Ratchet & Clank technical analysis *spawn

[T2098]

It's worth remembering that the one way bandwidth for PCIe2 16x is only 8GB/s which is barely faster than some Gen4 NMVe drives and so could be very easily saturated by heavy IO plus normal game data going back and forth.

PCIe3 doubles that to 16GB/s though which gives far more headroom. I would expect that if PCI3 is still a bottleneck, and thus 100% saturated (to enable PCIe4 to give a further speed boost) that we'd be seeing a bigger speedup from the doubling of bandwidth between 2.0 and 3.0. I suspect 4.0 won't give much if any speedup over 3.0. That seems born out by the 4060/Ti results here vs the 3060Ti. The 3060Ti being full speed PCIe4.0 and the 4060's being only half speed. Yet neither seems impacted by that.



Evidence that points towards decompression likely not being a bottleneck would be:

• We have other benchmarks showing vastly higher decompression throughput than R&C is using
• We see no obvious difference in load speeds between different GPU's of wildly different capabilities (albeit this is on different test systems so a proper test may show different results).
• We can see GPU usage is well below 100% on the 4090 during the portal transitions

None of that is conclusive, but I'm sure we will get conclusive evidence one way or the other soon enough as it's as simple as benchmarking the transition times on the same system with just the GPU swapped out.

Hell, anyone here with the game could do it right now by simply underclocking their GPU.

This title does seem to be even more PCIe bandwidth constrained than one of the previous leaders, Hitman 3, which sees a pretty solid 20% performance decrease on the 4090 from going Gen3 x16 to Gen2 x16 in a similar fashion at 4K: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-pci-express-scaling/21.html

I've always speculated that engines architected (at least initially) as console exclusives would have a higher PCIe usage. Many things that will consume PCIe bandwidth on the PC don't on an APU, since CPU memory and GPU memory are one and the same, and don't require transfers across the bus; if in the early stages of development they didn't even have a future PC port in mind, then why not use that capability to its fullest?

That brings me to another interesting test, particularly since Rich already has an RX 570, although it'd be nicer if it were an 8GB one to eliminate VRAM pressure skewing the results...
RX 570 8GB versus... AMD Phoenix APU.

On average, TechPowerUp rates the Radeon 680M in the Phoenix APUs as exactly identical speed-wise to the RX 570: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-780m.c4020
It'd be neat to compare both the frame rates and the average PCIe bandwidth utilization of both, with the RX 570 in a system with a similar Zen4 CPU.

I know DF's got their hands busy with lots of other things, but a man can dream!

 

[davis.anthony]

So I've had a quick 25 minutes blast.

- It crashed once!
- The GPU usage is all over the place and I'm running at ~100fps at native 1440p + DLAA + mix of very/high settings + v.high rt reflections with LOD at 9
- VRAM use was ~10GB and system RAM was ~14.5GB
- Turning on RT reflections with (v.high + LOD at 9) reduces my fps from ~130fps to ~100fps
- Turning on DLSS3 FG increases my fps from ~100fps to ~150fps and actually feels very nice in terms of input response

I can turn on DLSS but it just makes me constantly CPU limited on a Ryzen 5 7600 at 5.35Ghz all core so it's pointless using DLSS so I use DLAA., my GPU is an RTX 4070ti and I have 32GB DDR5 6000Mhz.

The game is installed on a RAID 0 array comprising of 2x 1.7GB/s NVME drives and a side from the very odd stutter at the very start of a load it has been perfectly stutter free.

PS5 in performance RT mode can drop to 1080p, so in GPU heavy scenes I'm getting over double the performance with better visuals, so I'm not sure why some people are complaining about the games performance as the performance from my 4070ti compared to PS5 is where I expected it to be.

 

[HolySmoke]

I've just been playing it native 1440p, max settings with max RT reflections on a 12GB GPU with no issues with VRAM.

