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Atomic Heart - DF Tech Review - PS5 vs Xbox Series X/S vs PC

GymWolf

Member
Mark Cerny is just a meme really, I love it, it's pretty obvious the xbox and ps5 are almost identical.
yeah but looks at his nephew tho

MV5BMDU3MDNmZmYtNDNhMC00N2RlLTlhMDEtNzc2OTYwMGNjMjYwXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyOTgxNjA4NjY@._V1_.jpg
 
Honestly what's happening is those recent games is the state of APIs / DX12 vs APIs / GNM on PS5. PS5 is just a much better (easier) machine to develop for (and with maybe a more efficient hardware, CU, higher clocks etc, but the hardware would not explain all those bugs on PC / Xbox).

And with XSS version devs spend even less time on the XSX version. It was predicted by many.
 
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Godfavor

Member
PC, Xsx and xss probably share the same development time as of a single API which is dx12 so if no direct storage is used then no IO optimization would happen in either Xbox or the PC, which even the 4090 and a beast CPU would have some small stutters.

PS5 on the other hand is another story which seems that the IO api is way more mature.
 
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You believed marketing?

Jason Ronald who actually designed the machines was pretty clear before launch that they would let developers decide and that they could lower other graphical effects that didn't affect gameplay, the interview is well known by now.

Also Microsoft is not responsible for third parties and the performance of their games, no more than Sony is when something doesn't run as well on PS.

Yes Forza will be interesting on both consoles but it will prove that the Series S is capable of RT in the right hands.

Microsoft's marketing reaches millions of people. Jason Ronald's tweets, or appearances on a Major Nelson podcast, do not.

What devs choose to do optimizing their games for a system is their choice, you're right on that much. But Atomic Heart is a game Microsoft have marketing rights to; the assumption would be that they'd of given them the help needed to avoid the performance problems that are evident from the launch of the game.

But either Microsoft did not do so, or they did and these problems somehow were unavoidable. I'm leaning to the former, which says a lot about Microsoft's lack of care for helping devs optimize games on their platform when Microsoft can't get exclusivity out of that game. Which is oddly opposite of Sony, who are willing to help devs optimize PS versions of their games if they have marketing rights to them, even if those same games are multiplat Day 1 releases (in fact even the Xbox versions of Callistro Protocol saw benefits from Sony's Visual Arts team helping the dev with mo-cap animations on that game).

If MS threw what help they could but these were still the results, they have fundamental issues with either their APIs, design features in the hardware itself, or both. I hope for their sake Forza Motorsport is a stunner and sets a new visual bar for Series X & S; MS need a win in the "cutting edge visuals" department given the multiplats they've been falling behind on, and the Sony 1P games that have been outpacing their games in areas including (but not limited to) visuals.
 

Riky

$MSFT
Microsoft's marketing reaches millions of people. Jason Ronald's tweets, or appearances on a Major Nelson podcast, do not.

What devs choose to do optimizing their games for a system is their choice, you're right on that much. But Atomic Heart is a game Microsoft have marketing rights to; the assumption would be that they'd of given them the help needed to avoid the performance problems that are evident from the launch of the game.

But either Microsoft did not do so, or they did and these problems somehow were unavoidable. I'm leaning to the former, which says a lot about Microsoft's lack of care for helping devs optimize games on their platform when Microsoft can't get exclusivity out of that game. Which is oddly opposite of Sony, who are willing to help devs optimize PS versions of their games if they have marketing rights to them, even if those same games are multiplat Day 1 releases (in fact even the Xbox versions of Callistro Protocol saw benefits from Sony's Visual Arts team helping the dev with mo-cap animations on that game).

If MS threw what help they could but these were still the results, they have fundamental issues with either their APIs, design features in the hardware itself, or both. I hope for their sake Forza Motorsport is a stunner and sets a new visual bar for Series X & S; MS need a win in the "cutting edge visuals" department given the multiplats they've been falling behind on, and the Sony 1P games that have been outpacing their games in areas including (but not limited to) visuals.

