Games Analysis |OT| Time To Argue About Pixels And Frames!

[LucasTaves]

@TavishHill

… Wrt VRS, the image isn’t showing what you think it is. It is showing tiles of some size (unrelated to VRS granularity) where the resolution in that tile is compared between the consoles. Green tiles show areas where XSX has higher res in that region and blue for PS5. The blue tiles have VRS somewhere within them, at least enough to shift the average resolution in that tile towards the blue result. What is great about that image is it is a nice, clear cut an objective way to measure resolution as a coarse grained mapping of pixel density instead of just a single number that fluctuates both in time (DRS) an in screen space when VRS is used. FAR more informative to folks wanting to see how pixel density stacks up than just simple overall metrics.

Ah that’s pretty interesting then.

If that’s the case, I assume in scenarios where SX holds an resolution advantage the VRS loss would be mitigated, but in scenarios where both are hitting the same resolution then Ps5 has an edge?

Would like to see this analysis with smaller clusters too, I assume it would skew the results even more to SX

@nrXic

We were all floored by a 1440p TSAA upscaled to 4K 30 fps UE5 demo on the PS5. People are happy with a 1080p up-rezed to 1440p and then CBRed to 4K with Returnal.

A native 4K Halo Infinite was panned because the fidelity wasn’t there.

While I agree that resolution isn’t the only metric that matters, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to use UE5 demo, because they do some tricks with nanite geometry in the reconstruction (basically they use information from the edges as if the geometry was to fill a 4k screen, so nanite geometry get’s upscaled almost flawlessly to 4k, even when the internal resolution is 1080p).

Other games may not necessarily have results that good, Returnal for example saw some mixed opinions.

[TavishHill]

@nrXic

People are happy with a 1080p up-rezed to 1440p and then CBRed to 4K with Returnal.

lol wut? Returnal’s IQ is trash. Easily the worst of any next gen-only title. It looks straight 1080p for large portions of the screen.

[nrXic]

@TavishHill

lol wut? Returnal’s IQ is trash. Easily the worst of any next gen-only title. It looks straight 1080p for large portions of the screen.

Keep in mind that I never said it was good or bad, and I worded it carefully to demonstrate how the resulting image came from an internal rendering resolution of 1080p. I was speaking to how people received it.

I’m pointing to the contrast between perception and reality.

What people valued in that game was framerate and fidelity.

When it comes to real-time rendering think of graphics as a balance between:

1. Fidelity: the amount of geometric detail and tessellation, texture detail, particles, material shader implementations, draw distance, lighting implementation and shadow detail, post-processing effects, etc.

2. Resolution: self-explanatory but I’d like to include image-quality aspects in this like texture-filtering, anti-aliasing, and up-scaling.

3. Framerate: again, self-explanatory but I do want to mention that target framerates that are locked with resolution-scaling to help maintain it has been common practice in the last gen and may not be so in high-framerate next-generation titles where VRR affords variable framerates over 90 FPS without looking too bad and without screen-tearing.

Much like the software adage where you are balancing between cost, quality, and time (shorter time the better) where you can have any two but not all three… I’d apply the same to the three above aspects of visuals.

So my point is that resolution/image-quality seems to be taking a backseat early on in this generation when it comes to impressing players.

Contrast that to feet early footage of Halo Infinite that ran at a native 4K resolution at 60 frames per second, they had to sacrifice fidelity for it. I wasn’t fan of some of the artistic decisions but some of them were technical decisions and technical sacrifices.

This is why I think targeting a native 4K resolution may not be the best choice for developers. A sub-4K res target with as much fidelity as possible, including the implementation of raytracing, and using whatever tools possible to upscale to 4K, is the best course of action If you’re looking to impress most gamers.

I personally would like to target 6K AND 120fps, but that’s just me. I have no problems sacrificing graphical fidelity. I’m not targeting the mass market, I’m more interested in making something unique. But for some projects you are aiming it towards the mass market and I personally think that native resolution is what you’re going to have to sacrifice.

By the way all of this is my opinion and I do need more data to back up the idea that gamers prefer fidelity over everything else as all of my data is purely anecdotal from online reactions and the reactions from my friends. That’s why I stated in the previous tweet that it would be nice to have some polling data on gamer perspectives. Also I’m operating on 8 hours of sleep in the last 48 hours, heh. If I sleep now I’m going to screw up my sleep schedule so I’m going to try to stay up for a few hours, here.

