Encyclopedia Brown & The Mysterious Case of the PS4 and the Missing Anisotropic Filtering

[iroboto]

So your point is "there are games where PS4 drops AF where XB1 doesn't so XB1 isn't weaker as everybody suggests."

Glad to see your agenda. You're basically arguing that PS4 dropped AF on Evolve to hit 1080p over 900p because PS4 can't handle it and PS4 is weaker. It must have also dropped AF to hit near perfect 30fps (according to DF).

Surprise, 1080p's performance hit over 900p is higher than 16x AF. Lets see how that works in reality.

first you misquoted me: you should continue quoting the rest there.

PS4 is rendering 30% more pixels. Has a higher AO to boot.

How could 900p and higher AF be MORE taxing than 1080p with more lighting effects?

Wtf? Im the one out to lunch here?

 

[Strange]

It is as easy as not focusing on PS4 and looking at its nearest competitor. Why does Xbox not have 16XAF in all of its titles either? If there are no "apparent" performance issues why is no one raising a flag here?

Why is it in lead Xbox games like call of duty AW and AC Unity does PS4 have better to equivalent AF?

You gut feeling is baseless unfortunately. You don't know how much AF affects the game, each game is different, and this is the first time you have a tablet based processor working on completely unified memory. You cannot base how PC performs in this area compared to these machines, it is not a proper baseline to use.

Care to explain how a lot of games have better (one or many of the following) resolution, framerate, and sometimes AA, effects, but not sacrifice AF on the PS4?

We do have a lot of base data. The vast majority of games simply perform better on PS4. Period. You're basing your viewpoint on a few outliers that make no sense and ignoring the majority of the data.

 

[iroboto]

What are you talking about the only instances in which X1 has a higher AF than PS4 is when it's running lower settings. I've been saying this WHOLE the time.

It's a performance trade off. When had X1 ever ran equivalent settings? And still did better with AF? NEVER!

So there is no bug with AF! And AF is not free!

 

[Strange]

The irony that with the exactly the same hardware as a weaker competitor, the X1 is capable of higher precision AF in a handful of titles over PS4. It's easy to combat such a statement; PS4 is running higher resolution in all those instances, it's running more AO, better AA, better this or that. We've never seen a game to _date_ that X1 has run exactly the same settings as PS4 but higher. And I'd agree. X1 hasn't. But in situations where AF is cut, X1 is running a lower resolution, lower this lower that, it made cuts too. Cutting large things allowed AF back into the mix. But for some reason when it comes to AF missing on the PS4 the thought process is that PS4 magically has more headroom to support it. Wouldn't you call that bias?

first you misquoted me: you should continue quoting the rest there.

PS4 is rendering 30% more pixels. Has a higher AO to boot.

How could 900p and higher AF be MORE taxing than 1080p with more lighting effects?

Wtf? Im the one out to lunch here?

You're the one here suggesting here the following:
1. PS4 runs at native, no AF
2. XB1 lowers resolution, performance increase allows devs to adds on AF

Yet you ignore
3. XB1 also runs at worse framerate.

PS4 increases resolution, drops AF, runs better
XB1 has lower resolution, adds AF, runs worse

Yet you say that we have a bias towards PS4, and we shouldn't assume that PS4 has more headroom to support AF. To have no bias we consider PS4 and XB1 as equals.

Then this ultimately brings the following conclusion:
Performance impact of 0xAF=>16xAF is larger than 900p=>1080p due to XB1 having having worse framerate.
By supporting your argument, this is the statement that you will have to embrace. I don't think you actually embrace it.

 

[iroboto]

What? When have I ever said X1 and PS4 are equally footed on GPU power though? And when has performance ever been so simplistically laid out?

I let the developers decide what the best settings are. That's my stance. They have tuned games however they tune them for performance and looks. Your bone to pick is your own. There is no conspiracy here with AF. I'm trying crush out this notion that some SDK problem exists. There isn't.

