Trying to replicate Forza Tech Demo on PC for Reasons *spawn*

[mosen]

Yes that's exactly what I said. i.e. that based on the statement by Turn 10's studio software architect, some CPU performance effecting settings were not ramped up to PC maximums and thus PC CPU performance isn't necessarily comparable to Scorpio with everything turned up.



Which was totally irrelevant since it referred to only some specific features which would impact CPU performance and is not an exhaustive list of every feature in the game that can be dialled up which has a direct impact on CPU performance.



They were running a stress test (CPU included) at Xbox One settings. So yes, that was the maximum CPU load that the Xbox One version of the game is capable of delivering. The PC test was never supposed to be representative of what the Scorpio version of the game will look like, it was a simple quick and dirty test to see if the GPU could cope with PC ultra settings.

It doesn't matter how DF described it, because Turn 10 themselves described it specifically as:



So you tell me why they make the very specific qualifying statement of "for everything that's GPU-related" as opposed to just saying "everything"? There's clearly a reason why they make that qualifying remark.



Except there is no "display settings menu" in the XBO version of the game. So this clearly isn't a simply matter of going to the graphics menu and ramping everything up to Ultra. There may be some settings in the PC menu which merge different graphical values together which they are able to separate when manipulating the XBO version.



Ok, I'll grant that my wording wasn't perfect there. I didn't mean to imply that they didn't touch any PC exclusive setting which might have had an impact on CPU performance. However I am saying that there must be some settings which they didn't ramp up which have a detrimental impact on CPU performance. Whether they also have a detrimental impact on GPU performance or not (like reflections) is irrelevant. Which is why my original statement that CPU performance between the two versions can't be compared is entirely valid - unless you have proof - contrary to Turn 10's statement, that as well as everything that is GPU related, they also ramped up everything that is CPU related to the PC maximums as well. Do you have that proof?

There is no PC or 360 version of the test. That test used Forzatech engine which they use for this propose on different situations as DF mentioned in their article.

The process of getting ForzaTech up and running on the makeshift Project Scorpio hardware took just two days, and according to Chris Tector, the majority of that time was adapting the codebase from an earlier XDK [the PC-based development environment] that dated to just after Forza Motorsport 6's ship-date.

However, the 'ForzaTech' demo I'll be seeing won't be Forza Motorsport 7 - software announcements aren't typically tied into hardware deep dives - but clearly, Turn 10 and the Xbox team are confident that final software will match or indeed exceed the quality of what I'll be reporting on.

"ForzaTech is really the place to let us prove out platform features like Direct3D 12 [on PC] and also lets us help with internal things that nobody else gets to see - in this case, the modelling that happened with Scorpio," shares Tector. "We were really able to help prove that out... Our part in it - and an important part for us, because it's a two-way thing - we wanted to make sure that the hardware was going be able to do what we wanted, what we had as a vision, what we wanted in Forza next, but we also wanted to make sure that however it's being proved out, that the promise was solid, that the model made sense to us."

First they showcased the tech at XB1 level of quality at 4k resolution/assets and then they ramped upped all the setting to ultra.

So there is no PC exclusive setting or something like that.

I have no interest to talk about already discussed topics. Richard Leadbetter was there to see and report these demos and I quoted him and T10 Chris Tector here so no more conspiracy for me

 

[pjbliverpool]

There is no PC or 360 version of the test.

No-one said that there was.

First they showcased the tech at XB1 level of quality at 4k resolution/assets and then they ramped upped all the setting to ultra.

So there is no PC exclusive setting or something like that.

Fine, then what's your explanation for Turn 10's use of the qualifying phrase: "for everything that's GPU-related"?

 

[iroboto]

No-one said that there was.



Fine, then what's your explanation for Turn 10's use of the qualifying phrase: "for everything that's GPU-related"?

Not really interested in taking sides here, but relation and exclusive are not the same.

When I search relation, say search terms, I write dog food, I expect to see results about dogs, dog food, dog grooming, dog adoption etc.

If the feature impacts both GPU and CPU it's classified at GPU related.

If you're asking about why they said that, it's possible that Forza tech has very specific CPU based features that are also not shipped in any game, much like they have GPU features not yet shipped in any game. Like the rain and daylight. making the assumption that what's available in Forza Tech will be found in Forza Apex would be considered an error.

Thus if we agree to that, by association it should not matter what the CPU features are at "ultra" quality as you have no method of knowing what those features are, and cannot use Forza
Apex as a barometer.