[No-1HoloLens-Fan]

For me the equation is

Frame Rate > Fidelity > Resolution

A week ago I was playing FH4 at 720p on my work monitor. Due to being 720p I was able to turn every settings to ultra and I loved playing that way.

It’s all about distance from your screen and MSAA took care of the jagged edges easily for me.

Tried the same thing with GTA V and results where same. These techniques of upscaling in a way or the other really helps.

[TavishHill]

@nrXic

I’m pointing to the contrast between perception and reality.

Sure, but it was perceptibly obvious that the game ha horrid IQ. Your other examples were good and serve the point ya were making though.

[nrXic]

@TavishHill

Sure, but it was perceptibly obvious that the game ha horrid IQ.

Definitely, and my question is, why were people still happy with the visuals?

From my perspective, Reternal reminded me of the early Xbox One games that ran at 720p or 900p for a console generation that should be comfortably hitting 1080p. Something worth criticizing with a PS5 game.

A lot of people rightfully pointed out that AMD’s Fidelity FX upscaling didn’t actually look impressive when compared to DLSS… A part of me wonders if the general gaming audience and game reviewers would actually care about the blurry image that much as long as it has a ton of detail, raytracing, and runs at 60fps.

[TavishHill]

@nrXic

Definitely, and my question is, why were people still happy with the visuals?

I dunno that ppl were happy with the visuals. I know ppl liked the particle fx. Seemed to me more like ppl were ok with the visuals because of the type of game it is.

I get what you are saying, but I think your point is misplaced in the comparison you are making there b/t FSR/DLSS. Those technologies are meant to allow low res rasterization with RT and then boost the image to ‘4k’ so you can get decent fps. The goal isn’t IQ per se. Yes, ppl will LOVE photorealism with clean IQ even if blurry, but we are looking at a two-fol distinction b/t DLSS perf and FSR most likely. Ppl would absolutely notice that. Even if you capped fps at 60, you’d get way more asset fidelity and expanded RT with the DLSS option and folks would see that easily imho.

@BRiT

And also the platform exclusivity.

Yeah. An the fact it was among the first next gen-only games (despite it easily being doable design-wise on PS4). Ppl are thirsty for those experiences.

[BRiT]

@TavishHill

I dunno that ppl were happy with the visuals. I know ppl liked the particle fx. Seemed to me more like ppl were ok with the visuals because of the type of game it is.

And also the platform exclusivity.

[nrXic]

Well the goal is to upscale to an acceptable resolution. 1080p would not be acceptable with these consoles. So I figure many developers will focus on fidelity, a target frame rate, internally render at a resolution where those two are possible and then apply whatever tech to upscale.

[KageMaru]

@TavishHill

…the res you’d need is lower than you assume it’d be. Let’s say a game on XSX renders internally at 1080p, then uses ML to hit 4k at 60fps. The same game on PS5 would presumably need to have an internal res of 720p or so, then try CBR to get to 4k at 60fps. That would not look very good on screen. Could they turn other stuff way down to help instead of destroying IQ that badly? Maybe, sure. It probably depends on the type of game it is whether they go with fps at the expense of IQ or vice versa. I am expecting there to just be different display modes on XSX tho. For instance, say a game on PS5 has a RT fidelity mode and a 60fps perf mode sans RT. On XSX it might just have a single RT perf mode that is best of both worlds and so you’d have the 60/30 fps gap there in a like for like comparison.

@LucasTaves

Because a low enough resolution can look like a jagged/blurry mess depending on the reconstruction tech and the art style of the game.

We have some games like Avengers where despite the higher resolution, SX performs better than Ps5. Imagine if SX was able to render 4 times less pixels with no noticeable drop in image quality due ML upscaling. And that’s a game that already have a messy IQ on Ps5.

With such a lower baseline resolution devs would be able to push SX visuals way further…

I think that would put developers at a very tough spot, because since Ps5 IQ is already bad, lowering it even more will make it only worse, and on the other hand, if they don’t there’s no way they will be able to match SX visuals.

But I’m not sure that’s a feasible scenario, because they likely opted for CB because it was already implemented on Pro. For a new game they would most likely use a far better reconstruction tech that would allow them to drop the resolution perhaps with even better IQ than what they got from CB.

