Digital Foundry Tech Analysis: Destiny alpha on PS4

Not impressed by the graphics at all.

While not initially amazing, the ToD effects and lighting come together to make it look pretty awesome.




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If they still are planning on adding OBMB, that will go a long way as well. (I think it was on in some of the screens, could be like the Reach beta where it was deactivated)


Pretty impressive for a cross gen game.


Destiny 2 on current gen only should be an absolute stunner.
 
While some complaints over their games last gen were warranted, I always thought they always excelled on a technical level, they just had different priorities. Not saying their decisions were always the best, while impressive, the HDR implementation used in Halo 3 was overkill IMO.

That said, I've been impressed with the alpha. The lack of object based motion blur and the juddery frames issue are really the only major graphical shortcomings of this game IMO. Considering the scope, and how it's on 4 platforms, I'm happy with the results so far.
 
While not initially amazing, the ToD effects and lighting come together to make it look pretty awesome.






If they still are planning on adding OBMB, that will go a long way as well. (I think it was on in some of the screens, could be like the Reach beta where it was deactivated)


Pretty impressive for a cross gen game.


Destiny 2 on current gen only should be an absolute stunner.
Mentioned this before, but Reach never had obmb at all.

Digitfal Foundry consistently, I mean consistently, confuses full screen motion blur with obmb. They do this because the edge of the screen blurs in a way that makks it "look like" obmb at the screen edge.

They make this mis-identification in their halo reach analysis as well as in their doom 3 BFG analysis.
 
Meh, I still think Destiny is beautiful-looking game. It's no next-gen like Killzone or whatever, but it has that Bungie's touch that I like.
 
Mentioned this before, but Reach never had obmb at all.

Digitfal Foundry consistently, I mean consistently, confuses full screen motion blur with obmb. They do this because the edge of the screen blurs in a way that makks it "look like" obmb at the screen edge.

They make this mis-identification in their halo reach analysis as well as in their doom 3 BFG analysis.


Odd they would make that mistake. I remember it not being the best blur, but improved over the beta. Not that I don't believe you but I thought I remember when falcons were flying next to you that they were blurred while the rest of the screen was not? I could certainly be mistaken though.



At any rate, true OBMB in Destiny would be a very welcome addition. One of the more impritant effects in current gen games IMO. One of the reasons Crysis looks so great.
 
Wow looking at the DF footage I didn't expect this game to look so much like Halo.

I need something to sell me on this game, because I am not seeing anything at the moment.
 
Odd they would make that mistake. I remember it not being the best blur, but improved over the beta. Not that I don't believe you but I thought I remember when falcons were flying next to you that they were blurred while the rest of the screen was not? I could certainly be mistaken though.
That's exactly why Dictator93 is claiming that there's no OBMB. If you're holding your camera orientation steady while looking at an object that has the same motion vector as yourself, you shouldn't see any motion blur. The other falcon being blurred when it shouldn't be, suggests that maybe the game is treating it like a static object that the camera is moving relative to; it's not taking the object's velocity into account, hence "no OBMB."
It's expected that the background wouldn't blur much, it's farther away and thus moving slowly in screen-space.

It's a little bit weird to me that Reach wouldn't be accounting for object velocity in its motion buffer, considering Bungie made a big deal of how they're using it for both motion blur and TAA masking. It's obvious that the motion tracking isn't perfect (at the absolute least, the game's occasional ghosting reveals that it doesn't take movement caused by skeletal animation into account), but you'd think they would take overall object velocity into account. If they are, it certainly breaks in some circumstances.

Might be interesting to give a few things in a few circumstances a test.
 
Wow looking at the DF footage I didn't expect this game to look so much like Halo.

I need something to sell me on this game, because I am not seeing anything at the moment.

Make sure you get in on the beta. Playing it is a lot better than seeing videos.
 
Wow looking at the DF footage I didn't expect this game to look so much like Halo.

I need something to sell me on this game, because I am not seeing anything at the moment.

Pre-order it, get a beta invitation code, apply it to your Bungie.net account, then when beta releases on 17th July, play it to see if it interests you or not.

I played the Alpha, and I'd say playing it is more better than seeing videos of it.
 
They definitely still have Parallax Occlusion Maps on the PVP level but the wall textures on the brick walls are so low resolution it ruins the effect.

Cross gen is rearing its ugly head with the overall asset quality being a bit meh but I think the lighting and solid performance make up for some of the short comings.
 
Been loving the game more now than before. But visually, while not in motion it looks nice, but once you move the IQ drops pretty bad. I mean it is not a horrid mess, but almost every other shooter on the PS4 looks a lot better then this (image quality wise).
 
I thought it was weird that there would be judder just roaming the map but no frame drops during intensive fighting with two other players. Hopefully they sort out that issue by launch.
 
Playing Destiny and messing around in The Tower with friends and random people have hyped even more for the next Mass Effect game :(
 
Games fun as hell but to me it's the worst looking next gen Aaa game so far. I'll blame that on cross gen. Hopefully thing improve out of Alpha.

I was more visually impressed by the Destiny Alpha than Watch_Dogs. Then you have stuff like Titanfall, Wolfenstein, Thief, Dead Rising 3, CoD: Ghosts... etc.

There are plenty of AAA next-gen games that look worse than Destiny.
 
Game straight-up looks like something that should be able to run at 60 fps or at least a good unlocked frame rate.

It's the wildest thing to me when people look at current console games and say they just have some magical feeling that it should be hitting 60fps like the studio doesn't know any better about what's really happening under the hood.

The alpha is pretty, beta should be almost the same thing, and Destiny Part II without cross gen will be gorgeous.
 
