Felt weirdly immersive for me, while I'm recovering from COVID and have the same sort of gruff voice as you got, John. Hope you get well soon! Awesome video, as I had no idea how much they had changed visually compared to the original games!
You don't want to use 120fps on PC either, because the gameplay actually changes at 120fps, some combos are not connecting fully (ex. vs Alexei + lunar) whereas at 60fps, the full combo will connect.
Awesome, I thought that was just me. Also, anyone noticed jutter with DLSS 4 on Cyberpunk 2077? Although, it looks and performs absolutely stunning now aside from the little jutter when moving forward and looking behind you.
@@freefallp885i dont think its easy to make these type of games work at different framerates. Even dmc 5 has different timings for certain attacks at 100fps+
A visual thing that I noticed with this game is when you flick the blood off of a weapon while standing in a body of water (such as in the first stage Sky City Tokyo) the blood doesn't land on the surface of the water, it lands on the ground at the bottom underneath the waters surface. It's one of those weird small things that in the grand scheme of things doesn't necessarily matter but still it's a visual thing that I've noticed in this version.
Thanks for picking this up John! For anyone interested in a detailed comparison between OG NG2, Sigma 2 and NG2 Black from a content and gameplay perspective, there's a great video on The Electric Underground.
@@cube2fox Kingdom Come 2 uses Cry Engines SVOGI, which is a real time non ray traced GI solution. It's even present in the Switch version of the Original KCD1
@@cor.tenebrarum I'mma take that as sarcasm as that increases the system requirements for no logistical reason when you can get away with faking it since it's not under heavily dynamic situations since it's a glorified box room (Like mount Fuji being a 3D model is 100% unnecessary since it is far in the distance enough that a parallaxing 1080p jpeg with some baked DOF would have the same effect for significantly less cost).
You do not even need baked lighting you can pre compute of a lot of it and still having interactable light, dynamic time of day existed before and it was not 100% dynamic because it would have been to heavy, you precompute stuff then use clever tech to make it work and nobody knew
And you can mod the master collection to play close to og 2 so you get more than just a suped up sigma for not even a quarter of the storage space black takes up.
My god why does everything have to be real time with lighting? Its not like this is an open world with hundreds of physics objects. Why not just bake in everything after rendering like Source engine? Leave the real time for character shadows and have the rest of the lighting faked. Thats what they used to do in Uncharted 4 right? Someone please correct me
Real time lighting can streamline the development process by eliminating needing to preprogram how shadows cascade, how the light bounces in the environment, as well as having the benefit of showing off how powerful the hardware is that can handle it. Baking the lighting limits how it can interact with the environment, and to be comparable to a real-time process, would need extensive oversight and adjustments that often go completely unnoticed by players. It's less intensive and can look fantastic, but it's also a lot more work, which needs to be considered with how much time a game needs to be developed as well as funding.
Real time lighting is a lot quicker to implement and they don't have to redo their work if they decide to change the level geometry or lighting conditions.
I mean, on certain objects, it can be beneficial, but generally I agree. There's little consideration for "what best in what situation" I feel like in modern dev. It's usually just them throwing the kitchen sink at the issue with bloated tech that "generally" solves for anything. I think that might be why performance struggles and stuttering and image breakup issues are so common these days.
The original looks much better for the most part. We're losing distinct looking games with everyone just using common rendering from all these similar game engines.
Including the Lumen debug views was such a cool touch! Fascinating to see how it approximates the scene. Strangely reminiscent of older techniques like planar reflections or the mirrored geometry trick, which also often used low-detail approximations.
John: "But now I'd like to talk briefly about my PC experience. I am not Alex, so we're not gonna get into tremendous detail here" Also John: _shows Lumen debug view to explain what's wrong with hardware Lumen in this game_ Great video as usual, get well soon my man.
