Ratchet & Clank technical analysis *spawn

Flappy Pannus said:
Christ, I'm ping-ponging back and and forth on this like the hamster on V from The Boys.

Remembered NvInspector, and -LODBias, which is the go-to for games that fuck up their mip settings for DLSS and base them off the internal res and not the output. So set it to -1.5 for DLSS Performance, and...boom. Upon fresh game load, same quality as resetting the DLSS - except this time, the vram doesn't skyrocket, basically no increase at all. Game is perfectly playable with VH textures displayed in their proper full glory, no stuttering.

So, for my 150th variant of "What I think is happening": Nixxes didn't forget about the proper lodbias for DLSS, but it's not set properly on game load. Resetting DLSS does indeed fix it, but that just reveals the settings bug that has affected the game since launch, it causes the streaming system to go haywire. So the game can handle the VH textures just fine, displayed at their proper LOD in 4K, on 12GB cards - their vram cost at the proper lod is not the issue.

However, there are two caveats to forcing the lodbias: There's a performance cost to this as it is rendering more detail than before (mostly in areas with vegetation) - even more than the dlss reset trick, albeit not with the vram thrashing so it's still a win. While the detail wrt object lod and textures in most areas seems identical to the dlss fix, one weird addition is reflectivity - it's massively increased for surfaces that employ screen space reflections, or at least with some materials. Every metal surface in the game now becomes buffed to a mirror finish. It's actually kind of cool in some cutscenes as you can see so much detail of the world reflected in Clank, but I don't think it's intended as this doesn't happen with native TAA/DLAA or the PS5. Maybe that's the reason this is more costly than the DLSS reset fix which doesn't do this.

As for why this wasn't picked up before, the degree with which this is noticeable depends highly upon your starting internal res, screen size and a PS5 nearby to use as a base for comparison. As the game was reviewed mostly on higher-end cards, they were using DLSS Quality or DLAA, and there it's very hard if not impossible to spot as the LOD for 1440p and up is going to be higher than 1080p for DLSS perf. For DLSS performance, even viewing stuff like the single objects in the model viewer in the game can make it evident, but only if you have either a PS5 to flip to on the same display, or do side by side comparisons as I show below.

The wrong lod bias on boot does kind of resemble the PS5 in performance mode more closely for scenes with vegetation like I said, but now I think that's just a case of that mode on the PS5 being sub-4k often, and the weakness of IGTI compared to DLSS when resolving fine detail. The PS5's 4k Fidelity mode more closely resembles the LOD of DLSS with this fix than its performance mode.

The enhanced shimmering in some scenes was also likely partly to me keeping the default sharpening at 10, which helps the textures a little bit with the wrong lod bias set at boot. When it's fixed though, it's aggressiveness just exacerbates DLSS trying to deal with the increased detail. Cutting it in half or off helps.

PS5 vs PC DLLS Perf (fresh boot)

PS5 vs PC DLLS Perf (DLSS reset, lod fixed)

4K Native AA vs. DLSS Perf (dlss reset, lod fixed)

DLSS Perf with DLSS Reset Fix vs. DLSS Perf with LOD Bias Fix on Fresh boot (look how shiny! Also note the vram decrease with the lod bias fix vs. the dlss reset)

Showing that it's not just distant detail that's affected:

DLSS Perf vs DLSS reset fix, single object in model viewer


View attachment 9351
Click to expand...

Awesome work! I hope you're reporting this to Nixxes lol. I might try that -LODBias fix if nothing else then for those shiny metal textures, that looks pretty cool!
 
pjbliverpool said:
Awesome work! I hope you're reporting this to Nixxes lol. I might try that -LODBias fix if nothing else then for those shiny metal textures, that looks pretty cool!
Click to expand...

Thanks. Yup, filed a report on this as soon as I spotted it.

Actually not sure it's a matter of screen space reflections btw, I think the lodbias confuses the cubemaps. Still kinda neat though. :)

1691170056226.png
 
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Shifty Geezer said:
That's not what we're getting with the unified RAM configs being talked about though.
Click to expand...
No problem, that's what I took from your post. Unified = limited bandwidth. Many supercomputers are predicated on unified RAM and various multi-ported RAM bus designers give those systems almost in comprehensive levels of bandwidth.
DavidGraham said:
M2 Ultra achieves 800GB/s using an enormously gigantic 1024-bit bus, totally crazy.
Click to expand...
My bad, I meant M2 Ultra. Incidentally, that M2 Ultra 1024-bit bus is less than half the 2560-bit memory bus that PlayStation 2 had.
 
Flappy Pannus said:
Would be very interesting to learn if Radeon is actually using GPU decompression in this when DS is enabled. If they are, and they show no difference, then that's kinda good news - it means there's not a rendering performance hit when using GPU decompression, it's more of a Nvidia bug. The actual advantages it brings even if so are still in question mind you, there's no CPU measurements taken with DS on/off in this article which would have been helpful.

So potentially, when working as it should, GPU decompression could be giving a little boost to CPU performance with no cost to GPU performance, at least with the load in this game. Maybe that's why there never was a CPU/GPU toggle to begin with, Nixxes felt there wasn't a point as there wasn't a downside when they were testing it initially.
Click to expand...

