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[DF] Oddworld Soulstorm: The Digital Foundry Tech Review - PS5/ PC/ PS4 Pro/ PS4
hemo memo
Member
Unity
GHG
Member
Unity.
Fake
Member
Christ... I hate this engine.
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Md Ray
Member
Why?
It's just that Unity continues to be a terrible engine, for consoles atleastCan't help but feel that they're underutilizing the PS5's hardware running at 1440p60. They could have maybe provided a 1800p-4K 60fps option which would've cleaned up those shimmering a bit... Or a 120fps option while rendering at 1440p. Because on PC with a 3070 the game's comfortably hitting 120fps at 1440p, max settings with ~50% GPU time to spare in most cases. Perhaps the game gets more demanding in the later sections? Dunno.
Kuranghi
Member
Can't help but feel that they're underutilizing the PS5's hardware running at 1440p60. They could have maybe provided a 1800p-4K 60fps option which would've cleaned up those shimmering a bit... Or a 120fps option while rendering at 1440p. Because on PC with a 3070 the game's comfortably hitting 120fps at 1440p, max settings with ~50% GPU time to spare in most cases. Perhaps the game gets more demanding in the later sections? Dunno.
Fucking Unity is a piece of shit, I hate it.
GPU/CPU usage doesn't scale well with resolution increase in Unity, so even though you can do 120hz at 1440p on a 3070, what fps does it average for 4K? I bet its under 60fps sometimes.
edit - okay i got carried away its not a piece of shit lol, but I don't like it: Weird stutters I can't ever solve no matter what, forced borderless fullscreen sometimes which is a big cause of the stutters, bad GPU/CPU scaling when trying to run games at 60fps and/or native 4K.
To this day Outer Wilds runs like crap and its not acknowledged. Its the same for me at 720p + lowest settings as it is at 4K + max settings. Random stutter when turning even through GPU/CPU/Disk usage is nowhere near max.
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Bernd Lauert
Banned
Crash 4 is a boring comparison. Get over it.
Fake
Member
Performance on most of those games are bad. I remember Deadly Premoniton 2 was the last Unity Engine game I saw, and by far the worst of all.
Md Ray
Member
At 4K, it's close to 80fps mostly and sometimes it's even 100-110fps like in that exact same scene:
Bernd Lauert
Banned
Btw, for the people who are shitting on Unity, Ori 2 runs at 6K60 (yes, 6K) and 4K120.
Kuranghi
Member
That was Unity?! That explains why perf was so awful then: An open world game in (on?) the Unity engine, programmed by people who aren't very technically ept = nightmare scenario lol
Krappadizzle
Member
Can't help but feel that they're underutilizing the PS5's hardware running at 1440p60. They could have maybe provided a 1800p-4K 60fps option which would've cleaned up those shimmering a bit... Or a 120fps option while rendering at 1440p. Because on PC with a 3070 the game's comfortably hitting 120fps at 1440p, max settings with ~50% GPU time to spare in most cases. Perhaps the game gets more demanding in the later sections? Dunno.
More than likely less GPU bound and way more CPU bound on PS5 due to physics. It's why games on PS5 that have/use physics heavily have major dips on the hardware. Even then, probably not enough of an issue for the average player. Also, not sure what you do know about the history of Unity, but it's not had a great track record in performance for a long time, so the fact that it performs as well as it does across all the platforms is more of a surprise to me than anything. Unity has notoriously bad performance throughout it's history.
Unity is mostly fine for 2D artwork based games, but you start running 3D shit and it's been historically awful. Ori is the exception, not the rule.
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Kuranghi
Member
Thats one they did manage to optimise, but you know how they did it? They made a dynamic scaling system for the BG layers to stop latency spikes and that solved some of the stuttering, that along with adding exclusive fullscreen that should've been there from the start which was the main cause of bad framepacing (borderless fullscreen) combined with Win10's fullscreen optimisations thingie.
Clarification - I mean thats how they got it running at 6K60 on XSX, the BG scaling. I think they just lowered the quality of the BGs in general to help latency spikes on PC.
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Fake
Member
IDK if I can call Deadly Premonition 2 a open world, but he is indeed using Unity Engine and run most of the time at 0 fps.
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Md Ray
Member
PS5 has a competent CPU this time, it's not like the PS4 or XB1 CPU. Even in physics-heavy scenes, the game is nowhere close to using all of 16 threads on Ryzen. So I don't think that's the issue.
Most likely they're memory bandwidth bound when going above 1440p or they just went the conservative route.
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Kuranghi
Member
I'd like to conduct an experiment, please everyone try this demo of Exo One:
No matter the settings, no matter v-sync is on or off, I get a constant stutter on camera pan in this game, its like the game itself has a half-rate update on the camera motion. I spoke to the dev he said "it might just be the engine" and I was like wtf, how can people not notice that, its awful and ruins the whole experience for me. Makes 60 look like 30 on camera pan.