Yeah, I might be a bit of a dumbass here because I was playing on Very High settings. Dropping down to High freed enough memory to make it a bit more usable. Then it crashed but it didn't hammer PCIe like it used to.

But that's just more evidence that DirectStorage isn't a problem because the game runs perfectly well for me on Very High without RT. This actually made me go and test the read rates on both Medium and High settings and to say it makes a big difference is an understatement.

I already wrote about how the game will read about 18-19GB from disk during the intro sequence which is broadly on par with PS5. But these numbers are far, far lower on Medium and High at just 1.8GB and 5GB during that same sequence. We're talking a 10x difference in data rates between Very High and Medium which is what that Twitter poster was running at.

 

[see colon]

Opening rift sequence on HDD:

We need someone to test this with Readyboost. Inquiring minds want to know.

 

[Karamazov]

Can you change the turning speed of the camera on PC ? Dev said in DF interview that they were dumping from mem what's behind the players POV, but turning speed is not modifiable on PS5.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Can you change the turning speed of the camera on PC ? Dev said in DF interview that they were dumping from mem what's behind the players POV, but turning speed is not modifiable on PS5.

Yes. You have both camera and aim sensitivity, and can jack them up considerably. Stands to reason considering the game has mouse control. I don't see any pop-in when whipping the camera around.

 

[Karamazov]

Yes. You have both camera and aim sensitivity, and can jack them up considerably. Stands to reason considering the game has mouse control. I don't see any pop-in when whipping the camera around.

would be interesting to test with low ram and HDD

 

[eastmen]

Nixxes probably spent less than a year on it.

Yes

Spider-Man was released in August 2022. Miles Morales in November. I'd wager they only spent a few months on this.

Wasn't ratchet a launch game ? So its been 3 years since it launched on ps5. Should have been plenty of time to make a competent port. Sony should have taken advantage of the time. This is just another game from them with issues and they have already set the expectation that games will be on pc years after ps5. So there isn't really an excuse for lower quality ports, It could be forgiven a bit if they were day one or within a few months of ps5 but seriously 3 years is more than enough time to get this stuff right

 

[eastmen]

We need someone to test this with Readyboost. Inquiring minds want to know.

I wonder with how fast thumb drives are now if ready boost wouldn't be viable ?
This guy is 1000read/900write https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Dat...56+gig+flash+drive+usb+3.1,aps,75&sr=1-9&th=1

pretty dirt cheap at sub $40 usd for 256 gig

 

[Shifty Geezer]

In the video description. 32GB, but the game never used more than 12 according to RTSS.

12 GB RAM + 9 GB VRAM?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Thank you for the correction. So yea sony had 2 years to work on this port and this is what they turned up. They really need to focus more on pc ports or they are going to start to get a negative reputation for them

Nixxes were working on both SM before this. Presumably they aren't big enough to run multiple projects simultaneously. In interview they said they tend to be 6-12 months on a project.

I agree they need to improve first-day offerings, but at the same time there are plenty of PC games launching in a worse state from PC devs, I think Windows is just in a not-great place at the moment. Consoles not a huge amount better with requirement for day 1 patches.

 

[eastmen]

Nixxes were working on both SM before this. Presumably they aren't big enough to run multiple projects simultaneously. In interview they said they tend to be 6-12 months on a project.

I agree they need to improve first-day offerings, but at the same time there are plenty of PC games launching in a worse state from PC devs, I think Windows is just in a not-great place at the moment. Consoles not a huge amount better with requirement for day 1 patches.

That sounds like a Sony issue and not a gamer issue. Sony has not only had the complete development time the games originally had but multiple years after to get the pc port locked down. The majority of the other devs as you point out are putting their games out day and date with the console versions. I am pretty sure if some of those other devs had another 2 years to work on the game before a pc release they would all be in much better shape.