I'd say the biggest things that need to be addressed are the weird frame issue, the lack of object based motion blur (this is a big one for me), and lack of AF. You can really notice these three things. The game has some great lighting, some fantastic textures sometimes, nice water, and really good ToD changes.
 
That's exactly why Dictator93 is claiming that there's no OBMB. If you're holding your camera orientation steady while looking at an object that has the same motion vector as yourself, you shouldn't see any motion blur. The other falcon being blurred when it shouldn't be, suggests that maybe the game is treating it like a static object that the camera is moving relative to; it's not taking the object's velocity into account, hence "no OBMB."
It's expected that the background wouldn't blur much, it's farther away and thus moving slowly in screen-space.

It's a little bit weird to me that Reach wouldn't be accounting for object velocity in its motion buffer, considering Bungie made a big deal of how they're using it for both motion blur and TAA masking. It's obvious that the motion tracking isn't perfect (at the absolute least, the game's occasional ghosting reveals that it doesn't take movement caused by skeletal animation into account), but you'd think they would take overall object velocity into account. If they are, it certainly breaks in some circumstances.

Might be interesting to give a few things in a few circumstances a test.

Yeah, early articles were based on some oddities that were probably just "bug" due to inherent camera-space assumptions.

Chris Tchou basically outlined what they were doing in both H3 and Reach in a later interview though, so I'd disregard the early article mentions tbh.

Digital Foundry: Motion blur adds to the fluidity of the game significantly. It was there in Halo 3, but it looks like you've upgraded the system significantly. What were your aims here and what were the key achievements in the final shipping solution?

Chris Tchou: It's actually almost exactly the same algorithm as Halo 3, but the appearance was improved by several changes. When we calculate the pixel motion/blur direction, we were clamping it to a square in Halo 3, and now we clamp to a circle. Clamping to a square has the problem that fast motions always end up in the corners of the square, resulting in diagonal blurs that don't follow the actual direction of the motion. On top of that the improved per-pixel motion estimation for the temporal anti-aliasing helped give better results for the motion blur as well. Oh and the motion blur is no longer gamma-correct, which makes it less physically accurate, but also faster and more noticeable.
 
Yeah, early articles were based on some oddities that were probably just "bug" due to inherent camera-space assumptions.

Chris Tchou basically outlined what they were doing in both H3 and Reach in a later interview though, so I'd disregard the early article mentions tbh.
That interview never goes into what exactly is being tracked and what isn't, though. He basically just says that compared with Halo 3, the clamping process no longer causes direction errors, and Reach's blending sucks.

I've just messed around a bit in Reach's Forge, and I must say I'm a bit perplexed. I'm not sure if I'm looking at camera-based blur which is masked off for some objects under some circumstances, or object-based blur which doesn't account for camera motion on some parts of some objects, or some other such ad-hoc different-by-surface weirdness. Whatever it is, the game does appear at a glance to (at least sometimes) account for object velocity when calculating motion blur; I wish I had a good capture card* so that I could distinguish the motion blur samples more clearly, and also figure out the exact circumstances where the TAA masking breaks. It would say a lot about what's actually happening under the hood.

*A better TV would also help, LCDs are a terrible hindrance toward figuring out what the hell you're looking at, and the only CRTs I have are SD and interlaced and would make things even more problematic. I need a plasma or something. :/
 
Whoa, I thought Destiny was 60fps for some reason. All interest is gone now. Console FPS with a gamepad AND 30fps. Can't do it. Won't do it.
Well look; its melancholy and his infinite sadness. You sound like you were forced back from the future. Forgive us lowly gamers for not accepting such strong hyperbole.
 
That's exactly why Dictator93 is claiming that there's no OBMB. If you're holding your camera orientation steady while looking at an object that has the same motion vector as yourself, you shouldn't see any motion blur. The other falcon being blurred when it shouldn't be, suggests that maybe the game is treating it like a static object that the camera is moving relative to; it's not taking the object's velocity into account, hence "no OBMB."
It's expected that the background wouldn't blur much, it's farther away and thus moving slowly in screen-space.

It's a little bit weird to me that Reach wouldn't be accounting for object velocity in its motion buffer, considering Bungie made a big deal of how they're using it for both motion blur and TAA masking. It's obvious that the motion tracking isn't perfect (at the absolute least, the game's occasional ghosting reveals that it doesn't take movement caused by skeletal animation into account), but you'd think they would take overall object velocity into account. If they are, it certainly breaks in some circumstances.

Might be interesting to give a few things in a few circumstances a test.


Ah, I see. I am tracking now. Been a long while since I had played Reach.

After rewatching my old video of it, appears I was mistaken.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no-FgyE4HM8

Hopefully they will add it into Destiny. Could go a long way towards closing the cross gen gap.
 
Wow looking at the DF footage I didn't expect this game to look so much like Halo.

I need something to sell me on this game, because I am not seeing anything at the moment.

Go read the alpha thread, game was awesome and was a lot more fun than I was expecting as someone pretty lukewarm on Halo.
 
The game has great art direction, but the engine certainly looks dated overall.

My biggest complaint is that the image quality is poor due to FXAA. I'm hoping that with the Beta and final release they will further optimize the game on PS4 and use a better AA solution...as I don't see why there's any reason it should look as grainy, pixelated, and fuzzy as it currently does. InFamous is a huge open world and has much better IQ and graphics in general.

Especially now that the Xbox One version is running at 1080p, there's no reason why the PS4 version should be held back by lackluster image quality.
 
I will never understand why these DF articles don't take the funs per second into account.

I did notice a bit with the framerate but it did not take away from the experience enough for me to get my panties in a bunch about it, would be nice if they could flesh it out by release and give a solid 30 fps throughout. I was never expecting 60 fps with this game.
 
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