I emulated the original after trying to play Black. It not only had a better aesthetic.. but it felt slightly better to play (UE engine games have some kind of feel to them if not extremely well programmed). Absolutely flabbergasted how badly Black ran even on a 4090, complete with Lumen's slow lighting recaclulations. Another game crippled by UE5, performance wise and visually. If Xenia didn't have its sound bug with the game, I'd recommend everyone throw on Lossless Scaling framegen and enjoy the original downsampled at 120FPS.
Yup i been running thru the OG on xenia, it has way more enemies on acolyte and it def feels more responsive. I only got the soundbug once so far where it cut out during a load section after firing at the orb when you first get the bow., but reloading from my save fixed it.
I enjoy the gameplay of 2 Black (which is my first Ninja Gaiden) so much that I'm planning to buy an Xbox One X just to play the original in 4k and stable 60fps, since I have read from others that emulation is not ideal and also introduces additional input delay. The Xbox One X seems to be rather cheap when buying used. I'm very curious about the OG Master Ninja difficulty. Ninja Gaiden 1 Black looks also very interesting.
@@ZackZavage The OG 360 NG2 in Series X with backwards compatibility looks amazing with perfect image clarity at true 4K, and plays like butter with imperceptible input-lag compared to NGB2... NGB1 is also very good.
@@kurtwells711 it was. I just fixed it. The video fidelity and overscan override was not working properly with my display and games weren't running 120hz when they should. Now it's working. Only the UI was running at 120 hz
For the Series S, yes, it's a blurry hot mess BUT turn off HDR and the difference was night and day. Anti-aliasing seems to take a hit being nearly turned off and loses that hdr soft semi blur effect but looks so much sharper in return. Its actually playable now
Look of the old DOA engine and artstyle was always so clean and cohesive and just looks timeless to me. The remake just looks kind of souless like it's using the UE5 default lighting and tone mapping and terrible motion artifacts. The large enemy counts is a huge loss, these games are more fun with them and should have been a difficulty option like DMC Legendary Dark Knight mode.
The UI in the original responded to your button inputs with animation. The UI in the remake is just a static image. The busted door to the building in the intro is completely missing in the remake. Small details like that being lost is really telling...
John coming out of his sickly stupor to cover this is really nice, if I think of Ninja Gaiden or DoA, I instantly think of Xbox and John, they go hand-in-hand nowadays. edit: as far as visuals go, I like most of the changes but generally prefer the colour direction in the original release and have a soft spot for the old character models, I can't say either is definitive though.
8:09 Crazy how the original NG2 with it's limited tech can sometimes manage to even look better than Black 2. It certainly was a different, talented Team Ninja back then. Also, ya'll should do a DF Retro on the first NG! That thing was a technical masterpiece on the OG Xbox, as were the DOA games.
Fiend Busa already has a mod out for the PC version that increases the enemy count and other elements to NG2 levels. Right now it's just for Mentor and MN difficulties but it makes a big difference in restoring the chaos that is the original NG2.
That's great and all but I still feel the Sigma 2 versions of the levels are inferior to the original and that the extra stages are terrible pacing wise.
Not to disregard John, but I wouldn't call "CPU heavy" a clearly unoptimized game that doesn't even gets to 40% CPU usage on my 12900H. The game has clear optimization issues, and that tendency to send everything to the toilet if the frame rate gets even 1fps outside of 30/60/120 is absolutely unacceptable. I finished my Path of the Warrior Run a few days ago, and the last 4 stages where hell because even the combos and inputs are dropped with those frames. Insane to think that 2 Black's harder boss fight is against its trash tier frame pacing.
It's hilarious that there is stuff in the remake that looks worse than the original from 2008, still good though, runs well enough for a UE5 game using Lumen(for some reason) and nanite. edit: wait, why is the game CPU heavy? under the hood this is running just a modified Sigma 2, NG2 and Sigma2 ran at 60fps on Xbox360 and PS3, game should easily run at 360fps on a 12900K.
Totally agree! That stage with the downpour stuck with me so much that I would often think of NG2 when a storm/downpour happened IRL! On the new version it just looks so fake and boring. Very sad and proof that while new engines are easier, they aren't always better!