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

Ehhh.... I find that when people add specifics to a comment they usually do so for a reason. Turn 10 didn't say "we cranked up everything to 11!!!", they specifically added a qualifying statement "GPU-Related". This indicates to me that there are certain features, not GPU-Related, that they didn't set to what would be considered "PC Ultra".

What this means in terms of trying to duplicate their results using Forza Apex is that you're correct, we probably cannot use it as a barometer. Because we don't actually know the exact settings that they used system-wide in their demonstration. This is unfortunate, because I'd really like to have PBJ duplicate their claims that those specific settings max out his GTX 1070 system while the Scorpio supposedly still has 20% more headroom.

 

[BRiT]

Or maybe they were focused on ensuring the GPU was enough after or before tackling the CPU specific items. *shrug*

 

[AlNom]

They could reduce CPU load on reflections by reducing the # of objects drawn (just as on console), but still max out "GPU" with reflection resolution & shading (something that is far lower on console). Update rate is either, so who knows. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[mosen]

They could reduce CPU load on reflections by reducing the # of objects drawn (just as on console), but still max out "GPU" with reflection resolution & shading (something that is far lower on console). Update rate is either, so who knows. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If they wanted to reduce CPU load then why they put all cars with full AI/ Physics on the screen? This is a stress test that no one can recreate on Console or PC. So what's the point of adding CPU loads with this intentional and special settings and then reduce CPU load on certain graphical setting at the same time?

 

[Pixel]

Perusing the interwebs regarding Forza Horizon 3 it seems that many people with 1070/1080s are hitting cpu & hdd bottlenecks in regards to framerate dips below 60fps.
People are finding disabling antivirus, disabling core0 if you have an i7 (this does not work for i5 owners), defragmenting hdd (texture streaming), ensuring pagefile is in one contiguous block, greatly increasing page file size, can really help alleviate these issues.

So. Its unlikely that Digital Foundry addressed the issues of the pc port. Using their comparison of Forza:H3 is not the best method or relative indicator of the ballpark performance Scorpio owners can expect in a broad lineup of games versus (recent gen i7) + 1070/1080 owners.

Question: Does DF recording/testing methodology/software require cpu cycles like FRAPS? Hopefully no.
edit: Digital Foundry uses FCAT to benchmark/capture on PCs with Nvidia GPUs, and FCAT does use cpu resources, which are desperately needed for Forza H3 to maintain a solid 60fps.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...al-foundry-beyond-the-barchart-pc-performance

 

[DavidGraham]

Real time Reflections on multiple surfaces (mirrors/windshield) are far more CPU hungry than a mere increase in AI cars. Those might pose a serious challenge for a simplton Jaguar CPU. But a fully fledged PC CPU will eat through them with ease.

Turn 10 made detailed descriptions for their visual fidelity on Scorpio, detailing increasing textures, cars number, LOD, shadow resolution, MSAA, AF, motion blur, subtle lighting, even foliage desnity. But they never mentioned increasing reflections or particle count, or even draw distance for that matter, which rules those out from being included in the Scorpio demo. All of these effects are CPU heavy. Apex requires a decent Core i5 for 60fps on ultra, anything less and it runs below 40. So when taking everything thing into account, it's not illogical to determine that Scorpio demo didn't achieve visual pariety with the PC version.

Perusing the interwebs regarding Forza Horizon 3

The hardware requirements for Horizon 3 are completely different to those for Apex. Horizon runs with a better lighting, higher draw distances and a massive increase in world detail and object count. It ran way worse on Xbox One than Forza 6.

 

[iroboto]

Real time Reflections on multiple surfaces (mirrors/windshield) are far more CPU hungry than a mere increase in AI cars. Those might pose a serious challenge for a simplton Jaguar CPU. But a fully fledged PC CPU will eat through them with ease.

Turn 10 made detailed descriptions for their visual fidelity on Scorpio, detailing increasing textures, cars number, LOD, shadow resolution, MSAA, AF, motion blur, subtle lighting, even foliage desnity. But they never mentioned increasing reflections or particle count, or even draw distance for that matter, which rules those out from being included in the Scorpio demo. All of these effects are CPU heavy. Apex requires a decent Core i5 for 60fps on ultra, anything less and it runs below 40. So when taking everything thing into account, it's not illogical to determine that Scorpio demo didn't achieve visual pariety with the PC version.

