here:

- The removal of the motion blur was intentional and carefully considered. The post process motion blur of the original gave a very different feel at 60FPS. It's difficult to describe but it really detracted from the cinematic style - it just really stuck out as an obvious post process effect at 60. The best way I can describe it is being akin to switching on some of the frame processing on an old movie with a modern LED display - the effect started to make Journey feel like a modern racing title and really compromised the original artist vision. Additionally with the increase to 1080p, a global increase in anisotropic filtering and a reduction in texture compression the game gained a new solidity and clarity - a lot of this got lost when re-enabling motion blur, so we stuck with the much more natural blur from POV at 60.
- One of the compromises made in the original PS3 version was the resolution of the sand texturing, which is procedurally generated. For surfaces near or low to the camera the illusion of sand was often broken by texture magnification - so we opted to use some of the extra power available on PS4 to double the resolution of this system. The result is a finer grained surface (like sand!) at the loss of some of the coarseness you sometimes see in the original. You can see see this improvement most clearly in the open sections of the dune surfing section after 'landing' (level 4).
- Early on in the development process we received a bunch of fan emails asking us to keep various glitches and exploits that people use in the game - nearly all of these have been intentionally kept/replicated to make the game as true to the original as possible.
- This was a non-trival re-master - the original PS3 version of Journey is a master-piece in PS3 Cell/SPU programming and utilized all of the power of the original system. Translating all of this to a new CPU (and GPU) was an immense technical challenge. We'd recommend people read around some of the Naughty Dog articles/posts about their experiences in bringing a late generation PS3 title to PS4 - it really is/was a tough job. There were many thousands of hours of time spent making the re-master as faithful as possible.

"The best way I can describe it is being akin to switching on some of the frame processing on an old movie with a modern LED display...feel like a modern racing title" that's perfect! Gold stuff right there.

"a lot of this got lost when re-enabling motion blur" So the motion blur in a 60fps game makes the game as if it's running at 30fps instead of 60fps. Reminds me the first time I saw Project Cars, I first thought the game was running at 30fps because of the heavy blur...

They really have some reasonable and pragmatic guys at TrickyPixels, they do no blindly toggle the moblur switch on because the others do so and tell them to do so.

And the rest (higher resolution so finer grained surface) was already understood by many, well except by DF apparently.
 
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And the rest (higher resolution so finer grained surface) was already understood by many, well except by DF apparently.
It's not just grain fineness:

mym35Oc.png
 
You can see the sparkles. They are present, just not as significant as the low-res PS3 version, because the sampling is so much better. The PS3 aesthetic may be prefered, but there's no reason to doubt the developers word on this as assume they deliberately/accidentally missed a shading feature in their port.
 
"a lot of this got lost when re-enabling motion blur" So the motion blur in a 60fps game makes the game as if it's running at 30fps instead of 60fps. Reminds me the first time I saw Project Cars, I first thought the game was running at 30fps because of the heavy blur...
I have been saying this for a long time. You can make 60 fps look as "dream like / blurred" as 24 fps. You just need to keep the frame exposure time (= blur length) the same (= 1/48th second for most movies). Ir you do it like this, the 60 fps removes the judder of fast sideways movement (a significant improvement for 3d movies).

In general the frame exposure time (blur length) should be half of the frame time. In 60 fps game this is 1/120th second. Some developers use full frame time, and this makes things too blurry. I wonder whether Project Cars and Journey developers used 1/60th second exposure for their motion blur. 1/120th blur exposure doesn't make the image look too blurred at all (assuming a good per pixel blurring algorithm). 1/120th second blur is actually quite hard to see, meaning that most developers just skip that because it costs performance.
 
I have been saying this for a long time. You can make 60 fps look as "dream like / blurred" as 24 fps. You just need to keep the frame exposure time (= blur length) the same (= 1/48th second for most movies). Ir you do it like this, the 60 fps removes the judder of fast sideways movement (a significant improvement for 3d movies).

In general the frame exposure time (blur length) should be half of the frame time. In 60 fps game this is 1/120th second. Some developers use full frame time, and this makes things too blurry. I wonder whether Project Cars and Journey developers used 1/60th second exposure for their motion blur. 1/120th blur exposure doesn't make the image look too blurred at all (assuming a good per pixel blurring algorithm). 1/120th second blur is actually quite hard to see, meaning that most developers just skip that because it costs performance.

If I may ask, what exposure time do you use in Trials Fusion?
 
You can see the sparkles. They are present, just not as significant as the low-res PS3 version, because the sampling is so much better.
Given the stated changes you'd expect to see a fixed multiple more sparkles but at proportionally reduced power. This isn't really what's happening, as there are spots where the PS3 version has a wide distribution of very bright sparkles outside of the central specular lobe, but you can barely see anything in the PS4 version, it looks extremely flat. It's very obvious in places like the famous sand surfing spots that the effect expresses differently beyond just how fine-grained it is.
(And I'm not just making that call based on the compressed DF material which could have filtered away high-frequency, I've compared the two back-to-back on my TV.)

Although, the exact cause is tricky to isolate since the PS4 version has some general differences with lighting and/or shading. I noticed things like certain hills being rim-lit in one version and not the other from the exact same viewing location.
 
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