Hello. You mentioned that there's two engines in the game. UE5 for rendering, Sigma II for gameplay. Then you mentioned Tekken 8 employing the same approach. This is the first time I've heard of it.
I don't understand this at all. Their source code of the old engine was compatible with Unreal (C++), and they transplanted the gameplay part of it it over into UE5, and used all UE5 code to do the rendering part? I've never heard or seen something like that done before. Unless Sigma 2 was made on Unreal too... but googling says it's a "hyrbid" engine. Very confused.
The aesthetics of the original are superior throughout this whole video, sadly you can't make a good looking game through technical graphics alone, which seems to be a common thread with UE5. Maybe I'm changing, because I used to love all the technical aspects of graphics and high fidelity, but now I'm preferring low res and aesthetic far more these days. I'd play the original xbox version over the new one any day.
@@ka7al958DF is weird in what they consider mid-range hardware. Mid-range is core i5s and Ryzen 5s up till the x3d am4 cpus. Anything Zen 3 like 5600 or above is mid tier. GPU wise the 3060, 4060, 6700 xt, 7700,6800,and B580 are mid range. Anything above that is upper mid like 7900 GRE, XT, 6900, RTX 4070, and laptop variants. Anything above this is high end with the 4090 and 5090 being Enthusiasts tier.
Lumen tracing not including dynamic models from the scene, might as well be using a cubemap for reflections instead. For all intents and purposes, it's going to achieve the same outcome.
If you run strictly stock maybe? It can be clocked up and memory tightened to be in the top again- disabling e cores allows mroe power to the cache speed and limits potential scheduling quirks on games that may have them- so there's lots you can do with the chip to suit a need. I mean, why buy enthusiast hardware if you're gonna leave it at stock...
That's some nonsense, though. The 12900K is not mid-range in any capacity. The 14900K is not even a generational leap over it, on average being about 14% better in most tests.
9.5th gen console running a 7th gen game 😑 Imagine a Sega Genesis with CD and CD/32x engaged running a ATARI 2600 game with minor advantages, and recognized visuals...
I like your vids the most, John. There is no need to sell yourself short when it comes to talking about the tech way in depth. Its cooler hearing about more console trivia. Takes me back to the old days.
@@animaversus7407no it just you i think. I play on xbox series, and it work great in 60 fps. I'm pretty sure ps5 do the same. Maybe it something with you gamepad? Many streamers play on ps5 on mentor/masterN, and it work fine.
@@ezesosa7472 i play 60 fps, and currently beat on mentor, now play on unlocked masterN, every time boss use wrong move, i punish them, every time i do bad move, enemies punish me. I also play NG2 original on series X to compare games by myself. There is no input lag, i can do easily the same combos in both NG2 and black. Just the overall controls of Ruy - is based as fighting games as DOA. If you hit in enemy block, you get negative frame, doesn't matter how fast you press attack - Ryu don't do it, and you get hit if not press block instead. It is not input lag, it is how this game work. It is work the same in NG2 original. After some moves Ryu need time to get into "neutral" stance, and he can't do next move, until don't do this, doesn't matter how fast you trying press button
Nanite definitely doesn't eliminate pop-in, there are examples of LOD pop-in all over this very video, lol. Not saying the geometric detail doesn't look great, but c'mon.
it's pathetic that a linear character action game with narrow environments is so exhausting to run. what even changed to make it so CPU-heavy if it's just an xbox 360 game with new visuals?
Intersting enough, is that the TGS 2007 demo (still remember it), the second stage was also in daytime (the stage selection they showed). Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 Plus on Vita had the gore (soft of), wonder if they looked at that for this version.
The appaling Series S image quality and CPU usage really shows how this game spends ridiculous amounts of cycles on realtime lighting for a game with static environments! They probably outsourced most of the asset creation and just threw them in there putting barely any though on optimization, "no need for LODs, nanite will take care of that" they let YOUR GPU do THEIR job. So unfortunate that this is a rapidly growing trend that isn't just seen on very low budget studios and publishers anymore, I mean this is kind of an asset flip at this point. So much institutional knowledge is being lost from just using over relying on unreal 5 and doing the bare minimum.
