• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

[Digital Foundry] Immortals of Aveum PS5/Xbox Series X/S: Unreal Engine 5 is Pushed Hard - And Image Quality Suffers

pasterpl

Member
You can enjoy that "ea app" even today!
Fox Death GIF by Animation Domination High-Def
Don’t have problem with ”ea app”, but I have got problem with playing on my 4K 120hz oled tv a 720p game with shit quality. Also got problem with selecting perf or quality modes, why I cannot get game with full quality at high frame rate at proper resolution? Oh wait, I can, on my PC.

This game, latest FF just shows that console generations need to start being shorter 2-3 years max with full bc. Technology movies so fast that even mid gen refreshes will be out of date when they release.
 

rofif

Banned
Don’t have problem with ”ea app”, but I have got problem with playing on my 4K 120hz oled tv a 720p game with shit quality. Also got problem with selecting perf or quality modes, why I cannot get game with full quality at high frame rate at proper resolution? Oh wait, I can, on my PC.

This game, latest FF just shows that console generations need to start being shorter 2-3 years max with full bc. Technology movies so fast that even mid gen refreshes will be out of date when they release.
Yadira yada pc good console bad. I am still not installing ea app. Even if the game ran 16k on pc.
No problem with ff16 either. 30fps mode was awesome. Looked great and was very responsive.
Each to his own.
 
Last edited:

rofif

Banned
What amazes me is folks still think there's no need for mid-gen refresh consoles. Not just "I'm not interested" but adamant that there shouldn't be and others shouldn't even get the option...at the end of next year?!

Even if this is a particularly poor example, getting good image quality with non-ML/AI reconstruction on a reasonably sized 4K TV pretty much requires ~1440p as a base. Now if you want that with a few good quality RT elements, nanite/lumen and solid performance; all while pushing more complex game worlds..... We need something better.
Of course we don’t need pro consoles. It’s the approach of devs what matters. Pro will just make it worse because they will have more work.
First of all, pro wouldn’t be significantly faster.
And most importantly, it would just move the goalpost elsewhere. People would want ps5 and games would still look ass if devs pushed some other effect.
lol you guys bitch about 60 fps and now your complaining about all the stuff needed to actually achieve it.
Yes. Devs probably thought to themselves. “Wow we made ue5 game that’s also 60fps!!! We are golden boys” people scream for past two years that. Prying else matters and they will play 60fps even if games are 480p”
 

pasterpl

Member
Yadira yada pc good console bad. I am still not installing ea app. Even if the game ran 16k on pc.
No problem with ff16 either. 30fps mode was awesome. Looked great and was very responsive.
Each to his own.
If you ok with ps3 level of graphics and resolutions in 2023, kudos for you. I have got my xbox360 to play some old games, but new games I install on both Xbox series x and my pc, and play whichever feels better, usually pc version wins.

wasnt FF 30fps mode 1080p? More games will be released and that quality gap will be getting bigger.
 

rofif

Banned
If you ok with ps3 level of graphics and resolutions in 2023, kudos for you. I have got my xbox360 to play some old games, but new games I install on both Xbox series x and my pc, and play whichever feels better, usually pc version wins.

wasnt FF 30fps mode 1080p? More games will be released and that quality gap will be getting bigger.
It’s not ps3 levels of graphics or resolution. Maybe connect that xbox360 for a refreshment. We have solid 30,60 or unlocked fps instead of 20-30. We have anti aliasing and upscaling. It’s not a golden bullet but fsr is still bringing the
Image quality way higher.
We are way past raw resolution counts.
Idk if you realise that but I will blow your mind. Go watch any modern cgi movie in 720p. Like avengers or some shit. You will notice that it still come through perfectly fine.

I hate people saying that over and over.
And no. Ff16 was quite sharp in res mode. 14. 1440p internal but with good upscale.
 

DenchDeckard

Moderated wildly
In truth, they are struggling with UE5 on everything.

A few days ago I looked up the PC review and benchmarks and noticed that the best a 4090 could run it at 1440p was at 80fps. A 4090... 1440p, 80fps. And thats with a CPU that is over 70% better than what's in these consoles.

Unreal.

At this point, anyone who feints being surprised or saying stuff like these consoles are underperforming... Have an agenda lol. This is clearly and Unreal problem.

