ethomaz said:
Forza Motorsport 5: the Digital Foundry verdict
On balance, Turn 10's first effort on Xbox One is impressive for what it sets out to achieve in its 1080p60 presentation, but the raised resolution proves to be something of a Pandora's Box. As ever, the studio's exceptional car detailing steals the show in its authenticity, now bolstered by the materials texturing that sits well with the increased pixel-count. However, it's around this that Forza 5's shortcomings become apparent; now we see the lacklustre texture filtering, the pixellated foliage, and even the cut-out spectator sprite-work that line the road-sides. The game's improved lighting effects and motion blur go some way to obscure such issues during the core racing experience, but in tandem with the halved track and car count, it does seem to suggest a developer pressed to release an end product to a brutal launch window schedule.
It's also disappointing that, despite the supreme full HD presentation, Forza 5 offers anti-aliasing that delivers little to no effect on foliage or cars. Stair-stepping can be rough in spots, especially in cockpit view, and given the processing muscle-power needed to push out this resolution, it makes for a surprising contrast with a more thoroughly treated - if performance limited - 900p game like Ryse.
With that being said, much of this only considers the surface experience, and we're pleased to find Forza 5's handling model continues to impress in its next-gen form. By building on well-forged relationships with like the likes of Pirelli, from whom test data continues to be sourced and entered into the game engine, Turn 10's work continues to improve a simulation that few besides Polyphony Digital are ready to match in the console scene. At its core, the racing mechanics remain fun and satisfying with a controller in hand, even if the gloss over the top can underwhelm.
In review, while the bedrock racing experience is as solid as ever, this can be seen as a stepping stone towards a final product that has yet to arrive; a work in progress if you like. Even compared to the build seen at E3 just a few months ago, differences in bloom, optimised LOD streaming and the remixing of each circuit's surrounding décor are apparent. But in its current form, although Forza 5 falls short in terms of overall polish, it sets a precedent for next-gen racing simulations by virtue of simply planting the flag in the soil first.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-11-23-digital-foundry-vs-forza-motorsport-5
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I found the Digital Foundry article very fair and almost complete in the technicals limitations of Forza 5.
Except Not a word on complete lack of dynamic lighting or changing weather. But besides that, they were spot on and very negative towards the game I think. They really insisted on the complete lack of Antialiasing, the 2D crowds, low environments, poor textures etc.
But I can't believe those images come from Forza 5. The lack of dynamic lighting or even ambient occlusing, bloom, complex shadows.... Even F355 on dreamcast had better lighting and effects (in my tinted glasses) and seemed more real. Those baked textures ...give a new benchmark of baked textures I think that will be used for the years to come. Those 2D trees (forest even) on the background... this game is really low geometry and low textures and everything (the bland environment) is enhanced by the 1080p, it is always sunny also which is very convenient for the dynamic stuff lighting/shadowing explained lack.
I remember Gears of War on X360 with those awesome shaders and lighting applied everywhere... Now with a 300 people team in more than 2 years and they could not use 3D crows nor 3D trees nor shaders on textures? With 16 tracks?
They really didn't use any tiling. 2 framebuffers 16MB each: total 32MB. no more 150MB/S (at peak under some Microsoft PRed operations) available. All the assets, textures, geometry and shaders must be bottleneck by this 50MB/S bandwidth if you remove around 18MB/S for the jaguars, contention and useable bandwidth comprised in the 18MB/s.
50MB/s versus 150MB/s fully available on PS4 (I removed 18Mb/s for X1 VS 26Mb/s for PS4 for contention/jaguars and slight latency allegedly BS disadvantage) . It is 3 times more bandwidth available for all the assets. It explains the 720p22fps pushed by the first open-world X1 game, dr3. With 2 720p framebuffers all the rest of VRam may be used by the zombies render models and main character assets ideally. But the whole open-world must be stored and processed from the 50MB/s bandwidth.
No kidding the PS4 needs to actively and (intelligently) passively cool its GDDR5 ram and the fact that finally the PS4 has an impressive peak (not PRed) of 150W of power consumption. How did the X1 architects did let this bandwith bottleneck in the X1 specs? When they did use the fastest GDDR3 ram available for the X360 in a real unified fast ram? In fact the X1 is not a fully unified ram system cause it has a 32MB vram to be smartly used by developers like the 4MB of vram for the PS2, remember the fiasco? On X360 the 10MB was not programmable Vram but just a frambuffer memory used for that purpose, like a memory dedicated to the GPU but programmable by developers. This X1 architecture is different from the true unified X360 ram. It is in fact a re-hash of the at the times already and still insufferable PS2 Ram architecture.
Why nobody did make that PS2/ X1 memory architecture link? It is so obvious and real.
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