While I agree with your statement, how features are implemented on PC may not be implemented the same on console. i.e: on console they know they have access to unified memory, the amount and degree of compute and async compute, executeIndirect will differ wildly from PC just because console hardware is guaranteed. Recall several times through the segment that DF continually reminded viewers that Forza is one of the most optimized engines there are today, and one would make certain assumptions how they reach those goals on console.

"ForzaTech is really the place to let us prove out platform features like Direct3D 12 [on PC] and also lets us help with internal things that nobody else gets to see - in this case, the modelling that happened with Scorpio," shares Tector. "We were really able to help prove that out... Our part in it - and an important part for us, because it's a two-way thing - we wanted to make sure that the hardware was going be able to do what we wanted, what we had as a vision, what we wanted in Forza next, but we also wanted to make sure that however it's being proved out, that the promise was solid, that the model made sense to us."

Recall they ported Forza Tech to Scorpio, not Forza Apex; it's entirely possible that console codebase can reach CPU heavy goals by leveraging the GPU for heavy lifting. I think I almost expect this.

The hardware requirements for Horizon 3 are completely different to those for Apex. Horizon runs with a better lighting, higher draw distances and a massive increase in world detail and object count. It ran way worse on Xbox One than Forza 6.

I'm not sure how to qualify this statement Both F6 and FH3 reached their desired frame rate goals on XBO with no dips.

 

[DavidGraham]

I'm not sure how to qualify this statement Both F6 and FH3 reached their desired frame rate goals on XBO with no dips.

Just meant that the workload is different between the two, Horizon 3 ran 30fps while Forza 6 ran 60fps.

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

While I agree with your statement, how features are implemented on PC may not be implemented the same on console. i.e: on console they know they have access to unified memory, the amount and degree of compute and async compute, executeIndirect will differ wildly from PC just because console hardware is guaranteed. Recall several times through the segment that DF continually reminded viewers that Forza is one of the most optimized engines there are today, and one would make certain assumptions how they reach those goals on console.

I think we all agree that they used the very best case example to paint Scorpio in the very best light. But the article makes certain comparisons to specific PC Hardware and to take the position that their "goals" for the console will be different than goals for PC versions so the two aren't comparable is a flaw in their analysis - they're the ones who made the comparisons. If they aren't going to have the goal of supplying the same visual fidelity on their console ports as is possible on the PC, then those comparisons are useless and shouldn't have been made. Which I think is the point.

 

[iroboto]

I think we all agree that they used the very best case example to paint Scorpio in the very best light. But the article makes certain comparisons to specific PC Hardware and to take the position that their "goals" for the console will be different than goals for PC versions so the two aren't comparable is a flaw in their analysis - they're the ones who made the comparisons. If they aren't going to have the goal of supplying the same visual fidelity on their console ports as is possible on the PC, then those comparisons are useless and shouldn't have been made. Which I think is the point.

Agreed, DF was trying to get a feel for where the scorpio was landing by leveraging Apex as a barometer. How those features on Apex are implemented on console vs PC is not something that they discussed. I do appreciate DavidGraham's post draw conclusions with regards to Apex and CPU usage, but without knowledge of how/if those features are implemented on ForzaTech, we're at a bit of an impasse to know if these CPU heavy features would be available on scorpio.

 

[pjbliverpool]

If they wanted to reduce CPU load then why they put all cars with full AI/ Physics on the screen? This is a stress test that no one can recreate on Console or PC. So what's the point of adding CPU loads with this intentional and special settings and then reduce CPU load on certain graphical setting at the same time?

I've already answered this one. The stress test is designed to stress the game at XBO settings and 4K resolution. Therefore they maximise the CPU load at XBO settings.

There are additional settings on the PC version that they "wanted to see if they could handle as well" and so of those settings that were GPU related (their words), they were turned up to PC maximums. That strongly implies that at least some settings which are exclusive to the PC and impact CPU performance were not turned up. There is absolutely no need to turn them up for the stress test because the stress test is aimed at XBO settings at 4K resolution. They were quite clear in the article that the intention for the final release is not simply to whack up the settings to the PC ultra equivalents. They couldn't even if they wanted as DF stated the GPU spike to 100% on several occasions, thus dropping frames.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Real time Reflections on multiple surfaces (mirrors/windshield) are far more CPU hungry than a mere increase in AI cars. Those might pose a serious challenge for a simplton Jaguar CPU. But a fully fledged PC CPU will eat through them with ease.

Turn 10 made detailed descriptions for their visual fidelity on Scorpio, detailing increasing textures, cars number, LOD, shadow resolution, MSAA, AF, motion blur, subtle lighting, even foliage desnity. But they never mentioned increasing reflections or particle count, or even draw distance for that matter, which rules those out from being included in the Scorpio demo.