@@piensluc7444 Sure but with GamePass we don't own the game. If you stop subscribing, you have nothing. There are pros and cons to purchasing or renting. Renting is cheaper but you don't own anything
Resolution upgrade and 5fps better frames on 120fps mode.. the game is very CPU limited and not very well optimised it even struggles on pc so don’t expect big upgrades
14:04 Yeah, that's why when I played this game on the Xbox Series X, I just switched the cutscenes over to 30fps, and honestly, that's how I prefer it. And honestly, I'm sick of other people shitting on 30fps when its fine when most of their anecdotes are based on shitty ports of console games they played...I'm looking at you Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 on PS4/Xbox One with their stupid frame skipping crap. Thank god Dark Souls 3 got that 60fps update on Xbox Series X...
I never played the Xbox 360 version of this game, so the city scenes just keep reminding me of Ninja Blade, which wasn't a great game, but I'd love to see a remake of it for the sheer spectacle of it.
I understand there are a lot of challenges involved, but I wish there was a stronger commitment to keep closer to the original look with remasters like this. This video 100 percent sold me on playing the original over this new version
Glad to hear you again, but sorry about the laryngitis! I had JUST started playing Sigma 2 on PC modded to add the blood, and it's been really refreshing for a game to run smooth and crisp with no artifacts. I don't think I can add in all these modern issues now
At the moment, it's not worthy of the title BLACK. Updates and dlc can improve that. There's an update coming mid-February, and hopefully, it'll meet veterans and newcomers' expectations.
the fact that they are so vague about what is being added in the febriary update doesn't give me much confidente. Guess we will have to wait for mods again
Developers should stop using Nanite and Lumen, it is not worth it and make the image so dirty with all these artifacts and UE TSR make the problems even worse. all these graphic additions are increasingly dirtying up the on-screen image. I bet that with classic development techniques we would have had a more visually beautiful game capable of running even at 120fps and at native resolutions (4k for 60fps and 1080p for 120)
I’ve been using unreal for over 10 years and I can’t stand how modern unreal games look. To be fair it’s up to the dev but man so many artifacts it looks like trahs
Lumen and Nanite are used to save development costs, that's probably why it was used here. We might not have got this game at all if it were too expensive to develop. It's just a tradeoff that needs to be accepted in these current economic times.
It's not lumen and nanite "dirtying up the screen" it's TAA and TAAU being bad anti aliasing mathods and bad image quality up scalers. That's why DLSS looks better. This game doesn't look dirty at all with TAA or TAAU unless at a lower res native res and DLSS looks great too.
I literally won't play a UE game if it doesn't have Lumen. Serious upgrade to the lighting, UE5 has been around for years, no excuse not to use the modern feature set unless you are trying to appeal to 3060 users. Lumen isn't going anywhere lmfao, get used to it. Maybe buy a better monitor?
@@bluack123 PS5 and SeriesX still struggle to support those features so they have to relay on temporal reconstruction technique that only produce ghosting and artifacts. It is not worth it. You can still have amazing looking games with traditional technique that can be made even better than before.
1:25 You speak as if that was a bad thing. Reduced enemy numbers was a big improvement in Sigma. Remember that in the beloved Ninja Gaiden Black, you would fight enemies in waves of 3. Enemies were tough and challenging. Those Spider Ninja Clan guys, which in Ninja Gaiden Black were just ninjas in black, were so dangerous. They would come in only a group of 3, but they were tough as nails, fast, would dodge, block and put up a hell of a fight Ninja Gaiden 2 turn the number of enemies to 7+ at once, yet it was significantly less challenging. The higher number would come even in small areas. It's a mess. Enemies are weak and disposable, sometimes you can't even see anything and the game rewards button mashing. Ninja Gaiden should be quality not quantity. Sigma 2 fixed it. It's easy to compare NG2 with Sigma 2 and see the reduced number of enemies is a downgrade and justify as the PS3 not able to handle that many enemies, but that change made the game a lot closer to the original. Ninja Gaiden should not be about fighting hordes of weak enemies that falls apart after 2 slices... it should be about small tough groups that really makes you fight for your life. Every encounter is dangerous. NG2 threw that out of the window with weak enemies in numbers that you can easily cut through.