Ratchet and Clank entered development prior to the ps5 launching which was in 2020 , released in 2021 and it is now the middle of 2023 and the port seems to be a mess with tons of bugs and performance issues that shouldn't exist. If sony decided to spend only 6-12 months porting this , then that is on them. They are completely responsible for not using the time they had to create a good port. It's the same with the utter shit show that is TLOU pc.

It's even more of a farce that they are trying to get $60 out of a port of a two year game that shipped out broken.

 

[Seanspeed]

Wasn't ratchet a launch game ? So its been 3 years since it launched on ps5. Should have been plenty of time to make a competent port. Sony should have taken advantage of the time. This is just another game from them with issues and they have already set the expectation that games will be on pc years after ps5. So there isn't really an excuse for lower quality ports, It could be forgiven a bit if they were day one or within a few months of ps5 but seriously 3 years is more than enough time to get this stuff right

As many have said, they clearly would not have been working on this for three years.

It's also just not fair to call this a 'low quality port'. It's a perfectly playable game with a few mostly minor technical issues. I know that there's been a spate of games with significant issues the past few years, but man, at the same time we should keep some perspective about expecting ambitious modern games to have perfect technical polish.

 

[Seanspeed]

That sounds like a Sony issue and not a gamer issue. Sony has not only had the complete development time the games originally had but multiple years after to get the pc port locked down. The majority of the other devs as you point out are putting their games out day and date with the console versions. I am pretty sure if some of those other devs had another 2 years to work on the game before a pc release they would all be in much better shape.

Ratchet and Clank entered development prior to the ps5 launching which was in 2020 , released in 2021 and it is now the middle of 2023 and the port seems to be a mess with tons of bugs and performance issues that shouldn't exist. If sony decided to spend only 6-12 months porting this , then that is on them. They are completely responsible for not using the time they had to create a good port. It's the same with the utter shit show that is TLOU pc.

It's even more of a farce that they are trying to get $60 out of a port of a two year game that shipped out broken.

Again, Nixxes isn't some behemoth of a company that can just be working on all these Playstation games from launch. Sony has to pick and prioritize what gets ported to PC. It's basically a throughput problem and the longer you take on each item going through, the more the whole process slows down.

The alternative is to put more emphasis on the main studios doing multiplatform development instead of focusing only on Playstation during the main development cycles. But I think they're gonna be somewhat reluctant to do this because in the end, Playstation will always be their undisputed #1 priority by far.

I'm of the opinion that I'm grateful Sony is offering these games on PC at all. Some technical quibbles at launch, especially when otherwise being very playable, do not feel to me as warranting any kind of harsh bashing when they could easily just not be doing any of this at all and leaving these PS-exclusive. Especially when they've been very good about rectifying issues.

 

[pjbliverpool]

So I gather a pain point at the moment is async GPU decompression perhaps.

It does look to be that way. Hopefully someone will do some analysis on this with different GPU's and forcing DS on and off. Obviously this is the very first game to release using the tech though so if it is causing some in game streaming performance related issues then hopefully that's something that will be ironed out over time.

This title does seem to be even more PCIe bandwidth constrained than one of the previous leaders, Hitman 3, which sees a pretty solid 20% performance decrease on the 4090 from going Gen3 x16 to Gen2 x16 in a similar fashion at 4K: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-pci-express-scaling/21.html

I've always speculated that engines architected (at least initially) as console exclusives would have a higher PCIe usage. Many things that will consume PCIe bandwidth on the PC don't on an APU, since CPU memory and GPU memory are one and the same, and don't require transfers across the bus; if in the early stages of development they didn't even have a future PC port in mind, then why not use that capability to its fullest?

Oh I totally agree with all of that. I'm just speculating that while PCIe 2.0 (now an obsolete standard) likely would be a bottleneck, it's much less likely that PCIe 3.0 (which is still a relevant albeit ageing standard) would be serious detriment to performance. It would certainly be interesting to see it tested directly though. I guess that's something easily done by switching the BIOS from 16x to 8x on a PCIe4.0 card. I may give that a shot if I pick the game up this weekend for testing.