Do you think it could be devs wrestling to understand it like early unreal 3 and 4 days or that epic needs to step up and provide support?

I know early ue3 and 4 had issues but games were still 720p and 30fps or 1080p. They just had that unreal engine look for a while until developers learnt to add colour etc.

Either way. There's quite a few games running at like 720p and even under on these consoles. Not just unreal engine games. I don't understand it personally and never thought we would get here.
 
Last edited:

Mr.Phoenix

Member
If you ok with ps3 level of graphics and resolutions in 2023, kudos for you. I have got my xbox360 to play some old games, but new games I install on both Xbox series x and my pc, and play whichever feels better, usually pc version wins.

wasnt FF 30fps mode 1080p? More games will be released and that quality gap will be getting bigger.
FUD mongering I see.

Carry on.
 

Mr.Phoenix

Member
Do you think it could be devs wrestling to understand it like early unreal 3 and 4 days or that epic needs to step up and provide support?

I know early ue3 and 4 had issues but games were still 720p and 30fps or 1080p. They just had that unreal engine look for a while until swvelopers learnt to add colour etc.

Either way. There's quite a few games running at like 720p and even under on these consoles. Not just unreal engine games. I don't understand it personally and never thought we would get here.
It's two things. First, UE5 is just currently in a very unoptimized state. And that's evident when you look at how games perform on the PC.

Here is this game running at 1440p and 2160p.
performance-2560-1440.png
performance-3840-2160.png


Notice the 4090 couldn't even manage 50fps at native 2160p? But more relevant, look at the 1440p chart. 4090 is at 80fps and the 6700XT (closest to the PS5/XSX GPU in that chart) is only managing 30fps. kinda makes sense that they would have to halve the internal rez from 1440p to 720p to double the framerate which is what they did. Figured they could get away with reconstructing that to 2160p anyway.

What most people don't know, is that UE has always been an unoptimized mess.

Then the second part,itsthe devs. An argument can be made, that if the option to use reconstruction was not there to begin with, these devs would get more out of these engines and optimize their games better. I can't help but feel a devs approach to building their game is completely wrong right off the bat when they start by saying, just make the game, we can just reconstruct to smoothness at the end of it.

Because let's not kid ourselves.. I can show a good number of games on these consoles running at higher rez, also at 60fps, and that look significantly better than a great number of these underperforming games.

Seems this game runs much terrible on consoles, where you can get better performance on a 5 years old RTX2080 card.
People really need to stop doing this shit. The game runs terribly on EVERYTHING. The 2080Ti... better card than what you mentioned, only manages to run this game at 30fps@1440p and at 15fps @2160p. Which is just a frame or two less than the 6700XT (PS5/XSX GPU equivalent). How the hell is that better performance? What do you think you would have to do to run the game at 60fps at 2160p on the 2080? Yup, you guessed it, reconstruct the hell out of it.

I think we collectively would be doing better if we called out what is really happening here as opposed to just dismissing it and taking unnecessary digs at consoles.
 
Last edited:

Elysium44

Banned
Don’t have problem with ”ea app”, but I have got problem with playing on my 4K 120hz oled tv a 720p game with shit quality. Also got problem with selecting perf or quality modes, why I cannot get game with full quality at high frame rate at proper resolution? Oh wait, I can, on my PC.

This game, latest FF just shows that console generations need to start being shorter 2-3 years max with full bc. Technology movies so fast that even mid gen refreshes will be out of date when they release.

Technology moved faster during previous generations but console games still looked good and performed well, as they always should because it's a fixed hardware platform. You target the specs you have before you, you don't target mythical specs which don't exist yet (or only high end PC owners have) and then shrug and say well yeah it looks/runs shit but technology has moved on. The technology of the platform you coded it for hasn't moved an inch, so there is no excuse.

Also, the games aren't getting better looking, they're just getting more demanding due to the inefficient engine or coding.
 

Tarnpanzer

Member
Notice the 4090 couldn't even manage 50fps at native 2160p? But more relevant, look at the 1440p chart. 4090 is at 80fps and the 6700XT (closest to the PS5/XSX GPU in that chart) is only managing 30fps. kinda makes sense that they would have to halve the internal rez from 1440p to 720p to double the framerate which is what they did. Figured they could get away with reconstructing that to 2160p anyway.

