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[Porticus]

• GPU decompression can only use GDeflate as a decompression format and it's very CPU-unfriendly

Is one of the more confusing sentences I've read in a while. Like how the fuck does GPU decompression manage to be more CPU unfriendly than CPU only decompression by itself???????? Who designs this shit?

Microsoft

 

[Bernoulli]

So PS5 PRO will have the highest PC settings?

 

[OverHeat]

So PS5 PRO will have the highest PC settings?

At what framerate?

 

[ChiefDada]

The real interesting test will be Spider-Man 2. If it pushes 800MB/s or 1GB/s, which isn't impossible, then that could seriously cripple the CPU and DirectStorage's GPU decompression will need to work one way or another. Aside from monstrous CPUs clocked to the moon, no CPU will be able to push out that much data efficiently without seriously impacting the performance

Hoddi provided us with very good insight on NVME data reads from Ratchet and Clank on PS5. Hopefully he or someone else can do the same with SM2? I am very curious to see data on this considering the more dense open world and faster traversal capability.

 

[mansoor1980]

• They want to convince Microsoft to allow other formats for GPU decompression

 

[ChorizoPicozo]

I dont care for the excuse that RT would be too much work. Virtually every fucking studio from AAA ones to C tier ones and even indies have been able to add RT to their games. If RT shadows are too much work then add RTGI. If they are too much work add RT reflections. You are charging $60 for this game, its not a budget release.

At one point alex asked them the biggest addition they made to the PC port, and they literally answered with 16xAF. What a joke. Literal joke. The game on consoles has fog everywhere. Clean up the fog. A fucking modder did it with HZD and was charging $15 for it. Game looked marvelous with incredible draw distance. This one would look even better without the fog.

Nixxes is taking on too many projects at once. They worked on Ratchet, HFW and Ghost during the same time frame so no, i dont want to hear too much work. You gave yourselves too much work by taking on three projects at once. Take your time like you did with Shadow of the Tomb Raider and added RT shadows when it was literally in beta. 6 years later, you cant ship a game with RT shadows on GPUs virtually 4x more powerful?

There is zero reason for me to double dip aside from DLSS quality at 4k. I remember they had some amazing physics and destruction (intel sponsored but available on all GPUs) in Avengers. They used to go above and beyond. now they have turned into a competent but basic porting studio.

yeah, the entitlement is so annoying

 

[Bernoulli]

At what framerate?

60

 

[Zathalus]

Odd seeing complaints about GDeflate when it is being used by RTX IO and Vulkan as well considering it is an open standard.

 

[MisterXDTV]

yeah, the entitlement is so annoying

Remember, here we are talking about the greatest engineer, marketing man and developer in the world....

 

[CamHostage]

I dont care for the excuse that RT would be too much work. Virtually every fucking studio from AAA ones to C tier ones and even indies have been able to add RT to their games. If RT shadows are too much work then add RTGI. If they are too much work add RT reflections. You are charging $60 for this game, its not a budget release.

...Sure, why spend just one year porting a title when you can spend two?

DF talks with Guerrilla/Nixxes a bit in the interview about considering and then rejecting ray tracing features for the PC port. (Nixxes also mentions that it had done RT retrofitting for previous projects, like the third Tomb Raider, and the scope of that type of work on a game like that.) They basically concluded that it would be not only an extensively long, but also possibly counter-productive since H:FW already has specific directorial choices in its lighting and carefully rigged systems to get the most out of its capabilities. Regarding the technical challenge: "Don't forget a lot of the content is alpha-tested trees. I mean, a lot. Of course we have settlements and some hard surfaces, but most of it is really hard to ray trace against, even for shadows. There's a lot of content, maybe 100 square kilometres of content or more, and we'd need to go through the whole game... it's just mind-boggling."

The bit to look forward to is that it's obviously on the Decima radar; Krebbers of Guerrilla hints, "We really like the tech of course. Watch this space."

(Analysis of the Death Stranding 2 trailer has already seen hints of RTGI in the engine's future, though they're focusing on that instead of or in addition to other RT effects; shadows and reflections show signs of previous approaches still in play.)

 

[Killjoy-NL]

Ray tracing too time consuming fuck you guys!!!

He's basically saying the PC-port isn't worth the trouble.

 

[Kenpachii]

RT to much effort.

Every game under the sun on PC has RT.

Paying 60 bucks was also to much effort for most gamers it seems like on PC.

 

[ArtHands]

Jeroen Krebbers - Guerrilla: Don't forget a lot of the content is alpha-tested trees. I mean, a lot. Of course we have settlements and some hard surfaces, but most of it is really hard to ray trace against, even for shadows. There's a lot of content, maybe 100 square kilometres of content or more, and we'd need to go through the whole game... it's just mind-boggling... obviously having the scalability between PS4 and PS5 meant that we wanted to focus on stuff that would work on both PS4 and PS5, that sadly excluded RT. And it's not an easy addition to the PC version. We really like the tech of course. Watch this space.

 

[Gen.Grievous]

RT to much effort.

Every game under the sun on PC has RT.

Paying 60 bucks was also to much effort for most gamers it seems like on PC.

And they all look worse than this game lol.

 

[Mr.Phoenix]

It's not, but thankfully for PC gamers, the data streaming hasn't gotten that intensive yet. It comes nowhere near to stressing the bandwidth limits of the PS5's I/O' subsystem and honestly probably never will. I think Spider-Man was something like 200MB/s and Rift Apart was around 350? Can't remember the numbers for the latter. Decent CPUs and SSDs have no problem reaching those throughputs.