 

[TS_JBG]

What are you talking about the only instances in which X1 has a higher AF than PS4 is when it's running lower settings. I've been saying this WHOLE the time.

It's a performance trade off. When had X1 ever ran equivalent settings? And still did better with AF? NEVER!

So there is no bug with AF! And AF is not free!

Yeah sure performance trade-off...
Like you trading -off common sense for whatever we can call your insitance to post on this ?

Have you ever played on PC and adjusted AF level to see how impactful it is compared to other settings?
Do you seriously think a game performing better in every technical aspect would choose AF as a trade to ... be better on all else, including more demanding and less visible say, shadows ?

 

[Strange]

What? When have I ever said X1 and PS4 are equally footed on GPU power though? And when has performance ever been so simplistically laid out?

I let the developers decide what the best settings are. That's my stance. They have tuned games however they tune them for performance and looks. Your bone to pick is your own. There is no conspiracy here with AF. I'm trying crush out this notion that some SDK problem exists. There isn't.

Guess who said this?

But for some reason when it comes to AF missing on the PS4 the thought process is that PS4 magically has more headroom to support it. Wouldn't you call that bias?

Spoiler

you

 

[iroboto]

Prove to me that AF is an SDK bug. Everything else is a straw man argument. I have no agenda here except one:

A-Sony is no incompetent they know how to fix their development kits and they know what AF is.

B-developers are not stupid. They know how to enable AF and they know how to spot it

C- Sony's ICE team and a trip wire dev has explicitly said that there is no issue with AF. ASK the developer.


These are my arguments. I regret bringing Xbox one into this. I used them to showcase that they were not immune to the lack of AF but that has spiralled out of control.

I wanted to attack this conceived notion that PS4 was way mightier that people give it credit for, I shouldn't have. But there are huge misconceptions in my opinion in comparing the performance of a highly tuned engine for 1 piece of hardware with highly specialized graphics talents and a huge artist and asset budget compared to smaller multi platform studios. That is the mistake: using them as a benchmark.

 

[goonergaz]

iroboto, I think the 'problem' is that if AF is being dropped for performance issues they why are they letting XBO games release with worse performance with AF - why not drop it from that version too?

I ask again - is there a list of games that do not have AF on PS4, maybe that will help provide a link? I just find it odd, Sony may be pushing 1080p and as a side-effect AF may be being dropped, but I think there are too many games that show that shouldn't be the case. Far Cry 4 - doesn't that have AF? If so there's a great example right there.

 

[zupallinere]

Prove to me that AF is an SDK bug.

Prove to me that Unfinished Swan isn't a bug ??

Well you suggested Stryder was a bug so maybe that engine has it BUT it would be up to the dev to work around it if they choose to do so. There are at least 2 instances ( outliers to the outliers ) where it would be silly to think that performance was the issue so there is certainly something other than a performance corner case going on in some cases. The issue maybe one of resources but not knowing what the contracted deliverables are, those resources might be time for developers to work around some issue or clean up some weirdness ?

Most agree this is a bit of a weird situation in any case.

 

[turkey]

iroboto, I think the 'problem' is that if AF is being dropped for performance issues they why are they letting XBO games release with worse performance with AF - why not drop it from that version too?

I ask again - is there a list of games that do not have AF on PS4, maybe that will help provide a link? I just find it odd, Sony may be pushing 1080p and as a side-effect AF may be being dropped, but I think there are too many games that show that shouldn't be the case. Far Cry 4 - doesn't that have AF? If so there's a great example right there.

The AF might not be affecting the actual bottleneck the Xbox is suffering from, in such a scenario removing it would not affect the poor frame rate, where the reverse may be true on the PS4.... ?

Lower resolution means lower bandwidth requirements also?

 

[zupallinere]

iroboto, I think the 'problem' is that if AF is being dropped for performance issues they why are they letting XBO games release with worse performance with AF - why not drop it from that version too?