Going from 1440p to 720p is actually quarter resolution, not half.

2560 x 1440 = 3,686,400 pixel
1280 x 720 = 921,600 pixel

----------------------

I agree that 720p is way to low for a 4K-TV, even if upscaled. It just looks like ass in motion.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
If the latest engine brings such compromises, what convinces developers to use them over existing engines?
Producers/publishers: it is cheaper than building our own (we can lay some people off)

Marketers: we can ride the buzz of the engine’s feature.

Artists: less custom things I need to learn that I cannot easily reuse and a lot of built in effects / features I can play with (virtualised geometry, fully dynamic lighting, etc…). Tons of plugins and a full featured editor.

It does have a lot of pros but it trying to do everything for everyone has to come at a cost and in this case it eats a lot of performance and resources improvements made over the years (DevEx is not free).
 
Last edited:
The problem with the Series S here is that it's running at such a low base resolution that the information for reconstructing a higher pixel count just isn't there, scaling was really designed to help 1080p and 1440p target a full 4k output, the moment you start getting down to 720p or in this case, 436p - then it's almost pointless even trying to scale that up to 4k as it's having to make up like 80-90% of the pixels, at this point you might as well just bilinear stretch it up.
Out of curiosity, I did the math.

3840 x 2160 = 8,294,400

768 x 436 = 334,848

334, 848 / 8,294,400 = 0.04

So, it's reconstructing an image with 4% of the display's pixel count

Now, in a general sense, the AI-based reconstruction method DLSS2 is pretty amazing, but yes it's meant to reconstruct 1080p to 4K, which is 25% of the pixel count. 25% doesn't sound like a lot but these reconstructions are temporally based and if you get enough samples of the moving image, you can do a lot with it. Typically DLSS2 uses about 2-3 frames of temporal data for reconstruction, with extremely impressive results. It's not magic, it's just advanced technology.

FSR2 is purely a mathematical upscaler, it's basically TAAU with a couple of algorithmic tricks. And it looks kinda shit trying to scale 1080p to 4K, usually you want minimum 1440p to have FSR2 look kinda decent.

But 4%? FUCKING LAMO yes at that point literally just upscale it like a DVD to a 4K TV because that is literally DVD resolution it's trying to reconstruct. There wouldn't be enough frame data for reconstruction even if you took 30 seconds worth of frame samples. That's fucking hilarious. I can't believe these devs thought this would be a good idea.

Why doesn't this game have a 30 fps Quality mode for fuck's sakes?
 

Mr Reasonable

Completely Unreasonable
Producers/publishers: it is cheaper than building our own (we can lay some people off)

Marketers: we can ride the buzz of the engine’s feature.

Artists: less custom things I need to learn that I cannot easily reuse and a lot of built in effects / features I can play with (virtualised geometry, fully dynamic lighting, etc…). Tons of plugins and a full featured editor.

I meant versus Unreal version 4, not custom engines. If everyone knows version 4, and presumably there are still a number of games being developed on v4, why did these guys decide to jump to v5 given that it would have been a jump into the unknown?

Or is unreal 4 to 5 much more iterative than it might seem?
 
Last edited:

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
I meant versus Unreal version 4, not custom engines. If everyone knows version 4, and presumably there are still a number of games being developed on v4, why did these guys decide to jump to v5 given that it would have been a jump into the unknown?

Or is unreal 4 to 5 much more iterative than it might seem?
Some of the points still apply I guess. It is the next generation, new toy, removes work from designers and lighting artists, and again it is the new toy that everyone uses now and thus it is cheaper to hire with (cheaper and cheaper).
 

Bojji

Member
It’s not ps3 levels of graphics or resolution. Maybe connect that xbox360 for a refreshment. We have solid 30,60 or unlocked fps instead of 20-30. We have anti aliasing and upscaling. It’s not a golden bullet but fsr is still bringing the
Image quality way higher.
We are way past raw resolution counts.
Idk if you realise that but I will blow your mind. Go watch any modern cgi movie in 720p. Like avengers or some shit. You will notice that it still come through perfectly fine.

