• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

[Digital Foundry] Immortals of Aveum PS5/Xbox Series X/S: Unreal Engine 5 is Pushed Hard - And Image Quality Suffers

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
More stuff from the greatest developer of all time! (it would be hilarious if this is some gaffer who is pulling our chain all this time)

The 5GB/s NVME speeds on the PS5 are a huge part of why UE5 works so well - especially nanite which is just streaming ALL.THE.TIME. But the higher bandwidth GDDR6 that it uses for ram and the 256bit bus is also a very hero there. Throughput is just really good.

So yeah, pound for pound the consoles are hard to beat.

As for the perf tool - the synthetic benchmark is something Epic wrote. Its really GPU oriented. IIRC it does like 8 GPU tests with various weights vs like one single core test on the CPU.

SMA and Resizable Bar both help but those are both about getting data to the GPU faster and won't really factor into the CPU rating.

We are actually in the middle of trying to figure out if there is a better version of testing the CPU and figuring the cost. Right now the minspec 9700k scores around a 185 and my 2 primary development machines (5950x 4.45 all core and 12900k stock) don't score all that much better. 220-240 depending on what else I have running. So that isn't really all that helpful for trying to determine average FPS or low 1%. We are working on it. Please give us time. This whole thing is pretty new.

I'll keep checking back if you have more questions. I love talking about game development and Immortals so this is a good time.

He is willing to answer more questions so he's almost definitely fake because devs are typically never this open or accommodating. But go on and ask this dude any questions you all might have.
 

onQ123

Member
More stuff from the greatest developer of all time! (it would be hilarious if this is some gaffer who is pulling our chain all this time)







He is willing to answer more questions so he's almost definitely fake because devs are typically never this open or accommodating. But go on and ask this dude any questions you all might have.
Devs from smaller teams love to talk lol only problem is when someone make a thread about the information that they give it gets locked & forgotten.
 
By the way i truly hope that "despite being close in hardware specs, the PS5 is a little better so we pushed fidelity a little more" part won't cause any trouble for the developer, that was perhaps too plain of a statement.

Same it's very rare when devs open up like this to clarify things. Just hope nobody mistreats them because I would like to see more from devs in the future.
 

Zathalus

Member
More stuff from the greatest developer of all time! (it would be hilarious if this is some gaffer who is pulling our chain all this time)







He is willing to answer more questions so he's almost definitely fake because devs are typically never this open or accommodating. But go on and ask this dude any questions you all might have.
I take issue with the statement "UE5 works so well". Dropping to 40fps and running at 720p is not what I would call working well at all.

And that's with software lumen. Hardware lumen would drop the resolution to under 600p.
 
wait a minute, watching the video and reading articles with the likes of Eurogamer and others, seems that Series X has higher fps but the image on the PS5 is sharper (better), is that right??
 

shamoomoo

Member
I take issue with the statement "UE5 works so well". Dropping to 40fps and running at 720p is not what I would call working well at all.

And that's with software lumen. Hardware lumen would drop the resolution to under 600p.
Remember,UE5 is still relatively new being refined to making shipping games with and having a lot of dynamic shit to make the world seem more alive.
 

sinnergy

Member
I take issue with the statement "UE5 works so well". Dropping to 40fps and running at 720p is not what I would call working well at all.

And that's with software lumen. Hardware lumen would drop the resolution to under 600p.
It is one dev and 1 game with all features .. learning this stuff on a industry level will take time .
 

Zuzu

Member
He posted some ini settings for the consoles. Quote:

“For the PS5 here are some of the changes we have in the device profile.

; Baseline

+CVars=r.SecondaryScreenPercentage.GameViewport=50 +CVars=r.PostProcessing.QuarterResolutionDownsample=1 +CVars=r.RenderTargetPoolMin=600 +CVars=r.LumenScene.SurfaceCache.CardMaxResolution=256 +CVars=r.Bloom.ScreenPercentage=25 +CVars=r.Lumen.Reflections.DownsampleFactor=3 +CVars=r.FreeSkeletalMeshBuffers=1 +CVars=r.SupportReversedIndexBuffers=0 +CVars=r.SupportDepthOnlyIndexBuffers=0

