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

[Dom]

Series X finally getting into its groove as the most powerful console

[proelitedota (Andrew)]

@BRiT

There’s some parts where even the PS4 Quality has better Image Quality than the PS5 Performance.

Image Quality picture showing it pointed out by Shortbread @ B3D:

Should be the case on 1X vs Series x too.

[ProgStopper]

@ElPutoXD

Get the list.

[No-1HoloLens-Fan]

@ProgStopper

This list gonna keep on growing - to the point where it’s a done deal

[ProgStopper]

@No-1HoloLens-Fan

This list gonna keep on growing - to the point where it’s a done deal

(Why yes, I do nearly have a GIF for everything)

[proelitedota (Andrew)]

@ProgStopper

Hitman 3, Avengers, Mortal Shell, Outriders (Xbox versions has worse fps but look significantly better in lighting and IQ.).

Soon to be on the list will be RE Village and Far Cry 6.

[LucasTaves]

@Zappy5

Come on. The video was detailed, on point and accurate. His whole thing re pixel counts is absolutely true too.

Not quite he tries to make a point that a higher resolution isn’t necessarily better because there are situations where ps5 reaches a higher pixel count with significant lower image quality.

But ps5 isn’t rendering natively in the resolution he is counting, he is comparing with an image that is rendering almost twice the pixels natively so it’s actually countering the point he was trying to make.

Though that’s definitely a better point than the one I got the impression he would do from the start of the video.

[Zappy5]

@LucasTaves

Not quite he tries to make a point that a higher resolution isn’t necessarily better because there are situations where ps5 reaches a higher pixel count with significant lower image quality.

But ps5 isn’t rendering natively in the resolution he is counting, he is comparing with an image that is rendering almost twice the pixels natively so it’s actually countering the point he was trying to make.

Though that’s definitely a better point than the one I got the impression he would do from the start of the video.

Yeah of course. But he’s talking about limitations of reporting resolution. He could make a different point re render pipelines but think it’s fair enough.

[BRiT]

Yes. He’s trying to get people away from pixel counts and onto image quality. This will be more important when various SuperScaling ML / DLSS / UE4’s TAA become more prevalent in titles going forward.

Taken from B3D ( Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2021] | Page 58 | Beyond3D Forum )

@Alex / Dictator from DigitalFoundry @ B3D

I think it is me just being a bit purposefully obtuse when I say that wording !

One reason is because the end resolution and even the internal resolution is not always very important IMO when 2 different ways to generate pixels are being used. For example, 1440p internal res upscaled to 4K with DLSS 2.0 would produce a very different and interesting looking image in comparison to near 1800p with TAA. Think about it. 1440p to 4K DLSS 2.0 vs. 1800p TAA vs. Checkerboard 4K. All have various internal resolutions - but the quality of the end product does not line up with their internal resolutions in ascending order.

Basically, I am trying to just decouple the discussion from the resolution numbers to start talking about image quality again. The numbers are not really interesting anymore to us at DF rather often.

[No-1HoloLens-Fan]

@BRiT

Yes. He’s trying to get people away from pixel counts and onto image quality. This will be more important when various SuperScaling ML / DLSS / UE4’s TAA become more prevalent in titles going forward.

Taken from B3D ( )

Yup! Resolution counting here will give victory to PS5. When in fact it’s series X which has better Quality because it’s not CB.

[LucasTaves]

@BRiT

Yes. He’s trying to get people away from pixel counts and onto image quality. This will be more important when various SuperScaling ML / DLSS / UE4’s TAA become more prevalent in titles going forward.

Taken from B3D ( )

Yep, that’s more agreeable with.

I also noticed he said there that Ms ML super resolution is indeed like DLSS, should be a very good thing for SX and SS.

[bcatwilly]

Objectively it seems clear to me that Digital Foundry for business reasons is trying to be far more careful in how they present anything that seems to be a clear “win” for Xbox in my opinion, which I guess is understandable to some degree since they maintain an audience from fans of all the major platforms which includes the large PlayStation fan base of course.

I have seen real gamers out there who played it on both the Series X and PS5 who said it was quite “blurry” on the PS5, so no regular gamer cares about all of the goofy ways that the PS5 image is being constructed if it looks worse. The biggest thing for this next gen for me in general is probably frame rates too, and it gets a little annoying in some of these comparisons for them to pull out a random frame drop here or there on Xbox that pretty much no normal gamer would ever notice even without VRR in play. The one with the much better visual quality and no perceivable frame rate problems is the winner hands down regardless of all of the nuanced discussion of stuff.