I hate people saying that over and over.
And no. Ff16 was quite sharp in res mode. 14. 1440p internal but with good upscale.

Final Fantasy 16 IQ is horrible in res mode, for 1440p game it should look much better but they wanted to use (shitty as fuck) FSR1. Aliasing is everywhere and everything is sharpened by CAS. Remake on PS5 has better IQ and 60FPS!
 

Bojji

Member
Someone please tell me the PC version of this game supports DLSS2/3 so at least PC gamers can have a decent experience

It does have dlss2, 3 and reflex. On my 4070 game looks quite decent with everything on high (textures on ultra) and with dlss on banace runs around 60fps in 4k.

There are many high frequency details that needs high resolution to be seen and appreciated, why they went with 720p on consoles where everything they created is destroyed by upscaling ja beyond me.
 
Last edited:

Kataploom

Gold Member
Yadira yada pc good console bad. I am still not installing ea app. Even if the game ran 16k on pc.
No problem with ff16 either. 30fps mode was awesome. Looked great and was very responsive.
Each to his own.
Problem is we see "acceptable" differently... I see animation fluidity as part of visual enjoyment and that's achieved by 60 or more fps so 30 won't make it to me. The only reason I get to play a 30 fps game is that I love the franchise so much and have no other official way to play the games as I want, say Zelda and Xenoblade games.

High frame rate is also graphics to me, I enjoy looking at fluid animations, camera movement, etc.

Even at great response times like Zelda TOTK, 30 fps just won't look good enough to me.
 

Bojji

Member
Agreed... PS5 performance suffers due to enhanced visual quality

Is PS5 version is only sharpened it doesn't have any performance penalty. To me it looks like Xbox memory bandwidth is saving it from massive drops where there is tons of shit on screen.
 

Zathalus

Member
Seems this game runs much terrible on consoles, where you can get better performance on a 5 years old RTX2080 card.
You don't get better performance on a 2080 though. On medium/high 1080p with DLSS quality you get roughly 60FPS average with some dips - about the same as consoles.

You do get a much better image though, thanks yo DLSS. Especially if you use DLSS swapper to put in 3.5.
 

Riky

$MSFT
Framerate is king so good to see Xbox again doing well with the engine, it will be interesting to see what The Coalition can do with UE5, I'm sure they will manage to get far superior image quality than this.
 

PeteBull

Member
Need midgen upgrades ASAP, ps5pr0 with roughly(rumored) 2x gpu power would make game keep 60fps, but thx to increased native res, it wouldnt anymore look like blurry mess, and maybe thx to higher clocked cpu we wouldnt have so many dips whenever action is happening :p
 
Of course we don’t need pro consoles. It’s the approach of devs what matters. Pro will just make it worse because they will have more work.
First of all, pro wouldn’t be significantly faster.
And most importantly, it would just move the goalpost elsewhere. People would want ps5 and games would still look ass if devs pushed some other effect.

Yes. Devs probably thought to themselves. “Wow we made ue5 game that’s also 60fps!!! We are golden boys” people scream for past two years that. Prying else matters and they will play 60fps even if games are 480p”

PRO CONSOLES CAUSED A BIG IMPROVEMENT TO EVERY SINGLE GAME LAST GEN SO WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
 

Hudo

Member
The engine is a fucking hog. I hope studios keep to inhouse engines and didn't jump feet first into UE5.
In my own experience, it's also really bothersome to work with unless your problem falls into one of the things that already exists as a template/that the engine supports out of the box. It's actually even more bothersome than it was in UE4. And it's straight up a hellish nightmare when you're working on shared memory with other external libraries/processes and UE5.

The only cool 2 things UE5 has (in my opinion) are Nanite and MLFormer. Every other feature is just good marketing.
 

Heisenberg007

Gold Journalism
Of course we don’t need pro consoles. It’s the approach of devs what matters. Pro will just make it worse because they will have more work.
First of all, pro wouldn’t be significantly faster.
And most importantly, it would just move the goalpost elsewhere. People would want ps5 and games would still look ass if devs pushed some other effect.