Marketing rights? It's just on Gamepass day one, that has nothing to do with technical support.
Same way Sony had marketing rights for Deathloop and yet the Series X version ran better.
You're literally creating a scenario, there is no evidence whatsoever that MS had any input in the making of the game, please provide it. To then pretend this is some sort of fault with the hardware is as sad as you bringing up what people said post launch earlier in the thread, that's an old take that has been disproved several times. People were saying exactly that at the launch of Dirt 5 remember, then it simply got patched.

You can find as many Series X multiplats if not more than run better, falling behind is a delusion, it's just not a big deal because it's expected of Series X.

We've seen with Forza Horizon 5 with a full 4k 60fps locked and open world that they can outpace anyone, I'm sure Forza Motorsport will take that even further as it's not just a linear last gen game with some graphical bells and whistles added.
 

Mr.Phoenix

Member
PC, Xsx and xss probably share the same development time as of a single API which is dx12 so if no direct storage is used then no IO optimization would happen in either Xbox or the PC, which even the 4090 and a beast CPU would have some small stutters.

PS5 on the other hand is another story which seems that the IO api is way more mature.
This s not a direct storage issue. It's not like you are seeing the game perform identically on PC as it is on the XS consoles.

Stutters on PC have to do with the unreal engine and how it handles shaders on the PC.

People seem to keep forgetting the convoluted memory setup MS went for with the series consoles. That shit probably complicates the shit out of developing anything on those machines.

The issues on the series consoles are clearly about memory management, not IO bandwidth. Don't forget this game is also on past-gen consoles.
Mark Cerny is just a meme really, I love it, it's pretty obvious the xbox and ps5 are almost identical.
Idkbout identical... I like to think of it more like this.

XSX is more powerful. PS5 is more efficient and easier to work with.

Ony devs can say (or show) which of those two options they prefer.
 
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Riky

$MSFT
This s not a direct storage issue. It's not like you are seeing the game perform identically on PC as it is on the XS consoles.

Stutters on PC have to do with the unreal engine and how it handles shaders on the PC.

People seem to keep forgetting the convoluted memory setup MS went for with the series consoles. That shit probably complicates the shit out of developing anything on those machines.

The issues on the series consoles are clearly about memory management, not IO bandwidth. Don't forget this game is also on past-gen consoles.

Idkbout identical... I like to think of it more like this.

XSX is more powerful. PS5 is more efficient and easier to work with.

Ony devs can say (or show) which of those two options they prefer.

The memory setup on the Series S isn't the same as Series X, it's 2gb reserved for the OS and the faster 8gb for the developer, they have no access to the slower 2gb, Microsoft stated this, so that disproves that theory.
 

01011001

Banned
Dude are you serious? You have HUNDREDS of developers with issues working with DX12, the only common denominator here is DirectX12, not the devs being lazy. Christ, what a stretch.

DX12 is defacto the only API used in modern games with only a tiny handful using others like Vulkan or some games that aren't pushing tech still using DX11

that's like saying "don't you see! it's flat panel displays that are the issue!"

if 99% of all games use DX12 and some games have issues, you can't deduct from that that DX12 is an issue.
 

Godfavor

Member
This s not a direct storage issue. It's not like you are seeing the game perform identically on PC as it is on the XS consoles.

Stutters on PC have to do with the unreal engine and how it handles shaders on the PC.

People seem to keep forgetting the convoluted memory setup MS went for with the series consoles. That shit probably complicates the shit out of developing anything on those machines.

The issues on the series consoles are clearly about memory management, not IO bandwidth. Don't forget this game is also on past-gen consoles.

Idkbout identical... I like to think of it more like this.

XSX is more powerful. PS5 is more efficient and easier to work with.

Ony devs can say (or show) which of those two options they prefer.
It is not a direct storage issue, as direct storage is not used at all... this has nothing to do with split memory as well. And PC just brute force the game to minimize the stutterings, it's quite obvious that PC with slower CPUs would have stuttered way more.