Please let me know your results. If you perceive no stutter then take an offscreen video of your screen and post it here if you can be bothered. If its just on my end I'll be overjoyed and know its not the engine, but I'm pretty sure it will happen for everyone.
edit - Sorry I never said, its a unity game ofc, I'm really excited for this game and its put a massive dampner on my hype because I won't play it if it runs like that on my PC. Console might not be affected but its not on PS...
Please let me know your results. If you perceive no stutter then take an offscreen video of your screen and post it here if you can be bothered. If its just on my end I'll be overjoyed and know its not the engine, but I'm pretty sure it will happen for everyone.
edit - Sorry I never said, its a unity game ofc, I'm really excited for this game and its put a massive dampner on my hype because I won't play it if it runs like that on my PC. Console might not be affected but its not on PS...
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Kuranghi
Member
On console its bad?! Oh god, I thought that was my saving grace after I have on these stuttering problems on PC versions.
Krappadizzle
Member
You're probably mostly right, but Unity+Physics+Console just has a terrible track record. And you're almost assuredly right that they were conservative to keep the framerate stable.
Though, based on the DF analysis, "bad" might be a bit of an overstatement to be honest. Just not as good as it could/should be.
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GHG
Member
I tried it previously and these were my results:
I don't recall there being any stutter though tbh.
Kuranghi
Member
Oh yeah my GPU usage on a GTX 1080 FTW was around 70-80% at 4K60 max settings (Except depth of field because I disliked the implementation), there was no reason why it should've been doing this with v-sync on or off. I tried every thing I know of to fix it. I even tried running at 1080p & 1440p @120hz and using half-rate v-sync + an fps cap and it would fix it for a few minutes and then revert back to this "stutter on pan" problem. I think its something to do with how the engine is handling sync, it keeps grabbing it back from external programs (Sorry I'm not very technical about this, I'm not an expert) and introducing this stutter.
I searched high and low through everything installed on my PC to see if an old external prog was applying an fps cap or v-syncing that I didnt know about and couldn't find anything.
My phone is a piece of crap so not sure I can capture it myself, I'll try to find a way though. I wouldn't complain like this if it was pedant shit like a frametime spike every 10 minutes or loading stutters, its just a constant issue for me and I have no issues in any other games/games engines.
To the gameplay itself I think of it like Abzu, just being in the moment, don't mind that it has "no gameplay" really.
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Krappadizzle
Member
I never had those issues either with that demo. Playing with a 1080ti and a 9700k at 4.2Ghz. Some may have found it boring too, but I thought it was relaxing and quite fun trying to manage rolling efficiently down the hills to get more speed and the visuals and art direction were pretty good imo. Granted I wouldn't really pay more than $15.00 or so for the game, but as a demo, it ran well for me.
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Kuranghi
Member
For my sanity, if one of you beautiful boys could record an offscreen video of the game running for you I'd be eternally greatful. In fact I'll give you GAF Gold for it*.
*Caveat - As long as the camera is capturing the frames on screen properly, need to be able to see whats happening onscreen properly to assess it. Maybe I'm expecting too much that you'll be able to see it through a phone video tbh.
Okay, don't go to the bother of recording a video because I've realised I'm being a wally because its in every direct capture I can find on the internet. I did a search of other peoples captures of the demo and found this, its one of the higher quality (still rubbish but ehh it'll do) and it shows exactly what I mean:
Play that back at 0.2x speed, from the point I've linked, as the the "ball" takes off and goes near the clouds you see the beads of condensation form on the camera, watch them and you can see they smoothly transition between frames as they melt away to nothing, it looks like 60fps in slow motion.
Then when it gets to the part where it turns into a disc keep an eye on the black structures in the BG, there is a visible stutter thats extremely noticeable at this speed and I don't know why that is. Its really noticeable at 1.0x speed for me but 0.2x speed really shows it up.
edit - oh btw if 0.2x isnt available then download this:
Enhancer for YouTube™ – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-GB)
Download Enhancer for YouTube™ for Firefox. Take control of YouTube and boost your user experience!
Curse my stupid fucking eyes, I hate them:
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assurdum
Banned
On pc at least there is a community of mods which can improve it. On console you get what they give to you.
Krappadizzle
Member
Well, I just downloaded it and tried it again, GFE fps doesn't seem to hook properly so I didn't see the fps with that but the Steam overlay fps varied between 115-140 fps and I'm playing at 3440x1440 G-sync with V-sync off, so I dunno...No issues that I could really see, ran pretty damn smoothly for me. Are you sure you're not confusing asset streaming with micro stuttering?
Kuranghi
Member
Nope not at all, there was a asset streaming stutter for me when the images of the astronauts load as you enter clouds for the first time but the camera pan stutter is constant for me. The overlay shows a constant 60fps when this stutter is happening for me, I don't think its related to the usual things that would cause stutter like maxing out GPU usage.
What do you think of the video I added to my earlier post? I feel like I'm alone in seeing this, fuck sake.