Yes. Devs probably thought to themselves. “Wow we made ue5 game that’s also 60fps!!! We are golden boys” people scream for past two years that. Prying else matters and they will play 60fps even if games are 480p”
You might play Forspoken in 4K60 on a Pro console.

shupepper.gif
 

rofif

Banned
Final Fantasy 16 IQ is horrible in res mode, for 1440p game it should look much better but they wanted to use (shitty as fuck) FSR1. Aliasing is everywhere and everything is sharpened by CAS. Remake on PS5 has better IQ and 60FPS!
I don't agree.
The image quality is good in quality mode. Good thing they used fsr1 and not 2. At least the image is more stable.
 

sinnergy

Member
In my own experience, it's also really bothersome to work with unless your problem falls into one of the things that already exists as a template/that the engine supports out of the box. It's actually even more bothersome than it was in UE4. And it's straight up a hellish nightmare when you're working on shared memory with other external libraries/processes and UE5.

The only cool 2 things UE5 has (in my opinion) are Nanite and MLFormer. Every other feature is just good marketing.
That must explain why respected devs are switching to UE5 🤣🤡
 

Hudo

Member
That must explain why respected devs are switching to UE5 🤣🤡
Dunno about that. My point was that Unreal fits some problems and doesn't fit other problems. And when it doesn't fit, it really doesn't fit.

And I also think many devs are using their own stuff. Capcom, Remedy, id Software, EA studios internally still utilize Frostbyte where it makes sense, Valve use their own stuff, Blizzard use their own stuff (except Hearthstone, which is Unity), Rockstar are using their own stuff, Paradox have their own engine, Platinum as well, Nintendo and many of their studios obviously (although Good Feel have used UE4 for Yoshi's Crafted World), of course Sony's first-party studios as well, Kojima Productions use Decima, I believe. Bohemia use their own engine, Codemasters have their own engine, Bethesda (infamously?) have stuck with their Creation Engine for good reason as well, etc.

Do you think these aren't "respectable devs"? I think any developer who knows his shit will look at what tools are the best for the job at hand. Sometimes Unreal fits the problem. And so it is a wise decision to go with that. Other times, Unreal doesn't fit and when it doesn't fit you might very well roll out your own engine.
 
Last edited:

Riky

$MSFT
Same with the Coalition. Infact, some of the changes they made have been adopted by Epic for the main engine.

Apparently Jez Cordon has seen Gears 6, and it is mind blowing.

This is what we need to see before we judge the engine, Gears 5 looks phenomenal still and at 60-120fps. I wonder if the VRS function is now in the engine which explains the up to 10fps framerate difference.
If it is and that's what keeps the Xbox versions in the VRR range then it's been a great addition.
 

DenchDeckard

Moderated wildly
It's two things. First, UE5 is just currently in a very unoptimized state. And that's evident when you look at how games perform on the PC.

Here is this game running at 1440p and 2160p.
performance-2560-1440.png
performance-3840-2160.png


Notice the 4090 couldn't even manage 50fps at native 2160p? But more relevant, look at the 1440p chart. 4090 is at 80fps and the 6700XT (closest to the PS5/XSX GPU in that chart) is only managing 30fps. kinda makes sense that they would have to halve the internal rez from 1440p to 720p to double the framerate which is what they did. Figured they could get away with reconstructing that to 2160p anyway.

What most people don't know, is that UE has always been an unoptimized mess.

Then the second part,itsthe devs. An argument can be made, that if the option to use reconstruction was not there to begin with, these devs would get more out of these engines and optimize their games better. I can't help but feel a devs approach to building their game is completely wrong right off the bat when they start by saying, just make the game, we can just reconstruct to smoothness at the end of it.

Because let's not kid ourselves.. I can show a good number of games on these consoles running at higher rez, also at 60fps, and that look significantly better than a great number of these underperforming games.


People really need to stop doing this shit. The game runs terribly on EVERYTHING. The 2080Ti... better card than what you mentioned, only manages to run this game at 30fps@1440p and at 15fps @2160p. Which is just a frame or two less than the 6700XT (PS5/XSX GPU equivalent). How the hell is that better performance? What do you think you would have to do to run the game at 60fps at 2160p on the 2080? Yup, you guessed it, reconstruct the hell out of it.

I think we collectively would be doing better if we called out what is really happening here as opposed to just dismissing it and taking unnecessary digs at consoles.

Thanks.

Well thanks to epic and playstation for fucking us this gen with expectations.