The elevator section which slows down to 30fps when nothing happens on screen clearly shows streaming problems and disproves your point
 

Mr.Phoenix

Member
The memory setup on the Series S isn't the same as Series X, it's 2gb reserved for the OS and the faster 8gb for the developer, they have no access to the slower 2gb, Microsoft stated this, so that disproves that theory.
Nope.

When I say convoluted memory setup with XS consoles, what I mean is...8GB for XSS, 10 + 6GB or XSX vs 13/14GB for PS5.

On XSS, not only do you have significantly less memory than the two premium consoles, your overall bandwidth is 224GB/s. Not only less than half that of the XSX and the PS5, but even less than that of the XB1X. On XSX, this is even worse, because now you have two independent memory banks. 10GB at 560GB/s, and 6GB at 336GB/s.

That is an all-around convoluted architecture. And it will be a nightmare for devs to build out to. Especially when you consider that when optimizing any engine for any specific platform, one of the most important optimizations is memory management. It doesn't matter how fast or powerful your cores are if its taking you significantly more time and work to get tasks to them to run in the first place.
 

Mr.Phoenix

Member
It is not a direct storage issue, as direct storage is not used at all... this has nothing to do with split memory as well. And PC just brute force the game to minimize the stutterings, it's quite obvious that PC with slower CPUs would have stuttered way more.

The elevator section which slows down to 30fps when nothing happens on screen clearly shows streaming problems and disproves your point
Where did I say this had to do with direct storage? I am sure I said direct storage had nothing do with it.

And how do you not see that you are just making my point for me? Anyway, thanks.
 

Hugare

Member
They do this a lot. Especially Tom.
Wasnt Tom analyzing it, it was Oliver

You'll believe some user over a guy who does this for a living

90% of the games nowadays use DRS anyways. So maybe it looks less sharp on some scenes, better in others. Hard to tell.

Plus FSR usually on top. Counting pixels is a thing of the past.

What matters is if its sharp enough or not, and IQ looks great on Series X
 

Riky

$MSFT
Nope.

When I say convoluted memory setup with XS consoles, what I mean is...8GB for XSS, 10 + 6GB or XSX vs 13/14GB for PS5.

On XSS, not only do you have significantly less memory than the two premium consoles, your overall bandwidth is 224GB/s. Not only less than half that of the XSX and the PS5, but even less than that of the XB1X. On XSX, this is even worse, because now you have two independent memory banks. 10GB at 560GB/s, and 6GB at 336GB/s.

That is an all-around convoluted architecture. And it will be a nightmare for devs to build out to. Especially when you consider that when optimizing any engine for any specific platform, one of the most important optimizations is memory management. It doesn't matter how fast or powerful your cores are if its taking you significantly more time and work to get tasks to them to run in the first place.

Only the GPU can see the memory difference and the slower memory is again reserved for the OS and the balance on Series X used for CPU and Audio. I'm sure DF said that the Series X actually has more available memory for developers as it reserves less.

The Series S has the advantage of GDDR6 over the One X and normally outputs at much lower resolutions so doesn't need that the same throughput. When resolution matched in games with One X like Ori, Halo Infinite 60fps etc Series S always outperforms One X.
 

Godfavor

Member
Where did I say this had to do with direct storage? I am sure I said direct storage had nothing do with it.

And how do you not see that you are just making my point for me? Anyway, thanks.
You implied that direct storage is not the culprit (which both you and me agree on, as it is not used) but the split memory bandwidth and that's false as I have explained that the game stutters in the elevator area.

Edit: What would have happened if the 10gb bandwidth gets bottlenecked is heavy stutters in scenes with a lot of effects in place (like transparencies) or a lot of high rez textures on screen
 
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aries_71

Junior Member
I’m shelving this for the moment, pretty disgusted. Playing 1.0.2.0 latest XSX patch and videos are not even playing on the wall monitors or TV on the safe rooms. That’s nothing to do with DirectX, hardware or other generally stupid warrior Gaf takes. Dev must know these videos are not playing and still decided to release the game for Xbox in such state. Their QA would not miss such a blatant issue. They just didn't dedicate enough time to iron out the issues on Xbox. If this is what MS gets with their deals, I’m afraid they are laughing on their faces.

edit: also, neuromodules are not dropping on the Xbox and windows version. Devs are working on a patch. Pretty sad, to be honest.
 