The videos and articles about some of the 3rd party games on the Switch that run at a very unstable 30 fps being a real engineering feat are pretty sad to me too, as of course you can make a ton of games at least run on the Switch with major compromises in visual quality and frame rate. I could do the same with a really crappy laptop PC in terms of settings for a game, and that wouldn’t be impressive.

[TavishHill]

@LucasTaves

Errrr, that’s a strange start for the video with this post resolution era talk about how it’s no longer relevant and then pointing out how PS5 looks obviously a lot worse than SX

While this is true on nvidia cards with DLSS, until there’s an equivalente on consoles this is just BS. Specially when there’s a possibility only xbox consoles are able to use a similar feature.

The point, as shown later in the video, is actually to show that naive res figures that aren’t considering the way the final image is produced can be wildly misleading. It can make one think the CBR’d image with higher pixel counts on PS5 should be higher IQ when IRL it is the opposite when you consider the CRB vs native+upscale. He makes that point later in the video when noting the IQ favors XSX despite naive pixel counts being higher on PS5 due to CBR.

Good on Alex for trying to shift the discourse in the right direction here too. As ya noted, it will become really important down the line as DLSS and ML SS on XSX and AMD’s soln starts becoming a thing.

[No-1HoloLens-Fan]

@bcatwilly

…general is probably frame rates too, and it gets a little annoying in some of these comparisons for them to pull out a random frame drop here or there on Xbox that pretty much no normal gamer would ever notice even without VRR in play. The one with the much better visual quality and no perceivable frame rate problems is the winner hands down regardless of all of the nuanced discussion of stuff. The videos and articles about some of the 3rd party games on the Switch that run at a very unstable 30 fps being a real engineering feat are pretty sad to me too, as of course you can make a ton of games at least run on the Switch with major compromises in visual quality and frame rate. I could do the same with a really crappy laptop PC in terms of settings for a game, and that wouldn’t be impressive.

It’s pretty obvious that they try declare series X wins rather softly.

[CallMeCraig]

But the resolution isn’t higher on PS5. Every frame Series X shades millions of pixel more.

[TavishHill]

@No-1HoloLens-Fan

It’s pretty obvious that they try declare series X wins rather softly.

I think this is setting up the opposite actually. Internal res will be a meaningless metric soon with more games adopting VRS and it will get much worse once ML SS takes off on XSX. The shift to IQ favors Xbox in the end.

[proelitedota (Andrew)]

@No-1HoloLens-Fan

It’s pretty obvious that they try declare series X wins rather softly.

They got flak for their Hitman 3 title.

[KageMaru]

@LucasTaves

Errrr, that’s a strange start for the video with this post resolution era talk about how it’s no longer relevant and then pointing out how PS5 looks obviously a lot worse than SX

While this is true on nvidia cards with DLSS, until there’s an equivalente on consoles this is just BS. Specially when there’s a possibility only xbox consoles are able to use a similar feature.

@javycane

Series X looking better always has some “caveats”

You guys really need to stop looking into things that aren’t there. Alex’s video was highly detailed, nicely structured, and goes right in line to what they’ve been saying for over a week now in looking past pure pixel counting.

There are no caveats here.

[Zappy5]

@CallMeCraig

But the resolution isn’t higher on PS5. Every frame Series X shades millions of pixel more.

I think that’s the point in that it depends how you determine the resolution - the full render pipeline is more complex than geometric resolution. And output resolution is higher even though each frame is rendering 50% of the pixels.

[LucasTaves]

@TavishHill

The point, as shown later in the video, is actually to show that naive res figures that aren’t considering the way the final image is produced can be wildly misleading. It can make one think the CBR’d image with higher pixel counts on PS5 should be higher IQ when IRL it is the opposite when you consider the CRB vs native+upscale. He makes that point later in the video when noting the IQ favors XSX despite naive pixel counts being higher on PS5 due to CBR.

Good on Alex for trying to shift the discourse in the right direction here too. As ya noted, it will become really important down the line as DLSS and ML SS on XSX and AMD’s soln starts becoming a thing.

Yep, at first I thought he was going to argument that there was no difference between native and CB, but he did raised an interesting point (which I thought a bit flawed, because with CB the rendered resolution on Ps5 is always lower than on Xbox, but on B3D he ended up elaborating more and I agree)