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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Digital Foundry Face-Off: Alien: Isolation (Why PS4 is not 60fps?)

ethomaz on 12 October 2014

dane007 said:

its 97% smooth. just fromtime to time during cutscenes it drops  and that rarely occurs. playing teh game as we sepak. its freaking awesome. Playing it on xbox one. don't know if you guy know , the xbox one version uses kinect  for noise detection and head tracking. you sneeze or make an sound while playing, the alien or toher enemies will hear you and will find you and kill you .  i died once playing on hard as i accidentally sneezed when the alien was close by lol.

PlayStation Camera and Kinect are the same in the game.

The only different feature is the DS4 speaker that outputs the pulse of your motion tracker.

PS. PC versions have a lot of features to Oculus Rift.



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ethomaz on 12 October 2014

The cuteness drops is really werid and happens even on PC (it locks the cultscenes to 30fps but it goes down to 20fps sometimes).

I think they could have a little more time to work in the game.



ethomaz on 12 October 2014

Puppyroach said: So, the enjoyment of the game has little to nothing to do with framerate in alot of games, good to now we agree on that point :). You focus way to much on finding negative things about X1, there are alot of us that actually enjoy it very much.

Wut?

I did even focus or try to find these things... It was my first the DF article since March I guess.

I'm glad you enjoy it but what that have to do with the technical analist?



QUAKECore89 on 12 October 2014

So AMD CPUs are to blame you say.

My question is, why did they(developers) move on after Sony revealed PS4 specs last year?

& also Microsoft revealed Xbox ONE specs.



ethomaz on 12 October 2014

zero129 said:

Dont know where you get that from but this game runs perfect for me on my PC in 1080P@60FPS everything maxed im amazed how well this game looks and runs on PC, i was even able to downsample the res from 3840x2160 to 1080P and still run the game above 30FPS (But locked it at 30FPS for smoothness sake). But i really am amazed how well this game runs.

Gameplay yes.

The cultscenes (that are locked to 30fps) drops to 20fps no matter what hardware you are using.... there is some weird optimizations issues in the game.

And that is sad... the five plataforms are bad optimized PC is the best one but have issues too.



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ethomaz on 12 October 2014

zero129 said:

Yeah i did notice that but it doesnt seem to last too long its more like a bit of stutter, i just thought it was my pc.

But i still am shocked this game isnt 60FPS on PS4 i bet like others have said its for a project morpheus update as this game would be unreal in VR.

I don't know too... I looked some benchmars and low-end PCs runs this game really good... even 60fps with an old dual-core and GPU below PS4 specs. The game is not demmanding.

Are there any news about this Morpheus feature? I know it support OR.



curl-6 on 12 October 2014
globalisateur said:

On PS4 the game doesn't really have usual framerate drops, from time to time the game infact completely freezes during a very short moment (also on a lesser degree on XB1), it's easily visible on the video. One of DF writer think it may be because of streamed loading. It's a problem many games have this gen, notably Thief, Lego or even Destiny in one specific area have those problems which is probably loading related (the game completely pauses waiting for new data) and not CPU / GPU related.

You'd think this wouldn't be a problem any more with the larger RAM of PS4/Xbone. How hard can it be to stream a slow-moving corridor game with 5GB of memory? (Or however much PS4/Xbone have when you subtract the OS)



SvennoJ on 12 October 2014
curl-6 said:
globalisateur said:

On PS4 the game doesn't really have usual framerate drops, from time to time the game infact completely freezes during a very short moment (also on a lesser degree on XB1), it's easily visible on the video. One of DF writer think it may be because of streamed loading. It's a problem many games have this gen, notably Thief, Lego or even Destiny in one specific area have those problems which is probably loading related (the game completely pauses waiting for new data) and not CPU / GPU related.

You'd think this wouldn't be a problem any more with the larger RAM of PS4/Xbone. How hard can it be to stream a slow-moving corridor game with 5GB of memory? (Or however much PS4/Xbone have when you subtract the OS)

Mincraft ps4 freezes for half a second everytime the autosave kicks in. Lazy programming I guess. Instead of making a memory copy to be saved, it seems the write function locks the game to save it. Then the game catches up in fast motion to where it was supposed to be on the timeline.

Maybe it's something similar with Alien isolation. Lazily locking a large part of memory to stream data from hdd to, preventing the game engine to continue to work with it. The more memory, the more stuff to read from the slow hdd.  The last of us ps4 had no problem streaming the cutscenes while loading, I never noticed any hickups in Infamous SS either, so it is possible to do it right.

Why not 60 fps. Simple, XBox One struggles with 30fps, game is like for like otherwise, 40% more power, ps4 can max hope to struggle with 42fps. I guess if the ps4 version ran at 900p it might be able to reach 60fps.



curl-6 on 12 October 2014
SvennoJ said:
curl-6 said:
globalisateur said:

On PS4 the game doesn't really have usual framerate drops, from time to time the game infact completely freezes during a very short moment (also on a lesser degree on XB1), it's easily visible on the video. One of DF writer think it may be because of streamed loading. It's a problem many games have this gen, notably Thief, Lego or even Destiny in one specific area have those problems which is probably loading related (the game completely pauses waiting for new data) and not CPU / GPU related.

You'd think this wouldn't be a problem any more with the larger RAM of PS4/Xbone. How hard can it be to stream a slow-moving corridor game with 5GB of memory? (Or however much PS4/Xbone have when you subtract the OS)

Mincraft ps4 freezes for half a second everytime the autosave kicks in. Lazy programming I guess. Instead of making a memory copy to be saved, it seems the write function locks the game to save it. Then the game catches up in fast motion to where it was supposed to be on the timeline.

Maybe it's something similar with Alien isolation. Lazily locking a large part of memory to stream data from hdd to, preventing the game engine to continue to work with it. The more memory, the more stuff to read from the slow hdd.  The last of us ps4 had no problem streaming the cutscenes while loading, I never noticed any hickups in Infamous SS either, so it is possible to do it right.

Why not 60 fps. Simple, XBox One struggles with 30fps, game is like for like otherwise, 40% more power, ps4 can max hope to struggle with 42fps. I guess if the ps4 version ran at 900p it might be able to reach 60fps.

I thought HDD streaming was supposed to be fast? Not as fast as actual RAM of course, but faster than disc streaming.



globalisateur on 12 October 2014
curl-6 said:
SvennoJ said:
curl-6 said:

I thought HDD streaming was supposed to be fast? Not as fast as actual RAM of course, but faster than disc streaming.


Yes, fast HDD can always help but the real cause is the lack of polishing and the way the loading are integrated in the gameplay, you could say that those engine stalls are "programmed" by the devs and are inevitable.

And sometimes faster HDDs don't even help. For instance Thief have regular (and identical) framerate drops because of loading during gameplay both with HDD and with SSD, no difference at all.  

Some games, like for instance Trials fusion, are programmed to let the game run even if the assets are not fully loaded, you can then see incomplete textures (blurry textures) for a few moment in some areas. Others games forbid the lack of data and force the engine to completely freeze the game until the data is loaded into the system creating those mini pauses.

But normally by testing and polishing those problems are easily fixable.