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Godfavor

Member
What do you mean it's not used?
It's a dx12 ultimate feature which was announced to be implemented late 2022. No game that I know uses it except from returnal. It uses GPU decompression on the fly to avoid stutters when streaming data from the SSD. XBOX has a dedicated hardware for it which frees CPU and GPU from that work
 
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Mr Moose

Member
It's a dx12 ultimate feature which was announced to be implemented late 2022. It uses GPU decompression on the fly to avoid stutters when streaming data from the SSD. XBOX has a dedicated hardware for it which frees CPU and GPU from that work
Are you saying this game doesn't use it on Xbox or...?
 
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winjer

Gold Member
Only the GPU can see the memory difference and the slower memory is again reserved for the OS and the balance on Series X used for CPU and Audio. I'm sure DF said that the Series X actually has more available memory for developers as it reserves less.

The Series S has the advantage of GDDR6 over the One X and normally outputs at much lower resolutions so doesn't need that the same throughput. When resolution matched in games with One X like Ori, Halo Infinite 60fps etc Series S always outperforms One X.

GDDR6 has nothing to do with it. In fact, the One X has a lot more memory bandwidth than the Series S. 326.4 GB/s vs 224.0 GB/s
The diference is that RDNA2 is a tile based rendered architecture, but the One X is a tradicional renderer. This saves a lot in accesses to memory.
The Series S also has more L2 cache, which also saves on memory accesses.
 

Mr.Phoenix

Member
Only the GPU can see the memory difference and the slower memory is again reserved for the OS and the balance on Series X used for CPU and Audio. I'm sure DF said that the Series X actually has more available memory for developers as it reserves less.

The Series S has the advantage of GDDR6 over the One X and normally outputs at much lower resolutions so doesn't need that the same throughput. When resolution matched in games with One X like Ori, Halo Infinite 60fps etc Series S always outperforms One X.
Errr... when resolution matched between One X and series S the reason the S outperforms because of the better CPU.

Data doesn't care if you are on GDDR5/6/6x.... it only cares about bandwidth. The One X has more memory bandwidth than the series S. There is NO. ZERO, memory advantage of the series S over the one X. Pease, don't say this outside these forums..

If you are taking caches or rendering architecture, that's a different matter. But that's not what we are talking about here.
 
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Mr.Phoenix

Member
You implied that direct storage is not the culprit (which both you and me agree on, as it is not used) but the split memory bandwidth and that's false as I have explained that the game stutters in the elevator area.

Edit: What would have happened if the 10gb bandwidth gets bottlenecked is heavy stutters in scenes with a lot of effects in place (like transparencies) or a lot of high rez textures on screen
Watch the DF video again. The Series X isn't just stuttering. It has prolonged periods of running at a much lower framerate. A stutter can be due to an access miss or something. Running at a lower FPS for prolonged durations of time speaks more to RAM or its availability. It means the entire engine is getting bottlenecked somehow. We know it's not a raster bottleneck, it also isnt an IO bottleneck being that the game is on the previous-gen consoles too. That leaves memory being the only possible culprit. And what is the only difference between the memory on the PS5 and that of the XS consoles?
 

Lysandros

Member
I relied on this report:

https://www.eurogamer.net/heres-how-much-power-your-consoles-use-and-how-much-that-costs-in-the-uk

I don't know if it's up to date but according to this Eurogamer report, XSX consumes less power when running the same game, when iddle and when using media applications. In sleep mode, mode in which PS5 consume less, Xbox is more efficient while downloading a game.
That's to be expected when every single PS5 GPU component is running 22% faster compared to XSX counterparts. Additional speed isn't free.
 

