Digital Foundry - Dirt 5

[DonFerrari]

shikamaru317 said:

DonFerrari said:

I have sent you two or three times the links... Dirt 5 dev said the tools were in similar state for both consoles

Even if they claimed that, it seems highly doubtful based on their results here. There is nothing in the specs that suggests that the gap in performance on a multiplat should be in favor of the PS5, the latest stats have the Series X beating the PS5 in just about every on-paper metric, CPU speed, RAM speed, bus width, pixels per second, texels per second, triangles per second, rays per second. At the very least Series X and PS5 should have near identical performance. The only thing that can explain a performance gap like we're seeing on these launch games is simply bad optimization on Series X, and the best explanation for poor optimization, on games like AC and Dirt 5, which Microsoft had the marketing rights on, is that dev kits and dev tools released too late for developers to optimize properly ahead of release.

Oliver Darko no Twitter: "Sidenote: "All in all development on Xbox Series X has been more of the same. [...] My day-to-day TOOLSET hasn't changed that much." - David Springate, technical director of Dirt 5 (interviewed by Larry Hryb in June 2020). cc: @TigerCA123, @JayBari_ @JayDubcity16, @Puertorock77_ https://t.co/duiX68rOQ7" / Twitter

The rumors of delayed SDKs and whatnot are all sourceless. The ones of the SDK being at least on similar status as PS5 have the name od the devs talking about that, so I would take that with higher preference.

Pemalite said:

JRPGfan said:

Go re-watch the video from 19mins to 20mins again.
DF say that it running lesser quality in 120fps mode, "pays off".

That means not a bug (but a choice, to mantain 120fps more consistantly), john says that in the video dude.

They say 2 differnt things, about the same issue (at differnt times in the video).

"If you think DF is so biased, why are you bothering to spend all this time watching these videos? What a bizarre mindset to have."

Because they show proof.
They cannot twist truth.

When you see the frame time graphs, and the picture compairisons they speak for themselves.

Does it matter that DF are "gentle" whenever they handle a xbox issue, and harsher when its a playstation one?
Well.. yes.. its abit off putting (their not supposed to be biased), but in this case in point, its running better on the PS5 anyways (so not a issue).

*edit:
Also I forgot that "slighly less" image quality, was used in compairson with the 120fps mode.


Less Car LoD, enviroment details, lesser road tessellation, less grass/foliage, geometric cutbacks, and less texture filtering...  
= Slightly less image quality.

Digital foundry said it was likely a bug.

I would assume the Playstation 5 was supposed to take a visual hit in that mode and didn't... And will likely be rectified at a later date.
The Playstation 5 also has another bug which impacts the dynamic range... Hopefully that gets fixed as well.

Doesn't make sense to be a bug. A whole mode to use wrong profile? And that is coincidentaly similar to what was several months back when they showed the 120fps first time? Something this big and no one on QC would have got? It is much more likely that they chose it for stability on the 120. And even like that it had tearing and in some points drops in framerate reaching 96.

Hiku said:

LudicrousSpeed said:

We literally had articles and rumors posted all over the Internets earlier this year, many times by Sony fans themselves, about how PS5 was easier to develop for because the tools were further along than Xbox. Now some of those same people want to say the tools are not an issue, even while posting comparison videos where the people in the videos claim the tools are a problem. In the same video they use as evidence for PS5 vs XSX power, the people in the video say you should never take anything like that out of launch title comparisons. Yikes. 

Are you referring to someone here, or people from other sites?

shikamaru317 said:

Some fair points, but most game engines can handle more CU's than Series X has, Series X has 52 CU's, all 3 of the newly announced Radeon RX 6000 series GPU's have more CU's than that, with 80 CU's on the flagship 6900 XT, and the early benchmarks for those cards show that games seem to be benefitting from the extra CU's. 

It's certainly possible that things like the SSD controller and decompression chip could lead to better performance on PS5, but you would typically only expect 1st party studios to properly make uses of such things, not 3rd parties, which tend to be somewhat lazy with optimizations. In most cases the obvious on-paper advantages directly translate into better performance on 3rd party multiplats. For a 3rd party multiplat dev to put in the work needed to really take advantage of PS5 to boost games above Series X, it just seems unlikely to me. It just feels more likely to me that the rumors about MS sending out their new Game Core dev tools and dev kits to devs pretty late into the year are true, which would of course lead to devs not having the time to get used to the system before launch. I could be wrong of course.

Either way, we will know within a few months at least. If the delayed tools and dev kit rumors are true, we should see some performance patches for these launch games over the next few weeks that close the gap with PS5, with newly released 3rd parties over the next few months starting to show a smaller gap between PS5 and XSX and an eventual performance lead for XSX as time goes on. If things stay the way they are for the next few months in terms of 3rd party multiplat performance, we'll pretty much know that MS made some kind of bottlenecking design blunder. 

I can't say I know about most game engines, but the latest graphics cards at the upper end of the spectrum, and not really the standard yet.

As for the SSD, when it comes to building worlds without having to create extra walls, mazes, ladders, etc, I would rarely ever expect that from third party multiplatform games, because it would literally be designing two completely different games in those areas. But for quickly streaming in and offloading expensive assets like high res textures, as you normally would with RAM, I can't say because I don't know how easy or difficult that is made to be on PS5. I only saw one developer theorizing about it.

The rumor of the later dev kits may be accurate. Though the Dirt 5 developer seemingly said they got both dev kits around the same time, so I think the weird last gen looking geometry is due to something else. Final Fantasy 7 Remake also has a similar glitch with some of its textures.
Though if SX is going to play catchup with making it more easy to develop for, the question is how long that will take since PS5's development tools will keep evolving at the same time. Though if SX has more leeway to make up for, their development may be more rapid.

About the SDK, I posted another 2 sources talking about how satisfied they were with Xbox SDK.