The real interesting test will be Spider-Man 2. If it pushes 800MB/s or 1GB/s, which isn't impossible, then that could seriously cripple the CPU and DirectStorage's GPU decompression will need to work one way or another. Aside from monstrous CPUs clocked to the moon, no CPU will be able to push out that much data efficiently without seriously impacting the performance.

As for RT with the Pro, maaaybe? Not sure. They don't have 1st-party titles for the Pro, so why not let the rookies add RT shadows or even some of their main guys do it to get some practice? No game on Decima has RT yet. Death Stranding 2 will likely be the first. Still, not holding my breath even for RT on the Pro.

I dont care for the excuse that RT would be too much work. Virtually every fucking studio from AAA ones to C tier ones and even indies have been able to add RT to their games. If RT shadows are too much work then add RTGI. If they are too much work add RT reflections. You are charging $60 for this game, its not a budget release.

I don't get the RT thing either. An RT pipeline has to be added to Decima at some point. Such a port and subsequently an update to the PS5 version would have been the perfect test bed for something like that. And testing it out on the PC build first would have meant they didn't even have to be perfect with their implementation right off the bat, and improve RT performance over time. Seems like a missed opportunity if you ask me.

At one point alex asked them the biggest addition they made to the PC port, and they literally answered with 16xAF. What a joke. Literal joke. The game on consoles has fog everywhere. Clean up the fog. A fucking modder did it with HZD and was charging $15 for it. Game looked marvelous with incredible draw distance. This one would look even better without the fog.

Nixxes is taking on too many projects at once. They worked on Ratchet, HFW and Ghost during the same time frame so no, i dont want to hear too much work. You gave yourselves too much work by taking on three projects at once. Take your time like you did with Shadow of the Tomb Raider and added RT shadows when it was literally in beta. 6 years later, you cant ship a game with RT shadows on GPUs virtually 4x more powerful?

There is zero reason for me to double dip aside from DLSS quality at 4k. I remember they had some amazing physics and destruction (intel sponsored but available on all GPUs) in Avengers. They used to go above and beyond. now they have turned into a competent but basic porting studio.

Saying it gives me Starfield vibes, but I think the fog is/was an artistic choice.

 

[CamHostage]

RT to much effort.

Every game under the sun on PC has RT.

1. RT isn't just a thing on its own that games do or do not "have". Each problem a developer is trying to solve for (generally we're reflections, shadows, global illumination, and ambient occlusion, though the concepts has applications in audio as well and elsewhere) is its own thing. If you see that a game "has RT" and you think that means it has good graphics because RT is the newest type of stuff, check again what it's actually doing with RT.

2. Lots of PC games add RT, true. Some, because they can, because they're simple and linear and don't have a day/night cycle or other dynamic lighting approach to the design. Some, because development outlined from the beginning the choices of RT integration and it was worked into the design choices from the beginning. A few, because they did the work in a post-launch retrofit to add in the best-fitting features. And some, because RT is a selling point and so they stuck some passes in as an option even though it's not really tested or polished. (And sometimes the "fuck it, just throw something in there" solution works well enough; it's not like games these days are bug-free and perfected out of the box anyway. But it can cause problems with areas being too dark due to no "fake" light motivation, intentional glare/reflection tricks disappearing because they're no longer true to the scene, and other issues where a designer would have adjusted/corrected/"faked" the lighting if they had known it would have not worked properly via RT.)

Stray is an example of a relatively simple game (it's all the same ToD, the areas are small and the scenes are static, the camera is kind of on a rail) that the developer experimented with RT features for an ultimately abandoned-as-of-yet RTX option set in the PC version. You can kind of see some reasons maybe why in video testing it out.



The number of PC games that have ray tracing in the feature set is a lot.
The number of PC games where gamers are delighted that the RT features make the game look as good as they imagined it could be, that's a much lower number.

 

[CamHostage]

I don't get the RT thing either. An RT pipeline has to be added to Decima at some point. Such a port and subsequently an update to the PS5 version would have been the perfect test bed for something like that... Seems like a missed opportunity if you ask me.

And it will be, at some point; Guerrilla already said, "We really like the tech of course. Watch this space."

Decima projects (including the DLC and the PC port work) has been a testbed for features which become core to the next big game. It's not at all a foreign concept to Guerrilla that they are behind on because they've never touched the stuff; you can go back to their KZ Shadow Fall talks where they're doing some limited ray traces to augment its reflection cube maps, or the MADDER audio system at fires waves through scenes to get back info of sound bounce/absorption.

An RT retrofit of H:FW for PC though isn't just adding RT features to the tools, it would also be a ton of repair and redesign work for a product already completed in a different way. (A "mind-bogging" amount of that work). RTGI (which is probably what we're talking about implementing; RT reflections and shadows are their own case and pose problems in this type of game world) would potentially fuck up more than it would fix. And at that point, the test result is of little value compared to the massive workload added to redoing everything that's become undone.

If analysis from recent Death Stranding 2 footage proves correct, that is the testbed. (DF and others have determined that RTGI appears to be used in the DS2 trailer, although reflections seem to be still screenspace and shadows also probably aren't RT. This actually makes sense, focusing on FTGI, since this is where the feature development focus would be given the types of games Guerrilla and its partners tend to use Decima for. Insomniac meanwhile focused on stuff like RT reflections for its style of play and landscapes.) With the next game, they can plan for it from the beginning.