I even spoke to the dev (singular, its just one guy afaik) and asked if its an effect to simulate being inside the craft, like the "video feed" from the craft isn't perfect, like a video filter over something to make it seem like old video, but he said no such effects are added.
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Krappadizzle
Member
Yeah, dev is just one guy. And just watching you're video, yeah I see what you are talking about. No such issue for me, though to be fair, I didn't pan the camera around a crazy amount, I did a bit when I first started the demo but when I noticed that you didn't really need to do it, I just stopped doing it. But again, I didn't run into the same micro-stuttering you're having in that video.
Kuranghi
Member
Well I'm glad at least you see what I see in the video, I can't not notice that at normal speed while playing, its awful to me
MasterCornholio
Member
Can't help but feel that they're underutilizing the PS5's hardware running at 1440p60. They could have maybe provided a 1800p-4K 60fps option which would've cleaned up those shimmering a bit... Or a 120fps option while rendering at 1440p. Because on PC with a 3070 the game's comfortably hitting 120fps at 1440p, max settings with ~50% GPU time to spare in most cases. Perhaps the game gets more demanding in the later sections? Dunno.
John did mention that it was a small team and the developers didn't have time to do some things. Maybe a higher resolution is possible but it would really more time from them. That's all that I can thing of.
MasterCornholio
Member
Duchess
Member
Crash 4 is using Unreal Engine 4. A proper game engine, basically.
Kuranghi
Member
Any idea what Crash remake trilogy runs on? That game has horrendous input lag on console (This was PS5 as well, with 10ms lower controller lag than PS4) for me and I couldn't even play it. Will play on PC (or PS5 when they increase the cap to 60).
The Pathless is UE4, is 30fps in fidelity mode and the input lag is so much better for me.
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Duchess
Member
Apparently, it's an in-house engine called Alchemy.
I wonder what engine do they use? :: Crash Bandicoot™ N. Sane Trilogy General Discussions
Sony homebrew or ue4, because at times is sure looks like ue4 lighting. As with ue3, all ue4 games have the same "feel", since not all devs rewrite the renderer enough during production.
Kuranghi
Member
Apparently, it's an in-house engine called Alchemy.
I wonder what engine do they use? :: Crash Bandicoot™ N. Sane Trilogy General Discussions
Sony homebrew or ue4, because at times is sure looks like ue4 lighting. As with ue3, all ue4 games have the same "feel", since not all devs rewrite the renderer enough during production.steamcommunity.com
Thanks mate, I couldn't find results myself.
In that thread a guy says "I believe its Unity Engine" and linked to a fansite page thats now a 404, so it might be Unity Engine then...
VFXVeteran
Banned
You can't compare a 3000-series board with the PS5 hardware. The Ampere boards are more than a generation ahead of the 2000-series boards. Perhaps it's simply a matter of having limited pixel shader bandwidth. If all these games coming out on the consoles could hit higher native resolutions and 60FPS, they would have done so. I don't see where any company would intentionally NOT use the GPUs abilities simply because.Can't help but feel that they're underutilizing the PS5's hardware running at 1440p60. They could have maybe provided a 1800p-4K 60fps option which would've cleaned up those shimmering a bit... Or a 120fps option while rendering at 1440p. Because on PC with a 3070 the game's comfortably hitting 120fps at 1440p, max settings with ~50% GPU time to spare in most cases. Perhaps the game gets more demanding in the later sections? Dunno.
S0ULZB0URNE
Member
Oh look it's his partner!
S0ULZB0URNE
Member
ToolsCan't help but feel that they're underutilizing the PS5's hardware running at 1440p60. They could have maybe provided a 1800p-4K 60fps option which would've cleaned up those shimmering a bit... Or a 120fps option while rendering at 1440p. Because on PC with a 3070 the game's comfortably hitting 120fps at 1440p, max settings with ~50% GPU time to spare in most cases. Perhaps the game gets more demanding in the later sections? Dunno.
The Pleasure
Member
I thought Canadian humor was banned on GAF.
It's a remake of the second game in the serie, so it's a direct sequel to Oddworld New 'n Tasty, which is a remake of the first game.
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Heisenberg007
Gold Journalism
Do I need to play New 'n Tasty or will I get all the important story elements and character motivations if I just start with Oddworld?
Bo_Hazem
Banned
I think it's better to start with the first one. Just be careful it can be pretty hard so starting with Normal would be advisable as you can't change it in the first one.
Mister Wolf
Member
The shitshow that is unity. Buy hey it must be cheaper for the developer to use so its all good.
sncvsrtoip
Member
yes, 5700xt running around 60fps at 4k, it must be one of worst ps5 implementationCan't help but feel that they're underutilizing the PS5's hardware running at 1440p60. They could have maybe provided a 1800p-4K 60fps option which would've cleaned up those shimmering a bit... Or a 120fps option while rendering at 1440p. Because on PC with a 3070 the game's comfortably hitting 120fps at 1440p, max settings with ~50% GPU time to spare in most cases. Perhaps the game gets more demanding in the later sections? Dunno.
