Digital Foundry PC Article Discussion

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New DF review, this time for the PC (where the true expert stuff comes to life) featuring a superb laptop, the MSI GS65 Stealth. Darn, the name of this beauty is sooooooo close to mine, the GS63 7RE Stealth Pro (IPS screen version)...., yet so different.

Still, great review. The video shows the power consumption of the laptop when running the most demanding games, and it's pretty good too.

Mine topped at 85W running the good ol' Call of Juarez at 1080p/60fps. Maybe with Doom or a similar game, things might change.

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https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...i-gs65-stealth-the-ultimate-all-in-one-laptop
 
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BRiT

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https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-battlefield-5-rtx-ray-tracing-analysis

Battlefield 5's RTX ray tracing tested: is this the next level in gaming graphics?
The future looks bright - and shiny.

Battlefield 5 has shipped on PC, accompanied by our first look at a revolution in gaming graphics - real-time ray tracing via Nvidia's new RTX line of GPUs. It's a watershed moment in many ways and a phenomenal technological achievement - not just from the RTX hardware that makes it possible, but also from the engineers at DICE who committed to ray tracing in all of its shiny, real-time reflection glory. But alongside the revolution in visuals is the reality of the implementation - this is an alpha patch running on first-gen hardware. Real-time ray tracing remains massively expensive from a computational perspective, performance isn't completely ideal - but this is emergent tech, optimisations are coming, and having spoken to DICE directly, we know what kind of strategies the developer is pursuing to push frame-rates higher.

In fact, at the end of our analysis piece, you'll find our in-depth interview with DICE rendering engineer Yasin Uludağ, who has been working with colleague Johannes Deligiannis for the last year on implementing ray tracing within Battlefield 5. First up though, it's worth taking a look at the Battlefield 5 PC tech analysis video embedded below - principally to get a look at the game running in real-time in its day one incarnation and to get a sense of how ray tracing scales across the four available presets: low, medium, high and ultra. DICE's recommendation right now is to run the DXR setting at low for performance reasons, and this still looks great. But what actually happens to the quality of ray tracing as you move down the various settings?


 
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NVIDIA had recently announced the imminent debut of Adaptive Shading in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, the first-person shooter game made by MachineGames, via an upcoming patch. FYI, Adaptive Shading is one of the new advanced shading technologies that NVIDIA introduced with the Turing architecture, the others being Mesh Shading and Texture-Space Shading. Adaptive Shading in particular is derived from Variable Rate Shading alongside Motion Adaptive Shading and Foveated Rendering; all three of these accelerate performance in specific ways.
A new patch has been deployed to implement NVIDIA Adaptive Shading, improving the performance of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. We’ve been working with NVIDIA to make sure the game runs great on NVIDIA RTX hardware. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus debuts the first implementation of NAS.

Additional patch notes:

Added support for NVIDIA Adaptive Shading on NVIDIA RTX series GPUs. (Improves frame rate by dynamically adjusting the shading resolution in different areas of the screen, without affecting fidelity).
Ensured that, on multiple GPU systems, the discrete GPU is preferred over an integrated GPU.
Players can now choose to ignore/suppress warnings when the selected video settings exceed the amount of dedicated VRAM available on the GPU
Fixes for skinning issues on GTX 970
 
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https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-sunset-overdrive-pc-port-analysis

Sunset Overdrive PC: the game's great - but the port is basic
Resolution and frame-rate are the only real improvements.

One of the worst-kept secrets in gaming, the PC version of Insomniac's excellent Sunset Overdrive finally released last week on both Steam and the Windows Store - and it's a bargain at just £14.99/$19.99. Liberated from the 900p30 lock of the original Xbox One release, the game is vastly improved - but as good as the game can be, the quality of the port itself could have been better. A lot better.

Let's begin with the positives - and there are many. Sunset Overdrive does indeed allow for rendering at a range of resolutions all the way up to 5K, while frame-rate options allow for 30fps and 60fps caps, in addition to running fully unlocked - so yes, it's possible to play the game at 120fps if you have the GPU power to get you there. The game doesn't seem to offer up any artwork improvements over the original Xbox One release, but that's fine - simply operating at a higher resolution gives the game extra clarity, allowing the original assets to present at their very best.

The first Insomniac title of this gaming generation saw the developer beginning to deploy its post-heavy effects pipeline, and all of this loveliness - including the industry-best motion blur implementation - works beautifully on PC. The effects also scale well with resolution and frame-rate, and seeing how this game renders at either 4K or 120Hz is quite the feat: Sunset Overdrive really is treat that revels in the scalability PC offers. In short, this port is well-priced for a great experience overall, and the improvement over Xbox One is substantial.

 
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2020 Vision: The Witcher 2 was a stunning tech achievement that still looks great today
But ubersampling and depth of field still melt even the best PC hardware.

Next-gen before their time? There's an elite selection of technologically advanced titles that appear towards the tail-end of any given generation, where developers are upping their game, experimenting with the kinds of techniques we'll see in the era to come - and it's typically on PC where we tend to get these nascent next-gen experiences. CD Projekt RED's The Witcher 2 - released in May 2011 - is one such release, a game that required a radical process of re-architecting before arriving on Xbox 360 almost a year later. But what made The Witcher 2 so special, how did it push PC hardware and can even today's mainstream graphics tech handle the game's legendary ubersampling?

Of course, the profile of The Witcher 2 is especially heightened at the moment with the recent series release on Netflix generating unprecedented interest in Geralt of Rivia's escapades - but it's not just the story and the world presented in these games that has driven their popularity. Starting with The Witcher 2, we've seen CD Projekt RED deliver some hugely ambitious, game-changing technology. The fact that the studio targeted PC - a format 'apparently' in decline back in 2011 - was remarkable in itself but without explicitly targeting mature (ie old) console hardware, CDPR pushed its game to the next level. Alongside titles like Far Cry 3, Battlefield 3 and Crysis 3, the PC showcased visuals much closer to those we would see in the now current generation of console hardware and it did so two-and-a-half years before they would arrive.


Read entire article @ DF - https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-the-witcher-2-2020-vision-retrospective
 
Cyan

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BRiT said:
2020 Vision: The Witcher 2 was a stunning tech achievement that still looks great today
But ubersampling and depth of field still melt even the best PC hardware.

Read entire article @ DF - https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-the-witcher-2-2020-vision-retrospective
Click to expand...
this game almost killed my laptop at the time. The ubersampling thing was crazy, 2 fps iirc or something like that. Very very few games I've seen running like that in my life, but shadows, some features and the aforementioned ubersampling had to be toned down or disabled, depending -at least on a laptop of the era-. Other than that, it looked decent and there were ways to tone down graphics even more using a config file iirc.
 
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