That's not necessarily true, as they are quoted as saying they increased all GPU related settings to the maximum. As reflections are GPU related, even if heavily influenced by the CPU, that would mean that it was increased to maximum as well. It is entirely possible that the software engineer misspoke, of course, but without clarification we can't assume that they meant something other than what they said.

What we do know is that even when doing the same things on Project Scorpio versus a PC, the CPU load on Project Scorpio will be lower. While they offered up only one example (draw calls being made even less CPU dependent than it already was on console vs. PC), there are likely more examples where they aren't limited by the console version of Dx12 having to be limited by multiple IHVs with different levels of API feature sets as is the case on PC. It would not surprise me if more graphics related features other than just draw calls that are CPU heavy on PC have instead been leveraged to the GPU in order to reduce the load on the CPU.

It would be interesting to hear Sebbbi weigh in on this as he has been doing extensive research into moving CPU heavy graphics work onto the GPU.

Regards,
SB

 

[DavidGraham]

That's not necessarily true, as they are quoted as saying they increased all GPU related settings to the maximum. As reflections are GPU related, even if heavily influenced by the CPU

Again they make no mention of increasing reflections, or even reflections resolution. They were keen on documenting all the changes they made, even down to the shadow resolution and foliage density. Not mentioning reflections or particle density means they didn't touch on them, or did little to change them, especially in light of their "GPU related options" quote.

 

[mosen]

I've already answered this one. The stress test is designed to stress the game at XBO settings and 4K resolution. Therefore they maximise the CPU load at XBO settings.

There are additional settings on the PC version that they "wanted to see if they could handle as well" and so of those settings that were GPU related (their words), they were turned up to PC maximums. That strongly implies that at least some settings which are exclusive to the PC and impact CPU performance were not turned up. There is absolutely no need to turn them up for the stress test because the stress test is aimed at XBO settings at 4K resolution. They were quite clear in the article that the intention for the final release is not simply to whack up the settings to the PC ultra equivalents. They couldn't even if they wanted as DF stated the GPU spike to 100% on several occasions, thus dropping frames.

Their words is "everything GPU-related" and DF said the same thing. As far as I know there is no exclusive PC setting for CPU and if there were anything like that you could easily point them out.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Okay so this is getting a bit ridiculous now. This all stemmed from the original statement that directly comparing CPU performance between the Scorpio demo and a PC test is not possible because *there is at least a suggestion* that not all PC exclusive CPU related features were turned up to the maximums.

Is anyone claiming that the Scorpio demo definitely maxed out all PC settings including those that impact CPU performance either independently of or in conjunction with GPU impact? And that as a result of that, the CPU performance seen in the PC version with everything maxed out is exactly comparable to the CPU performance in the Scorpio demo?

Because if not then I'd suggest this question is already settled and the thread should be closed.

Oh, and the personal attacks on peoples character and motivations? Seriously? At B3D? That's the kind of thing I came here to get away from at sites like Gamespot.

 

[DavidGraham]

1-States they maxed the GPU related options
2-Don't mention reflections, draw distance, particle density while mentioning trivial insignificant stuff like foliage density
3-Scorpio is behind a core i5/1070 PC in ALL performance metrics

CASE CLOSED, doesn't need a genius to figure this out, this demo is NOT comparable to a PC Forza 6 game running on Ultra. No need to argue semantics or be pedantic about paraphrasing, just connect the dots in a very consistent logical manner like any sane person would do.

And for the people attacking the PC crowd in this thread, I though we moved it here in the PC gaming section so we can talk more freely about matters related to PCs, I would rather the console crowd leave this thread if they don't like talking about it. If this is not Double standards, I don't know what is!

 

[DavidGraham]

Their words is "everything GPU-related" and DF said the same thing. As far as I know there is no exclusive PC setting for CPU and if there were anything like that you could easily point them out.

Most visual options affect both the CPU and GPU to variable degrees. Hanging your entire argument on the premise that reflections affect both the CPU and GPU and thus are not excluded is senseless, and naive. In this case, Reflections affect the CPU because it needs to render multiple different viewpoints of the world at a specific frame rate and accuracy, it affects the GPU because it has to have a decent resolution/shading for the reflection, both elements are dependent on each other. You can't max out reflections on Scorpio because it has a massive CPU hog element, and that is irrelevant to whether Scorpio can handle the GPU element of that process or not.