; Scalability Groups +CVars=sg.GlobalIlluminationQuality=2 +CVars=sg.AtmosphereQuality=2 ; CVars here used to be part of GI quality

+CVars=r.Lumen.Reflections.TraceMeshSDFs=0 ; Trace the global SDF instead +CVars=r.LumenScene.FastCameraMode=1 ; use less texel density, but update more frequently +CVars=r.Bloom.AsyncCompute=1

+CVars=r.LocalExposure=1 +CVars=r.LightShaftQuality=1

; Newly added skylight resolution CVar +CVars=ASC.SkylightMaxCubemapResolution=512

For the X we have

; Baseline

+CVars=r.SecondaryScreenPercentage.GameViewport=50 +CVars=r.PostProcessing.QuarterResolutionDownsample=1 +CVars=r.LumenScene.SurfaceCache.CardMaxResolution=256 +CVars=r.Bloom.ScreenPercentage=25 +CVars=r.Lumen.Reflections.DownsampleFactor=3 +CVars=r.FreeSkeletalMeshBuffers=1 +CVars=r.SupportReversedIndexBuffers=0 +CVars=r.SupportDepthOnlyIndexBuffers=0 +CVars=r.SSR.HalfResSceneColor=0 ; This can cause a crash if set to 1 +CVars=r.Lumen.Reflections.TraceMeshSDFs=0 ; Trace the global SDF instead +CVars=r.LumenScene.FastCameraMode=1 ; use less texel density, but update more frequently +CVars=r.Bloom.AsyncCompute=1 +CVars=r.FidelityFX.FSR2.Sharpness=0 ; To avoid artifacts

; Newly added skylight resolution CVars +CVars=ASC.SkylightMaxCubemapResolution=512

as well as the X specific overrides

[XSX_Anaconda DeviceProfile]

DeviceType=XSX BaseProfileName=XSX +CVars=r.SecondaryScreenPercentage.GameViewport=50 ; We want a 1080p secondary screen viewport +CVars=sg.ViewDistanceQuality=3 +CVars=sg.AntiAliasingQuality=3 +CVars=sg.PostProcessQuality=3 +CVars=sg.TextureQuality=3 +CVars=sg.EffectsQuality=3 +CVars=sg.FoliageQuality=3 +CVars=sg.ShadowQuality=2 +CVars=sg.ShadowResolutionQuality=2 +CVars=sg.ShadowMeshQuality=2 +CVars=sg.ShadingQuality=3 +CVars=sg.GlobalIlluminationQuality=2 +CVars=sg.AtmosphereQuality=2 +CVars=r.Streaming.MaxEffectiveScreenSize=1080 +CVars=r.Streaming.PoolSize=4096 ; Overkill but necessary to avoid pool overflow (perf hit) and has not been known to cause emergency memory pressure ; Virtual texture pools in XSXEngine.ini are scaled to XSS ; Here we make sure to configure the pool scalability to better fit the XSX +CVars=r.VT.PoolSizeScale.Group0=4 ; x4 because she's worth it +CVars=r.VT.PoolSizeScale.Group1=4 +CVars=r.VT.PoolSizeScale.Group2=4 ; There are only 3 groups that we can scale

+CVars=r.LocalExposure=1 +CVars=r.LightShaftQuality=1

There is a bit more spread over a few other files but that should give you and idea of what we are dealing with.”
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
How do we know it was all fake?
He is fake because he says ps5 is better and Adam’s Apple is butthurt.

In all seriousness. We don’t know. Seems real to me. Profile on Reddit for 1 year. Only member of unreal and immortals Reddit.

Edit: anyway I asked him for more details. Let’s see.
 
Last edited:

RoadHazard

Gold Member
XSS is hilarious. XSX is sad, PS5 even sadder.

Looks like UE5 games really need to be 30fps on these consoles, because this image quality and framerate consistency just isn't good enough. The game doesn't even look that great anyway, not sure what exactly UE5 is really bringing to the table here.

PS5 Pro now please.
 

Darsxx82

Member
I take issue with the statement "UE5 works so well". Dropping to 40fps and running at 720p is not what I would call working well at all.
Not only that, what is shocking is that it insinuates that the performance of PS5 gave it a chance to upload settings when the reality is that what this version asks for is the opposite. In fact, it is clearly the worst in terms of framerate.