I ask again - is there a list of games that do not have AF on PS4, maybe that will help provide a link? I just find it odd, Sony may be pushing 1080p and as a side-effect AF may be being dropped, but I think there are too many games that show that shouldn't be the case. Far Cry 4 - doesn't that have AF? If so there's a great example right there.

Good questions. We are really only going by a the ongoing survey of what DF sees and posts. There are plenty of other games that do not get the DF treatment and while I can imagine there are enough enthusiasts out there willing to the the work to compile such a list I can also see lots of fights over metrics and the like as well. Is it certain that even that with the DF ones that AF is off for the entire game ??

 

[DrJay24]

What? When have I ever said X1 and PS4 are equally footed on GPU power though? And when has performance ever been so simplistically laid out?

I let the developers decide what the best settings are. That's my stance. They have tuned games however they tune them for performance and looks. Your bone to pick is your own. There is no conspiracy here with AF. I'm trying crush out this notion that some SDK problem exists. There isn't.

Your... crusade is missing one thing. Evidence. You don't have one tweet, one interview, not one piece of evidence where a dev said they tuned AF for performance. You already admit Strider is likely a bug. So in the light of contradictory evidence you once again assume what you want to be true. That's not how logic and the scientific method works. I'd would say give it a rest a for a while, wait for more data. Of course if you are not a data driven kind of guy, then keep jumping to conclusions that reinforce your bias.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

iroboto, I think the 'problem' is that if AF is being dropped for performance issues they why are they letting XBO games release with worse performance with AF - why not drop it from that version too?

It's a reach but I wonder if Microsoft have a minimum AF setting among there TRC whereas Sony so not. That's the extent of my input into this ludicrous discussion. We won't know for sure until somebody in the know lays it out.

 

[goonergaz]

I think it's fair to say there are examples of games where it's missing and it can't possibly be performance related (Unfinished Swan) and examples where it's fully implemented and rarely has perfomance issues (Last of Us) so for these reasons I find it hard to believe there's an bottleneck issue.

 

[iroboto]

Your... crusade is missing one thing. Evidence. You don't have one tweet, one interview, not one piece of evidence where a dev said they tuned AF for performance. You already admit Strider is likely a bug. So in the light of contradictory evidence you once again assume what you want to be true. That's not how logic and the scientific method works. I'd would say give it a rest a for a while, wait for more data. Of course if you are not a data driven kind of guy, then keep jumping to conclusions that reinforce your bias.

This is an easy argument to deflect. No developer has ever explicitly gone on record about what features did not make the cut for their final game. We have always been left to sites like DF to resolve that for us.

The position I take is implicit that if the feature did not make it into the final game it did not have the performance to do so.

Why do you not ask why Xbox is missing all the same features as well? My argument is all encompassing. Developers will tune the game to obtain the best possible look while reaching their frame rate budget.

You are welcome to debate that point but I think the proof is sitting in about every single game released.

Bugs in a single game mind you do not apply to the whole SDK or the API. Be very careful applying one situation to every situation.

You continue to focus on outliers and not the group of games on PS4 that have AF enabled.

 

[goonergaz]

This is an easy argument to deflect. No developer has ever explicitly gone on record about what features did not make the cut for their final game. We have always been left to sites like DF to resolve that for us.

The position I take is implicit that if the feature did not make it into the final game it did not have the performance to do so.

The problem is there's plenty of evidence to suggest the performance is there - unfinshed swan is the perfect example - it would be nuts to suggest AF was dropped due to performance, surely you can agree with that? Then, if AF is such a 'problem' for PS4 why does LoU have it at the highest setting and run very well? More evidence to suggest that something else is at play here.

 

[DrJay24]

This is an easy argument to deflect. No developer has ever explicitly gone on record about what features did not make the cut for their final game. We have always been left to sites like DF to resolve that for us.

Its not an argument, it was a statement of fact. If you want to help solidify your theory, you need evidence. Right now you have none, but you do have contradictory evidence that you hand wave away as "outliers".