They should be as they declared as such. Nevertheless, I don't think they need one as DS doesn't require a IHV solution as it has a GPU fallback option. DS will employ a GPU optimized implementation (RTX IO), GPU fallback or a CPU fallback depending on the drivers and hardware that is present.

There is probably a rendering performance hit in any case where gpu compression is used.

GDC 2023 AMD DS Slides

Slides 60 and 61. AMD employed non-BC textures. Two of the largest could reduce rendering performance by 10%-
20% while the impact of that performance reduction could reach into the 100s of milliseconds (meaning over multiple frames).

Honestly, I believe that AMD, Nvidia and Intel just need to throw some decompression hardware on their GPU DMA engines, adopt the Xbox version of DS and call it a day.

Reading from a disk drive to an upload heap in system memory, doing a memcopy from system memory to GPU memory into a staging buffer, reading from the buffer to decompress on the GPU, writing to another staging buffer in memory and lastly performing a memcopy to final destination in memory so the GPU can finally use the texture, seems hardly ideal.

Especially when on the Xbox, textures are read from the disk, decompressed in the DMA engines and then copied to the final destination in GPU memory ready to use.
 
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Dampf said:
Indeed it is. The PC platform is outdated and every damn port released in the last couple of months proves this.

The PC needs to switch to unified memory ASAP. I know it's hard to get everyone on board, but it needs to happen.
Click to expand...

And how would upgrading your GPU work?
 
davis.anthony said:
And how would upgrading your GPU work?
Click to expand...
Simple. Instead of seperated GPU and CPUs, you would buy combinations in a SoC like Core i7 Something + RTX something (AMD would have a big advantage there as they already produce both in-house, but Intel and Nvidia will work together and catch up). Which combination you buy, is up to you, preserving the soul of the PC (upgradeability). The sockets of new would look similar to these giant sockets already used for server CPUs. Cooling would get better as well, because you can dissipate much more heat on such a large surface.

That would connect via a super wide bus to RAM, which would still be exchangeable. That way you can also upgrade your VRAM, basically. Which is a huge plus.
 
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Dampf said:
Simple. Instead of seperated GPU and CPUs, you would buy combinations in a SoC like Core i7 Something + RTX something (AMD would have a big advantage there as they already produce both in-house, but Intel and Nvidia will work together and catch up). Which combination you buy, is up to you, preserving the soul of the PC (upgradeability). The sockets of new would look similar to these giant sockets already used for server CPUs. Cooling would get better as well, because you can dissipate much more heat on such a large surface.

That would connect via a super wide bus to RAM, which would still be exchangeable. That way you can also upgrade your VRAM, basically. Which is a huge plus.
Click to expand...

No thanks, I'll stick with how it's set up at the moment.
 
Technically a rather sizeable portion of PCs already support unified memory with AMD's APUs and Intel's integrated graphics.

The current platform serves much of the PC market just fine. Intel, AMD and others aren’t going to reconfigure the entire PC platform just to suit AAA gaming.
 
We'll get there eventually... but it's not time yet. Problem isn't the architecture.. the problem is developers build games for other architectures and port.
 
Remij said:
We'll get there eventually... but it's not time yet. Problem isn't the architecture.. the problem is developers build games for other architectures and port.
Click to expand...
How do you see this situation changing? Or even improving?
 
dobwal said:
Technically a rather sizeable portion of PCs already support unified memory with AMD's APUs and Intel's integrated graphics.

The current platform serves much of the PC market just fine. Intel, AMD and others aren’t going to reconfigure the entire PC platform just to suit AAA gaming.
Click to expand...
It's not just gaming that would benefit from this. It would benefit AI massively, as that requires a ton of VRAM with high memory bandwidth.

It all makes sense and it will happen.
davis.anthony said:
No thanks, I'll stick with how it's set up at the moment.
Click to expand...
The future is now, old man.
 
DSoup said:
How do you see this situation changing? Or even improving?
Click to expand...
I see proprietary consoles being replaced with "console" form factor PCs. I see publishers developing only one version of a game, which scales with a wide range of hardware and can be deployed across all PC and cloud streaming devices.

I see Playstation being an app store, just as Xbox is. Digital is phasing out Physical.. it's not a matter of if, but when. Eventually platform holders will ask themselves why they're spending R&D building a proprietary consolewhen they're already going to be building their games for the PC platform. Why they have to build of a new install base every generations.. Publishers will ask themselves why they're making 3 different versions of the same games to reach all the markets.. when they could make one and deploy everywhere.


Nintendo will do their own thing of course.. but even eventually they'll succumb. WiiU was a disaster, and in an attempt to make something different, they'll have another device that truly bombs, and after that they'll fall in with the others.
 
Console has been replaced by these PC "boxes". PS4 and Xbox One are basically just a PC. Okay, the first Xbox was one, too...
The question is why rely only on one vendor when you can just buy parts and connect them? ARM with Intel GPU? AMD GPU with nVidia GPU? nVidia's NVLInk C2C Link provides 450GB/s in each direction - back to the PS3 implementation of Cell and RSX.
 
why even bother buying a PC in the future when connection speeds will make things fast enough to stream without a difference.
A smart TV and a subscription will be the way to go.
 
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