The logic would be to bet on the opposite option. The other option would be that this improvement of settings to PS5 was coming out for free, which is something that I highly doubt.

It is also surprising how, in the interview with DF, when talking about async-compute there is always a reason to applaud and congratulate oneself for the plus and it improves when it works in conjunction with DirectStorage, even when referring to the situation on consoles. Never mention a PS5 when it's supposed to be the one to praise.

It still doesn't add up to me either that he almost ensured that XSX would close that settings/IQ gap with a future patch when the supposed causes shouldn't be solvable in principle (depending on less usable ram and less async capability). What will be the solution? Raise the settings/IQ in XSX and make the framerate worse? Simple optimization? If it's the latter then what he is asserting is less optimization time on XSX.

And finally, it is shocking that in all his answers he is focusing on PS5 and applauding its specificities and go so long to explain those of XSX. It's like he was only interested in focused on his work on PS5. There, he even no difference PS5 with "consoles" in the plural...
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
XSS is hilarious. XSX is sad, PS5 even sadder.

Looks like UE5 games really need to be 30fps on these consoles, because this image quality and framerate consistency just isn't good enough. The game doesn't even look that great anyway, not sure what exactly UE5 is really bringing to the table here.

PS5 Pro now please.
I am sure with enough time, 60fps could be more stable and resolution could be higher.
Maybe next versions of unreal.
 
Fuck me, so it turns out the dev is fake?

How did we fall for this?

It depends on what you want to believe. At the moment I don't know what's going on. I'm going to wait and see if anything happens.

Edit: If anything I would say the dev would say something if this can actually harm them. Pretty sure they don't want anyone to think they are breaking NDAs.
 
Last edited:
If this is UE5 working well on PS5 I'm very glad I can afford a PC as this looks and runs like shit.

Pound for pound maybe a good result Vs PC but when the end result on console is ugly IQ full of really obvious artifacts and drops to the 40s with no alternative performance modes I'd say the comparison isn't worth making.
 

Darsxx82

Member
Edit: If anything I would say the dev would say something if this can actually harm them. Pretty sure they don't want anyone to think they are breaking NDAs.
If he is a real developer, he knows full well that he is breaching NDA here with this level of detail. The other option Is that he is stupid o he want to be fine.

You only have to compare with the interview in DF and how restrained they are when it comes to going into certain details.

The logical thing is that there would be a reaction from the Studio asking for forgiveness or (if that is the case) denying the veracity at the moment in which all this spreads and has an effect on social networks and reaches the ears of those involved in the agreement to save professional secrets.
 
If he is a real developer, he knows full well that he is breaching NDA here with this level of detail. The other option Is that he is stupid o he want to be fine.

You only have to compare with the interview in DF and how restrained they are when it comes to going into certain details.

The logical thing is that there would be a reaction from the Studio asking for forgiveness or (if that is the case) denying the veracity at the moment in which all this spreads and has an effect on social networks and reaches the ears of those involved in the agreement to save professional secrets.

Well i have seen some major NDA breaches before like with that Sony engineer. Some people really do spill the beans and there will be consequences to that.

The validity of this will be revealed with time.
 
Last edited:

Lysandros

Member
Well i have seen some major NDA breaches before like with that Sony engineer. Some people really do spill the beans and there will be consequences to that.

The validity of this will be revealed with time.
He might not be breaking any NDAs, he isn't giving the exact RAM amount usable for PS5 and XSX for example. He isn't going that deep about the differences in hardware in async compute. He is mostly sticking to already known data about the systems. That is his perspective and first hand experience which really seems too hard to digest for some. Accusations already begun, like clockwork as always.
 
Last edited:
He might not be breaking any NDAs, he isn't giving the exact RAM amount usable for PS5 and XSX for example. He isn't going that deep about the differences in hardware in async compute. He is mostly sticking to already known data about the systems. That is his perspective and first hand experience which really seems to hard to digest for some. Accusations already begun, like clockwork as always.

That is also true. Many times we claim they are breaking NDA but we really don't know what the NDA consists of. Very possible they are not breaking it and some don't know it.
 

