Xenoblade Chronicles 3 [NX]


Seems some reviewer didn't realize that the game have some kind of memory leak, and the longer you play, the worse the game look. At least from what I've read.

Start fresh, and docked is pretty close to 1080p for a lot of time. While on handheld mode it's blurry all the time.

I wonder whether that reviewer play mostly while handheld as they didn't even realize that the audio mixing is broken when played docked in 5.1ch.

Anyway for those with vulnerable Nintendo switches, the people that made graphics tweaks for xenoblade chronicles 1 and 2 already got the files for 3. There's also 60fps patch already floating around for emulator use.
 
Looks the temporal aa technique from 2 and 1de is definitely improved with less ghosting. I suppose they might switch to a variance based color clamping method. I don’t think disocclusion test is utilized as I can still see slight ghosting trails.

It also seems to resolve better when still. I’m not sure whether it has upscaling feature or is only antialiasing. Also the improvement might be brought by the reduced sharpening filter.

One thing that’s kinda odd is how the image wobbles during camera movement. I guess this might due to 1. Incorrect reprojection implementation; 2. Float point inaccuracy in large world. This is mostly hidden by the full screen motion blur, which I’m not a fan of. But you can still spot it if moving camera at a low speed.

The visuals are cut to my eyes too. Depth of field is done at most half resolution, and they use simple box filter replace Gaussian filter. But considering the superb bokeh effect, this is probably the tradeoff for performance.

Volumetric cloud in the xb2 is done in quarter horizontal res and half vertical res, and is smoothed out by TAA. In xb3 it seems a lot lower res with what looks like a simple bilinear upscaling. You can also see foreground leaking into the clouds. This might not be the issue of the cloud though. Probably also related to the low res DOF enabled during the gameplay too.

Grass is improved. No more billboards anymore (at least I can’t see).

Character rendering… double blade. Eyes and iris look fantastic, but light leaking is quite obvious around the neck. Xb2 utilized screen space contact shadow to solve this, which doesn’t seem to be consistently present in xb3 cutscenes. Characters also look kinda odd under shadows due to different lighting condition compared to the surroundings. But most of these problems are common for these anime style toon shading, I won’t really blame Monolith too much.

Not regarding graphics, the foot IK looks improved, but still pretty basic, and doesn’t seem to be based on prediction but rather correction on local animation frame. It creates a sticky ground effect when walking slowly. But overall, it’s not an action rpg anyway…
 
I’ll try set up the emulator to capture a frame. Hopefully renderdoc will work fine. (Plus I never play around with a switch emulator before
 
On emulator you need to change the game graphics config to render at higher resolution than on real switch

 
Goddammit monolith, 3 chapters in and xenoblade chronicles 3 already have a bunch of blatant Ludonarrative dissonances.

Vague spoiler :

A colony in hunger. They even say they gonna eat their shoes. But the colony is literally surrounded by a river filled with fishes, an open green land filed with vegetation and monsters.

Stupid side quest. You, together with enemy's army visited an detachment of your army to help them killing monsters. They act as if you were not together with the enemies. Heck they act as if the enemies where not there at all

When the plot says X live, x will live. When the plot says Y die, y will die despite Y were strong enough to operate machinery and blabbering for quite a long time. Heck, before the cutscene where Y died, there were cutscenes showing that HEALING MAGIC WORKS WHILE IN CUTSCENE. healing is not just a gameplay mechanic but it is part of the story.
 
From renderdoc capture of the emulator, the gbuffer is 720p too so I don’t think Digita Foundry’s guess of temporal upscaling is correct. It’s just the classic TAA and a more consistent resolution (when not in battle)

I really hate the full screen motion blur, especially when it’s done at a low quality. I understand switch is quite limited on bandwidth so they have to cut the sample count. But at least give me an option to turn it off. I love the per object ones in xb2.

Transparency seems to render at a much lower res than before and looks really pixelated. This is probably drawn after TAA cuz it is quite obvious even at still.

