Games Analysis |OT| Time To Argue About Pixels And Frames!

All I’m saying is working Xbox as your priority is a “challenge” because they have been so accustomed to PS4 which is now PS5 with extra flares. Look at Doom Eternal. They didn’t pull Callisto Protocol and managed to give great results all around, including Switch. With Xbox tools however, they were able to do something more.

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I’ve been thinking about this a little and let’s say this turns out to be the case, why would CDPR do this? Don’t devs want to see the best results possible? Look at Cyberpunk, look at Rockstar with RDR2. If there’s one studio I would not expect this from it’s CDPR and for the ones that bought Series X for that extra power it would truly suck. I hope they fix it.

I have been okay with the Series S, I mean it’s whatever for me, great for those that want it, it’s absolutely not for me though. So had MS just went with X only, I would’ve been fine with it. If your assumption turns out true I hope it’s one of the very rare cases.

It is a free update to an old game, I typically expect that to be done on a constrained budget and likely farmed out to the C team or an external company. Isn’t there already evidence that it used some weird and inefficient way to get to DX12 on PC?

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Yep, just sucks that it’s one of my favorite games ever. But this is something that shouldn’t happen too often, thankfully hadn’t happened a lot since the consoles came out.

Yeah, are you planning on replaying it? I loved it, but it’s hard to convince me to replay a long RPG. Definitely would not help the backlog.

It was, but then the entire game update was pulled in house because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It was originally being worked on by Saber’s St Petersburg studio.

Probably not gonna replay the whole story again but I did save Blood and Wine for the upgrade. So, one of these days I’m gonna check it out.

Right, that’s true. Then it was CDPR proper who did it after all? I really hope for them to have fixed this in upcoming patches. I can live with the shadow draw thing, but that part with the foliage just isn’t good.

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You’ll probably be glad to know that the foliage draw distance does appear to be a bug since the Series S matches the PS5 in its quality mode.

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Lol

Oh wow, yeah that is definitely good news. Then it’s just a matter of us having to wait for them to fix for X. :ok_hand:t2:

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This patch definitely came in super hot.

Loving the Witcher 3 on Series X on performance mode, I also played it on quality mode for a while but performance is the best by far for me, much better image quality and 60FPS, ray tracing isn’t enough for me to sacrifice those things, also thought it looked great on Series S on both modes (played it on the S for a few hours when I was away from home) I’ve noticed that some games seem to struggle on Series X for some reason until they get patched, I don’t know what it is but it would be nice if it stopped happening, thankfully this update just seems like it was a bit rushed.

Witcher 3 remains to this day the best open world WRPG ever made, playing through this again and gotta say it is far far superior to Cyberpunk 2077 in everything besides maybe gameplay, but even the Witcher 3 has far more unique enemies to fight, the writing is on another level though, excited for Witcher 4 especially after experiencing this masterpiece again with this update but not sure if CDPR will ever be able to match this masterpiece, really hope they do.

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And people wonder why they are switching engines lmao.

1. Horizon Forbidden West

2. The Callisto Protocol

3. Portal RTX

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The version tested was 4.00. Default video options were used.

00:00 - Ray Tracing Mode and Xbox Series S Quality Mode

07:54 - Performance Mode

Xbox Series S in quality mode uses a dynamic resolution with the highest resolution found being 2560x1440 and the lowest resolution found being approximately 1536x864. Pixel counts at 1536x864 appear to be rare. Xbox Series S in quality mode seems to be using FSR 2.1 to reconstruct a 2560x1440 resolution when rendering below this resolution.

PS5 in raytracing mode uses a dynamic resolution with the highest resolution found being approximately 2880x1620 and the lowest resolution found being 1920x1080. PS5 appears to often render at or near 1920x1080 in raytracing mode. PS5 in raytracing mode seems to be using FSR 2.1 to reconstruct a 3200x1800 resolution.

Xbox Series X in raytracing mode uses a dynamic resolution with the highest resolution found being 3200x1800 and the lowest resolution found being 1920x1080. Xbox Series X in raytracing mode appears to render at 1920x1080 less often than PS5 does and the native rendering resolution seems to rarely reach 3200x1800. Xbox Series X in raytracing mode seems to be using FSR 2.1 to reconstruct a 3200x1800 resolution when rendering below this resolution.

Xbox Series S in performance mode uses a dynamic resolution with the highest resolution found being 1920x1080 and the lowest resolution found being 1600x900. Xbox Series S in performance mode seems to be using a form of temporal upsampling to reconstruct a 2560x1440 resolution. The temporal upsampling used in performance mode isn’t as effective as FSR 2.1 used in quality mode.

PS5 in performance mode uses a dynamic resolution with the highest resolution found being 3200x1800 and the lowest resolution found being 2048x1152. PS5 in performance mode seems to be using FSR 2.1 to reconstruct a 3200x1800 resolution when rendering below this resolution.

Xbox Series X in performance mode uses a dynamic resolution with the highest resolution found being 3200x1800 and the lowest resolution found being 2048x1152. Xbox Series X in performance mode appears to render at 3200x1800 more often than PS5 does. Xbox Series X in performance mode seems to be using FSR 2.1 to reconstruct a 3200x1800 resolution when rendering below this resolution.

Ray Tracing Mode adds a form of ray traced global illumination and ray traced ambient occlusion. Ray tracing mode also has an improved form of screen space reflections.

Xbox Series S in performance mode has a reduced foliage visibility range compared to quality mode and the other two consoles. Some trees in the very far distance aren’t visible on PS5 even though they are visible on the Xbox Series consoles in both modes https://bit.ly/3GilF1N After completing this comparison and playing the Xbox One X version, the trees in the far distance also disappeared from the Xbox Series version of the game https://bit.ly/3GhUnZh

The current gen versions of The Witcher 3 have some graphical improvements compared to the last gen consoles. Comparing PS5 in performance mode to PS4 Pro, PS5 has improvements to: foliage, shadows, anti-aliasing, LOD, NPC density and texture quality https://bit.ly/3YSjDNk

There is a bug on Xbox Series X where the foliage visibility range gets set to the setting used on Series S in performance mode https://bit.ly/3C0FYya To fix this, start the game on Xbox Series S and switch the graphics mode to quality mode.

Performance seems to degrade during an extended play session and performance can vary somewhat run-to-run.

The scenes tested here aren’t exactly the same as previous tests of The Witcher 3. Stats: https://bit.ly/3uLYari Frames Pixel Counted: https://bit.ly/3YgH6qV

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What the hell, so you need to start the game on the S and then it will be fixed for X? That’s very odd. Maybe I misunderstand it. I’ll wait for them to fix it. For sure they will do that.

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Yes apparently graphics settings are integrated into your game save and therefore can get updated by saving on different platforms. And as you might expect, it’s buggy. Honestly one of the dumber designs I’ve heard of. It has been common knowledge to decouple those things, since forever.

For those on PC, here is an interesting mod for The Witcher 3 that brings a sizable uplift in performance with minimal image quality impact.

I don’t even understand.

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