SABRE220

Member
He might not be breaking any NDAs, he isn't giving the exact RAM amount usable for PS5 and XSX for example. He isn't going that deep about the differences in hardware in async compute. He is mostly sticking to already known data about the systems. That is his perspective and first hand experience which really seems to hard to digest for some. Accusations already begun, like clockwork as always.
You already have the usual suspects questioning his statements and his competence because they don't align with their preferred preconceived notions. They will go after the guys rep instead of contemplating the possibility that they could be wrong.

War..war never changes.:lollipop_fire:
War Attack GIF by INTO ACTION
 
More stuff from the greatest developer of all time! (it would be hilarious if this is some gaffer who is pulling our chain all this time)







He is willing to answer more questions so he's almost definitely fake because devs are typically never this open or accommodating. But go on and ask this dude any questions you all might have.

I felt a great disturbance in the force when reading this... as if a million narratives cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
 
Last edited:

Zathalus

Member
Are people saying the problem is actually UE5? Because that seems to be the problem. Marginal features at an incredible cost.
The issue is that Nanite and Lumen are incredibly compute heavy and the consoles simply can't keep up.

Using all the latest features and hardware Lumen will force the consoles to run at 720-900p, even at 30fps.

UE5 feels like it was developed for the PS6 and next Xbox in mind. PC is the only platform that can do it justice at the moment.
 

avin

Member
How does lowering the resolution help with compute-heavy requirements? I wouldn't have thought something like Lumen would care much.

avin
 
Last edited:

Mr.Phoenix

Member
How does lowering the resolution help with compute-heavy requirements? I wouldn't have thought something like Lumen would care much.

avin
No matter your engine, or your resolution... EVERYTHING you do has to fit within a specific render time to hit any given framerate. And while for whatever reason this always gets ignored, every part of a system, GPU, RAM, Cache, IO...etc contributes to that render time. So if you have something in your engine that takes up say.. 10ms of a targeted 33ms frame budget, you may have to cut back on something else to stay within budget.

Unfortunately, resolution is usually the easiest and most effective thing to cut back on. Because its usually tied to so many different systems in any engine. That is more so here with UE5 than probably any other engine on the market because all its virtualized systems are tied to pixels. Starting from its geometry to lighting, shadows....hell even textures. And it's a streaming heavy engine.
 

adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
He hasn't replied to the ini post since yesterday, I think the publisher ninja's got to him lol


edit: he did, nice.
 
Last edited:
He hasn't replied to the ini post since yesterday, I think the publisher ninja's got to him lol

If true that would confirm that he isn't a fake. Which depending on who you are could be either good or bad news.

Edit: We will just have to wait and see how long this lasts.
 
Last edited:

adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
If true that would confirm that he isn't a fake. Which depending on who you are could be either good or bad news.

Edit: We will just have to wait and see how long this lasts.

He has replied, here's the ini configs he posted.

This is mostly greek to me but just eye-balling it looks like the parameters are almost entirely identical between the two, barring some specific console level ini lines thta are in one but not the other.

Like, the Xbox section has a view distance and anti aliasing ini line, of course the PS5 would use them too but they're not written in the PS5 section, and some settings vice versa.

For the PS5 here are some of the changes we have in the device profile.

; Baseline

+CVars=r.SecondaryScreenPercentage.GameViewport=50 +CVars=r.PostProcessing.QuarterResolutionDownsample=1 +CVars=r.RenderTargetPoolMin=600 +CVars=r.LumenScene.SurfaceCache.CardMaxResolution=256 +CVars=r.Bloom.ScreenPercentage=25 +CVars=r.Lumen.Reflections.DownsampleFactor=3 +CVars=r.FreeSkeletalMeshBuffers=1 +CVars=r.SupportReversedIndexBuffers=0 +CVars=r.SupportDepthOnlyIndexBuffers=0

; Scalability Groups +CVars=sg.GlobalIlluminationQuality=2 +CVars=sg.AtmosphereQuality=2 ; CVars here used to be part of GI quality

+CVars=r.Lumen.Reflections.TraceMeshSDFs=0 ; Trace the global SDF instead +CVars=r.LumenScene.FastCameraMode=1 ; use less texel density, but update more frequently +CVars=r.Bloom.AsyncCompute=1