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The position I take is implicit that if the feature did not make it into the final game it did not have the performance to do so.

What about time, cost, and balance issues? "Performance" is an unwieldy generalisation. As others have said, you could have ample performance in some areas of your hardware and hit a bottleneck elsewhere. Could be that a feature is quite possible if the underlying engine is reworked a bit to eliminate the bottleneck preventing the feature, but there's no financial incentive to bother, meaning a feature dropped due to business reasons rather than the hardware not being able to pull it off. Especially if you decide another feature is better value and prioritise that ahead of fixing the bottleneck.

Edit: Truthfacts -
The presence of AF in PS4 games shows AF is not universally broken.
The absence of AF in some games where other clearly more taxing games have it shows AF is not limited by overall hardware power.
There's the possibility of more than one cause for the condition requiring a per-title analysis and filtering of results to identify the major culprit. No-one has yet performed the necessary data acquisition (list of games with and without AF and the engines/libs used).

Until that's done, the discussion probably should be dropped.

 

[Globalisateur]

I would like to focus on the assumption that some (rare) PS4 games lack Anisotropic fitlering (AF) compared to all others console versions (XB1, X360 and PS3) because of an API, library or SDK bug/problem.

Then what problem or bug could cause lack of AF on some PS4 games?

Performance argument:

The performance argument ("Devs remove AF on PS4 versions compared to XB1, PS3 and X360 versions because PS4 is too weak"), even if totally legitimate in itself, is unfortunately unprovable until we have real developers testimonies and can only lead to heated and unfruitful debates.

The following games had decent level of AF enabled on all versions except PS4:

Strider (PS4, PS3, XB1, X360):

The unfinished Swan (PS4, PS3):

Others game have this problem on PS4 like: Thief (using Unreal Engine 3, UE3), Dyinglight (using Chrome Engine 6, CE6) or recently Evolve (CryEngine 3, CE3).

Finding analogies and clues:

Now In order to resolve the mystery, still assuming it's caused by some kind of bug or API problem, we need more data about the games in question. A good start would be to find analogies between the games with no (or little) AF. @iroboto pertinently noticed that one of the games could have in fact a small amount of Anisotropic Filtering (like 2x) and not 0x like previously assumed by many.

So now we have an interesting and new starting point that we need to follow! We have to compare PC games with AF 2x (and others level) enabled versus PS4 versions and see if those games on PS4 have the same level of AF (which could be then an important fact).

From memory the games that seemingly until now lacked AF and are available on PC are Thief, Evolve and Dying light. So do you own those games? If yes, can you take screenshots of them (in identical scenes as seen in the screenshots available in each Digital Foundry articles), with different level of Anisotropic fitlering enabled and post them in this thread?

Things we know:

We know PS4 SDK has 2 APIs: GNM and GNMX.
We know the big AAA publishers (Ubisoft, EA, Activision and Sony first party teams) that have their own engines produce games with perfectly identical (and decent) levels of AF on PS4 compared to all others console versions.

The (crazy) theory of direct3D feature level 9.1 AF 2x restriction:

That's most probably unrelated to our problem but still an interesting coincidence, particularly if the aforementioned PS4 games have in fact AF 2x enabled. We know many engines are first coded in directX then ported on PS4, some hiccup (I don't know how) could happen in the translation (like with some wrappers) between directX and notably GNMX.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn642451.aspx

In Direct3D, feature level 9.1 specifies a maximum anisotropy of 2x. Because the Anisotropic Texture Filtering variant attempts to use 16x anisotropy exclusively, playback fails when frame analysis is run on a feature-level 9.1 device. Contemporary devices that are affected by this limitation include the ARM-based Surface RT and Surface 2 Windows tablets. Older GPUs that might still be found in some computers can also be affected, but they're widely considered to be obsolete and are increasingly uncommon.

In conclusion:

Any ideas and theories that could help us resolve into this investigation are welcome! But please remember that this thread is only about the theory that it could be an API, engine port or SDK problem.