Mr.Phoenix

Member
I’m shelving this for the moment, pretty disgusted. Playing 1.0.2.0 latest XSX patch and videos are not even playing on the wall monitors or TV on the safe rooms. That’s nothing to do with DirectX, hardware or other generally stupid warrior Gaf takes. Dev must know these videos are not playing and still decided to release the game for Xbox in such state. Their QA would not miss such a blatant issue. They just didn't dedicate enough time to iron out the issues on Xbox. If this is what MS gets with their deals, I’m afraid they are laughing on their faces.
So you are saying that the most logical explanation is that these devs collected MS GP money and just set out to fuck them over right?

Ok.Got it.

I personally have my money on that sony paid them more than MS, just to have the game run poorly on the XS consoles.
 

Godfavor

Member
Watch the DF video again. The Series X isn't just stuttering. It has prolonged periods of running at a much lower framerate. A stutter can be due to an access miss or something. Running at a lower FPS for prolonged durations of time speaks more to RAM or its availability. It means the entire engine is getting bottlenecked somehow. We know it's not a raster bottleneck, it also isnt an IO bottleneck being that the game is on the previous-gen consoles too. That leaves memory being the only possible culprit. And what is the only difference between the memory on the PS5 and that of the XS consoles?
I was commenting on the load stutters which were the big dips.

The culprit for reduced fps on gameplay is something else as you have said. I am not sure how much memory does the game require, we can observe memory utilization on a PC running the game on console equivalent settings (high I assume?) If it is above 10gb in 4k then you are right, as some of the stutters could be related to the memory amount.

Of it could be CU utilization as another difference between PS5 and XBOX, Cerny said that less CUs are more easily fed.

EDIT: Saw a video running 4k ultra setting and was up to 9.8 gb vram with a 4090. Pretty sure Xbox is not using ultra settings. So it is unlikely that the game goes above 10gb on XSX
 
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Lysandros

Member
Some side by side scenes show noticeably softer image on XSX (seemed quite obvious), i suspect it is running at slightly lower resolution compared to PS5 at these moments. To be confirmed on Vgtech or NXgamer's analysis.
 

Riky

$MSFT
Errr... when resolution matched between One X and series S the reason the S outperforms because of the better CPU.

Data doesn't care if you are on GDDR5/6/6x.... it only cares about bandwidth. The One X has more memory bandwidth than the series S. There is NO. ZERO, memory advantage of the series S over the one X. Pease, don't say this outside these forums..

If you are taking caches or rendering architecture, that's a different matter. But that's not what we are talking about here.

Nobody is debating the bandwidth difference, which is needed when the One X is pushing up to 4k, the Series S simply isn't designed to do that. I don't see what any of this has to do with this game though.
I've just started tonight playing the game with my VRR counter on the latest patch and the only drops I'm seeing are during cutscenes which is when I presume loading is taking place. Even that elevator section now seems to be running a lot better but you can't actually do anything whilst that's happening so its pretty irrelevant.
The latest patch seems to allow the game to play out at 60fps in gameplay.
 

Polygonal_Sprite

Gold Member
This seems to be the trend since the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro where Xbox goes for more pixels at the expense of a stable framerate. More aggressive dynamic resolution lower bounds needed as always. Frustrating because as someone with both I was going to play it on GP. I’ll be waiting now and will probably pick it up for PS5 in a half off sale as I much prefer the PS5 controller and UI.
 

01011001

Banned
Developers with billions of dollars behind them struggle to make their shitty games not stutter on PC - then a random Russian developer comes along and makes a near flawless experience on their first try. This industry is embarassing.

small teams work on games due to passion,
big teams work on games because their boss told them so.

see Hi-Fi Rush, smaller project directed by a guy that really wanted to make this game... it's UE4, it's DX12, it has basically zero stutters
 
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Some side by side scenes show noticeably softer image on XSX (seemed quite obvious), i suspect it is running at slightly lower resolution compared to PS5 at these moments. To be confirmed on Vgtech or NXgamer's analysis.
I noticed the softer image immediately but it could be a bug with resolution scaling
 

Thebonehead

Banned
DLSS 2 looking better than native 4K.

Damn that’s impressive.
Yeah what a fantastic algorithm

Sadly drowned out by the cesspit warriors fighting their battles on here.

Perhaps I should relent and finally start blocking the turds on here. It's painful to use this forum again
 
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