+CVars=r.LocalExposure=1 +CVars=r.LightShaftQuality=1

; Newly added skylight resolution CVar +CVars=ASC.SkylightMaxCubemapResolution=512

For the X we have

; Baseline

+CVars=r.SecondaryScreenPercentage.GameViewport=50 +CVars=r.PostProcessing.QuarterResolutionDownsample=1 +CVars=r.LumenScene.SurfaceCache.CardMaxResolution=256 +CVars=r.Bloom.ScreenPercentage=25 +CVars=r.Lumen.Reflections.DownsampleFactor=3 +CVars=r.FreeSkeletalMeshBuffers=1 +CVars=r.SupportReversedIndexBuffers=0 +CVars=r.SupportDepthOnlyIndexBuffers=0 +CVars=r.SSR.HalfResSceneColor=0 ; This can cause a crash if set to 1 +CVars=r.Lumen.Reflections.TraceMeshSDFs=0 ; Trace the global SDF instead +CVars=r.LumenScene.FastCameraMode=1 ; use less texel density, but update more frequently +CVars=r.Bloom.AsyncCompute=1 +CVars=r.FidelityFX.FSR2.Sharpness=0 ; To avoid artifacts

; Newly added skylight resolution CVars +CVars=ASC.SkylightMaxCubemapResolution=512

as well as the X specific overrides

[XSX_Anaconda DeviceProfile]

DeviceType=XSX BaseProfileName=XSX +CVars=r.SecondaryScreenPercentage.GameViewport=50 ; We want a 1080p secondary screen viewport +CVars=sg.ViewDistanceQuality=3 +CVars=sg.AntiAliasingQuality=3 +CVars=sg.PostProcessQuality=3 +CVars=sg.TextureQuality=3 +CVars=sg.EffectsQuality=3 +CVars=sg.FoliageQuality=3 +CVars=sg.ShadowQuality=2 +CVars=sg.ShadowResolutionQuality=2 +CVars=sg.ShadowMeshQuality=2 +CVars=sg.ShadingQuality=3 +CVars=sg.GlobalIlluminationQuality=2 +CVars=sg.AtmosphereQuality=2 +CVars=r.Streaming.MaxEffectiveScreenSize=1080 +CVars=r.Streaming.PoolSize=4096 ; Overkill but necessary to avoid pool overflow (perf hit) and has not been known to cause emergency memory pressure ; Virtual texture pools in XSXEngine.ini are scaled to XSS ; Here we make sure to configure the pool scalability to better fit the XSX +CVars=r.VT.PoolSizeScale.Group0=4 ; x4 because she's worth it +CVars=r.VT.PoolSizeScale.Group1=4 +CVars=r.VT.PoolSizeScale.Group2=4 ; There are only 3 groups that we can scale

+CVars=r.LocalExposure=1 +CVars=r.LightShaftQuality=1

There is a bit more spread over a few other files but that should give you and idea of what we are dealing with.
 
Last edited:
He has replied, here's the ini configs he posted.

This is mostly greek to me but just eye-balling it looks like the parameters are almost entirely identical between the two, barring some specific console level ini lines thta are in one but not the other.

Like, the Xbox section has a view distance and anti aliasing ini line, of course the PS5 would use them too but they're not written in the PS5 section, and some settings vice versa.

Well what did you expect with the two systems being so close? Its not like its shocking to be fair.

If what he's saying it's true at least it's interesting to see what differences there are between the two systems.

I don't think there's anything to be mad about here as the results are expected.
 
Last edited:

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
If he is a real developer, he knows full well that he is breaching NDA here with this level of detail. The other option Is that he is stupid o he want to be fine.

You only have to compare with the interview in DF and how restrained they are when it comes to going into certain details.

The logical thing is that there would be a reaction from the Studio asking for forgiveness or (if that is the case) denying the veracity at the moment in which all this spreads and has an effect on social networks and reaches the ears of those involved in the agreement to save professional secrets.
Dude multiple developers have openly given digital foundry exact ps5 and xsx settings for their games before. There is no nda here when it comes to this stuff.

And they trashed ue5 through out that interview.
 
Top Bottom