I think we should wait to see how well MS ML reconstruction technique turns out before jumping to these conclusions. It’s highly doubtful it’ll reach DLSS quality, so I’m more cautious on assuming we’re going to see leaps of this kind.

Even in this scenario though, the developer wouldn’t reconstruct a 720p image to 4K on the PS5. We’ve already seen plenty of sub-4K games on both high end consoles, so aiming for a sub-4K reconstructed image is more likely. Also while CBR has been a focus on the PS5 side in this conversation, I see most of the industry moving to a temporal reconstruction solution and largely leaving CBR behind. Add on the option to use lower resolution buffers and effects and I would still be highly surprised to see a game run twice as fast on the Series X. The more likely scenario is the games just look better on the Series X, possibly with more stable performance, instead of running twice as fast.

@nrXic

This last point is why I’m taking a vested interest in The Coalition’s presentation. If they have found some DX12U optimizations in the little time that they’ve spent with UE5 (which I’m guessing is a year or so at this point), it bodes well for these exclusive hardware features.

The Coalition did optimize their own fork of UE4 for the Xbox One, even adding features like geo-caching before it was officially added to the engine. Wouldn’t surprise me if they did the same for UE5 so that tech can be shared within XGS.

I do recall features like lumen being described as an alternative solution to RT, so I see what you mean with Epic focusing on software solutions. I would hope that aspects of UE5 can be optimized to take advantage of the hardware features in these consoles though.

[TavishHill]

@KageMaru

Even in this scenario though, the developer wouldn’t reconstruct a 720p image to 4K on the PS5. We’ve already seen plenty of sub-4K games on both high end consoles, so aiming for a sub-4K reconstructed image is more likely. Also while CBR has been a focus on the PS5 side in this conversation, I see most of the industry moving to a temporal reconstruction solution and largely leaving CBR behind. Add on the option to use lower resolution buffers and effects and I would still be highly surprised to see a game run twice as fast on the Series X. The more likely scenario is the games just look better on the Series X, possibly with more stable performance, instead of running twice as fast.

Are you saying they’d just use CBR to scale a 720p internal render up to 1080p and then use a bilinear upscale to 4k display? That would look terrible IQ-wise. Why would any dev do that when they can just reduce graphics settings and axe RT in a separate ‘performance mode’?

[KageMaru]

@TavishHill

Are you saying they’d just use CBR to scale a 720p internal render up to 1080p and then use a bilinear upscale to 4k display? That would look terrible IQ-wise. Why would any dev do that when they can just reduce graphics settings and axe RT in a separate ‘performance mode’?

I think my scenario is more realistic than reconstructing from 720p to 4K. Also as I said before, I don’t think CBR will play a major part this gen.

At the end of the day, I think some are overestimating what the gap will end up being if you think we’ll see games running twice as fast on the Series X. It’s going to widen, and I think it’ll be noticeable, but not to the degree of seeing 2x performance.

[TavishHill]

@KageMaru

I think my scenario is more realistic than reconstructing from 720p to 4K.

At the end of the day, I think some are overestimating what the gap will end up being if you think we’ll see games running twice as fast on the Series X. It’s going to widen, and I think it’ll be noticeable, but not to the degree of seeing 2x performance.

You aren’t specifying what your scenario even is tho…

[KageMaru]

@TavishHill

You aren’t specifying what your scenario even is tho…

Not sure what you mean. You mention a scenario of rendering natively at 720p and using CBR up to 4K. I say that’s highly unlikely and if this highly unlikely scenario plays out, they’d likely reconstruct to a lower resolution.

The whole idea of games rendering at 720p isn’t going to happen anyway, so I’m not sure why that’s even the focus.

[TavishHill]

@KageMaru

Not sure what you mean. You mention a scenario of rendering natively at 720p and using CBR up to 4K. I say that’s highly unlikely and if this highly unlikely scenario plays out, they’d like reconstruct to a lower resolution.

The whole idea of games rendering at 720p isn’t going to happen anyway, so I’m not sure why that’s even the focus.

Games will absolutely be rendered internally at 1080p on XSX this gen. That is the whole point of having ML SR. Such a game would need to be below that for PS5 OR there would be a big drop off in settings somewhere (like RT being axed).

I am saying to imagine a game using RT at 60fps that runs at an internal res of 1080p on XSX (since devs intend to use ML SR). It would necessarily be sub-1080p on PS5 as is, and you are saying they CBR that to some intermediate res target. But CBR only doubles the pixels shaded, so what res are you thinking CBR brings the resultant image up to here? ~1440p? Using CBR at lower resolutions doesn’t work real well wrt artifacting, so using bilinear upscale after a CBR step would make those artifacts really noticeable.