So I've had a quick 25 minutes blast.

- It crashed once!

I read a few forum posts that said reflex is causing crashing and turning it off can resolve that. Not ideal obviously, especially not if you want to use FG. I am so seriously tempted to get this game just to mess with the settings. No way I have time to actually play it so spending 35 pounds on it seems incredibly wasteful. But then again I did just get some birthday money.....

I'm of the opinion that I'm grateful Sony is offering these games on PC at all. Some technical quibbles at launch, especially when otherwise being very playable, do not feel to me as warranting any kind of harsh bashing when they could easily just not be doing any of this at all and leaving these PS-exclusive. Especially when they've been very good about rectifying issues.

Definitely agree with this. As a tech enthusiast I'm bothered by unoptimised GPU performance, textures that don't load properly, minor graphics bugs etc... but these are things that casual gamers are unlikely to be overly concerned about or even notice (as opposed to crashing and game breaking stutter). Far better to get the games in a playable state than not, which R&C certainly qualifies as. That said, I would still prefer they took more time to release the games in a more optimised and state. 1 extra month would have made a huge difference in many cases.

 

[DavidGraham]

Official hotfix for textures, AF and RT issues.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1684864595599425536

 

[pjbliverpool]

This actually made me go and test the read rates on both Medium and High settings and to say it makes a big difference is an understatement.

I already wrote about how the game will read about 18-19GB from disk during the intro sequence which is broadly on par with PS5. But these numbers are far, far lower on Medium and High at just 1.8GB and 5GB during that same sequence. We're talking a 10x difference in data rates between Very High and Medium which is what that Twitter poster was running at.

Whoa! That's a crazy difference. And sounds like it confirms that the PS5 is running with Very High Textures rather than High. It'll be interesting to see Alex's verdict on the PC equivalent to PS5 texture setting.

In combination with this post from the DF thread, as well as @Flappy Pannus observations that the game runs slower and hitches more with very high textures, it seems in game streaming GPU decompression is having a very noticeable impact on GPU performance. Shame there isn't a toggle in game to make testing this easier.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Official hotfix for textures, AF and RT issues.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1684864595599425536

Damn that was fast, go Nixxes!

EDIT:

Release Notes

• Resolved visual issues with characters occurring on certain GPUs, including AMD Vega based models.
• Improved the visual quality of vegetation in ray-traced shadows and ray-traced reflections.
• Implemented a fix to make the Texture Filtering option work as intended.

So no specific word on the texture streaming issue assuming the above is referring to the lack of AF. It will be interesting to see this tested.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

I read a few forum posts that said reflex is causing crashing and turning it off can resolve that. Not ideal obviously, especially not if you want to use FG. I am so seriously tempted to get this game just to mess with the settings. No way I have time to actually play it so spending 35 pounds on it seems incredibly wasteful. But then again I did just get some birthday money.....

Maybe that's why I've never crashed? I'm no playing with reflex enabled.

Anyways, can confirm the latest hotfix fixed the AF issues, big difference. The sporadic issues with some textures not loading in some rare instances doesn't seem to be fully fixed atm though, same specific scenes still have their low/medium variant show up regardless of texture setting, but on reloading the level they were high res? It's tough as it can be sporadic and not that common. I certainly don't get the amount of low-res textures that Alex was in his first look (the vendor for example is always high-res for me).

RT shadows: Fixed!


PC with hotfix, RT shadows Very High:

RT Reflections seem fixed as well:

 

[iroboto]

In combination with this post from the DF thread, as well as @Flappy Pannus observations that the game runs slower and hitches more with very high textures, it seems in game streaming GPU decompression is having a very noticeable impact on GPU performance. Shame there isn't a toggle in game to make testing this easier.

Yea I think this is somewhat expected, this is the major advantage of having dedicated silicon doing the work for you as a black box, versus needing to manage when to decompress etc.
If you're not coding it optimally, hitches and stalls can occur.