Also wtf is wrong with the volumetric cloud. It is almost perfect on a low power machine in xb2, but now it has all those ugly upscaling pixelated effects. I don’t understand what’s going on and how they have a large step backwards.

The game plays really fun though. The gigantic map at chapter 3 throws at least 3 OMFG moments at me.
 
From renderdoc capture of the emulator, the gbuffer is 720p too so I don’t think Digita Foundry’s guess of temporal upscaling is correct. It’s just the classic TAA and a more consistent resolution (when not in battle)

I really hate the full screen motion blur, especially when it’s done at a low quality. I understand switch is quite limited on bandwidth so they have to cut the sample count. But at least give me an option to turn it off. I love the per object ones in xb2.

Transparency seems to render at a much lower res than before and looks really pixelated. This is probably drawn after TAA cuz it is quite obvious even at still.

Also wtf is wrong with the volumetric cloud. It is almost perfect on a low power machine in xb2, but now it has all those ugly upscaling pixelated effects. I don’t understand what’s going on and how they have a large step backwards.

The game plays really fun though. The gigantic map at chapter 3 throws at least 3 OMFG moments at me.

It can be disabled. Use the graphic config mod. Look for variabkes with blur2. Then change the values to something very low, like 0.1.

Transparency by default is at half resolution (dunno half of what resolution tho).


Lots of things are configurable.
 
It can be disabled. Use the graphic config mod. Look for variabkes with blur2. Then change the values to something very low, like 0.1.

Transparency by default is at half resolution (dunno half of what resolution tho).


Lots of things are configurable.
Interesting to see about the transparency res. Then it’s probably due to the change in upscaling method. I never saw these blocky artifacts of transparency and volumetric clouds in the previous game even though rendering at the same res.

Unfortunately I don’t play on the emulator, so graphics mod won’t work for me. I’m only using emulator to capture a frame to see what’s going on. From the feature level, I don’t think much is changed though
 
Interesting to see about the transparency res. Then it’s probably due to the change in upscaling method. I never saw these blocky artifacts of transparency and volumetric clouds in the previous game even though rendering at the same res.

Unfortunately I don’t play on the emulator, so graphics mod won’t work for me. I’m only using emulator to capture a frame to see what’s going on. From the feature level, I don’t think much is changed though
You can use modded graphic settings with real hardware. That's what I did, I locked the vertical resolution and only let the horizontal resolution to scales down.

It looks way better to my eyes than default option of running low resolution for both x and y. The blur also can be disabled
 
You can use modded graphic settings with real hardware. That's what I did, I locked the vertical resolution and only let the horizontal resolution to scales down.

It looks way better to my eyes than default option of running low resolution for both x and y. The blur also can be disabled
Thanks for pointing that out. Sadly I don’t want to hack my switch. ^^
 
Monolith has given a tech talk on CEDEC this year, focusing on their NPR techniques and temporal upscaling method.

Btw, after a few more captures, I was wrong about the game did not use taau. Apparently, they don't enable taau during cutscenes but gameplays. For cutscenes, I guess since the camera is fixed, they can better optimize for each shot, therefore it's a straight 720p image with taa only. As for normal gameplay, the typical internal rendering resolution is 544p and taau to 1080p when docked. The internal resolution is not reduced as much when in handheld, so after taau this sometimes actually introduces super sampling (the output tops out at around 880p).

The temporal upscaling method they use is basically the solution described in Activision's 2017 talk about Call of Duty's dynamic checkerboard rendering. The major difference is that instead of applying SMAA as a pre-cleanup pass, they apply fxaa as a post pass due to the low computation power of switch (although still at internal resolution, or only affecting native pixels).

I don't think there's much to talk about. Nothing really innovative for the taau part, and I also think the reprojection has flaws as you can clearly see the image gets distorted when moving (definitely not motion blur).

I also wonder whether the cost actually worths it. At docked, the TAAU + fxaa passes take around 8ms, which is almost 1/3 of a 30fps frame. Not sure if this is the best way to utilize the gpu. Bandwidth seems to be the major limitation to me. It's a mobile SoC anyway, so I guess shouldn't expect too much.
 
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