That tech demo was obviously bullshit.

I'm honestly a bit worried about gears and hellblade 2 on console now.
 
Last edited:

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Well thanks to epic and playstation for fucking us this gen with expectations.
“Same experience and features at 1440p” ah but you see they are philanthropists looking after the common man, plus totes true, plus <inset excuse>.

“Oh and that demo runs on Chinese low end laptops and it is totes no problem The Coalition intervened to optimise the Matrix Demo”

but now… ah it is PlayStation’s fault… never change, never change ;).
 

Riky

$MSFT
Thanks.

Well thanks to epic and playstation for fucking us this gen with expectations.

That tech demo was obviously bullshit.

I'm honestly a bit worried about gears and hellblade 2 on console now.
Hellbalde 2 will almost certainly be 30fps if it's running Lumen.
As for Gears 60fps would be great across the board but it may be like the Xbox One version of Gears 5 where we get 30fps single player and 60fps multi.
 

DenchDeckard

Moderated wildly
“Same experience and features at 1440p” ah but you see they are philanthropists looking after the common man, plus totes true, plus <inset excuse>.

“Oh and that demo runs on Chinese low end laptops and it is totes no problem The Coalition intervened to optimise the Matrix Demo”

but now… ah it is PlayStation’s fault… never change, never change ;).

It was Sony and Epic that displayed that as a playstation 5 demo not anyone else. Why are you deflecting? Are you OK bro?

Anyway, no point in getting into the weeds. It will be interesting to see Hellblade 2 and gears. I hope MS and their teams have managed to get more out of the engine.
 
Last edited:
Thanks.

Well thanks to epic and playstation for fucking us this gen with expectations.

That tech demo was obviously bullshit.

I'm honestly a bit worried about gears and hellblade 2 on console now.

Well there was also the Matrix tech demo on Xbox. That demo was also really impressive but unrealistic when it comes to an actual title.

I wouldn't limit the blame to just PlayStation and Epic.
 
Last edited:

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
It was Sony and Epic that displayed that as a playstation 5 demo not anyone else. Why are you deflecting? Are you OK bro?
Me deflecting :)? What was BS about this demo?

1440p limited AI demo running at 30 FPS by Epic themselves. This is a third party game… Meanwhile other clear BS is just handwaved away or offered endless justifications for.

I just find it fun that people are spinning all sorts of narrative about that demo. We are going from the “demo is nothing special, Epic runs it on cheap laptops just as well” to “demo was BS that gave use too high expectations, I blame PlayStation”, why are You blaming PlayStation there? Not sure, but imagine the surprise in seeing that happen 😉.

You can keep clutching your pearls though…
 
Last edited:

Mr.Phoenix

Member
Thanks.

Well thanks to epic and playstation for fucking us this gen with expectations.

That tech demo was obviously bullshit.

I'm honestly a bit worried about gears and hellblade 2 on console now.
Well, that demo wasn't BS per se. And The Matrix Demo, proves that. UE5 would be behind some really good stuff, we just need some really talented devs behind it. Guess that part takes time.
 

Montauk

Member
What amazes me is folks still think there's no need for mid-gen refresh consoles. Not just "I'm not interested" but adamant that there shouldn't be and others shouldn't even get the option...at the end of next year?!

Even if this is a particularly poor example, getting good image quality with non-ML/AI reconstruction on a reasonably sized 4K TV pretty much requires ~1440p as a base. Now if you want that with a few good quality RT elements, nanite/lumen and solid performance; all while pushing more complex game worlds..... We need something better.

Get a gaming PC.
 

Mr.Phoenix

Member
Going from 1440p to 720p is actually quarter resolution, not half.

2560 x 1440 = 3,686,400 pixel
1280 x 720 = 921,600 pixel

----------------------

I agree that 720p is way to low for a 4K-TV, even if upscaled. It just looks like ass in motion.
Yeah, I know.. wasn't speaking literally.

Still speaks to what I was saying though. On the PC side of things, we can see where the GPU in these consoles would land if they went for native pixels. These devs doing this 720p ting is excessive and as far as I am concerned something that only happens because they are not willing to optimize some more. Because even after sashing rez to 720p for their reconstruction base, that shit was still dropping frames.
 
Top Bottom