[CallMeCraig]

Some of you are way too bullish about a technology we have seen absolute zero yet on Xbox.

[KageMaru]

@TavishHill

… Games will absolutely be rendered internally at 1080p on XSX this gen. That is the whole point of having ML SR. Such a game would need to be below that for PS5 OR there would be a big drop off in settings somewhere (like RT being axed). I am saying to imagine a game using RT at 60fps that runs at an internal res of 1080p on XSX (since devs intend to use ML SR). It would necessarily be sub-1080p on PS5 as is, and you are saying they CBR that to some intermediate res target. But CBR only doubles the pixels shaded, so what res are you thinking CBR brings the resultant image up to here? ~1440p? Using CBR at lower resolutions doesn’t work real well wrt artifacting, so using bilinear upscale after a CBR step would make those artifacts really noticeable.

Not sure why you’re ignoring my point of CBR becoming less and less relevant.

Also I agree and can see games rendering internally at 1080p, especially since that’s the rendering target of both the XSX and PS5 with UE5. I just don’t see your scenario of a game rendering at 720p on either console ever happening.

I’m also skeptical on how widely adopted ML SR will be on multiplatform titles when it can’t be supported on all platforms. If I’m a 3rd party developer that already has a competent temporal reconstruction solution, like we see with a number of engines already, I’m not sure it makes sense to spend precious time investing in technology that half of my target audience can’t enjoy. Am I saying it’ll never happen? Not at all, but if it does, there’s no guarantee the technology will be good enough to offer this theoretical 2x performance you assume will happen.

All I’m saying is we probably should wait and see before making bold predictions that we’ll see a 2x performance delta. Obviously the 1st party titles is where we’ll see the technology pushed the most. 3rd party studios will have less freedom here since their resources will be spread across more platforms.

[TavishHill]

@KageMaru

Not sure why you’re ignoring my point of CBR becoming less and less relevant.

Also I agree and can see games rendering internally at 1080p, especially since that’s the rendering target of both the XSX and PS5 with UE5. I just don’t see your scenario of a game rendering at 720p on either console ever happening.

If ML SR on XSX takes ~5ms, what can PS5 do in a similar time budget using CBR or alternatives to end up on screen near 4k? Sure, devs can reduce settings to buy more time for that upscaling budget, but it seems to me they would need a lot of reductions to hit the same target fps and comparable IQ.

And devs have spent time making RT work as exclusive to Nvidia GPU’s plenty in recent yrs. They also do so with DLSS. Plus, it isn’t as if DirectML only works on Xbox consoles. I don’t think it will be as rare as you do. Btw, I didn’t ignore your comment about CBR being used less. It just isn’t relevant since alternatives are also limited to 2x pixel counts w/o ML, be it via rendering every other frame with temp injection or drawing half the pixels with CBR. The same argument applies to the alternatives.

[No-1HoloLens-Fan]

@nrXic

Definitely, and my question is, why were people still happy with the visuals?

From my perspective, Reternal reminded me of the early Xbox One games that ran at 720p or 900p for a console generation that should be comfortably hitting 1080p. Something worth criticizing with a PS5 game.

A lot of people rightfully pointed out that AMD’s Fidelity FX upscaling didn’t actually look impressive when compared to DLSS… A part of me wonders if the general gaming audience and game reviewers would actually care about the blurry image that much as long as it has a ton of detail, raytracing, and runs at 60fps.

Does question on Returnal IQ even matter? I say this because there is no native output to compare it with anyways

In FSR case… It can be compared easily to other and native output

IQ quality on PS only games will hardly be talked about because there is no native version to compare with

In theory, games can upscale to 4k from 720p internal and still be called 4k easily

[Kals_Els]

@No-1HoloLens-Fan

Does question on Returnal IQ even matter? I say this because there is no native output to compare it with anyways

In FSR case… It can be compared easily to other and native output

IQ quality on PS only games will hardly be talked about because there is no native version to compare with

In theory, games can upscale to 4k from 720p internal and still be called 4k easily

That should be changing with this gen as Sony moves to get their games in PC shouldn’t it? Or will they not offer native versions and have them all run like they do on Playstation?