Yes. As always, the PC version has hiccups and stutters. I am the owner of I9-14900K and RTX4090, 64GB 7200 RAM and SSD 5 Gen. And I can confirm it even at 60 FPS. DF no need to hope - need to push developers to do their job. STOP being so polite! OMG...We need to fight for rights to play in optimized games on release.
Yup. My performance is pretty shitty on pc. Maybe I’m being a bit greedy nowadays but I really don’t think that a 9800x3d with a 3090 and dlss enabled should have an issue with 60fps at 4k. I quite frequently get dips into the 40s/50s.
@@kornykidd0 Greedy? Mate, you have the strongest and the best processor on the market and a strong card! You must run this game smooth like butter! So give me hope that others will see this comment! Because now we must yell about it! Because in the last few years PC gaming has become a disaster!
Damn right broski. Games just aren't optimised enough today like they used to be I saw black coding magic going on when I was a kid with literal megabtytes of memory (RE2 for N64 for example) games that are made with the system in mind or ability to upscale to the systems highest settings.. I find a lot of games don't even push the PS5, not unless their first party anyway, showing how totally unoptimised that console even is, what hope has any PC port got? They have always been terrible... (particularly square and final fantasy games) but now it just feels all games coming out are mostly hot garbage and a mess. Even the highest performing computers are struggling to run games that look no better than 10 years ago really and are so poorly optimised the damn PC owners and modders literally fix their mistakes for them for free... Then often try and sue the damn modders who actually help the games?! It's a wierd industry my friend. If you can't play a new game without all that DLSS crap in 60fps 4k on the most powerful of PC's, there's no hope for us is there? Why aren't graphics getting any better? The rate of progression I saw as a kid.. I thought we would of achieved hyper realism by now tbh tech was developing at such an extreme rate.. Hope you get the results you should be having soon dude. This is why I literally don't game anymore. No creativity, everything's been done before, and the stagnation in innovation and advancements in tech, putting to much stock into AI that will never replicate the human mind when it comes to art.
@@davidgeorge3944I agree only with half part of your post. But, I read it with pleasure. I think we need to fight back much louder! And we will get what we want.
Updating the DLSS DLL from Cyberpunks latest patch seems to fix the DLSS and frame gen issues for me. You have to make sure to set it to the J model with inspector too. And it fixes the issues for me. Very smooth.
Oops, I just finished the game on the 120hz mode on my brother’s 75” 4k tv lol. I definitely noticed the hit to image quality but I just accepted it for the sake of more frames.
That didn't make sense, at least based on what he showed. The Xbox Series X gameplay was above the base PS5 during most of the screen capture with some dips below. The cutscenes were definitely a bit lower.
Seeing how this runs there's no way they're going to add the additional enemies the original had. I don't think they'd sacrifice performance for that insanity. The og team was just built different.
After all these years, the 360 version still holds up very well. That thing really punched above its weight. I hope they keep tweaking so we can get a better experience on PS5 Pro.
I use 12600KF and 4080 super, and this game runs 120fps without any problem in 4K DLSS Quality without raytracing without DLSS FG. I don't understand why you don't have 120fps with 12900K
This video left me with two takeaways. 1. Could they be including the 120 mode to future proof themselves for the next generation of consoles that hopefully will be backwards compatible and be able to handle the 120? Add it now instead of patching it in later? 2. They ruined Sonia's model, her more pronounced nose on the original model made her stand out more compared to other Team Ninja female characters who can all look kind of similar. It also showed that a willingness to design a character outside of the conventional beauty standards.
Awesome Review Video DF. I am checking out NG2: Black on Xbox Game Pass, I'll probably Double Dip at some point with the PS5 Version or a Switch 2 Port possibly, the only Problem is i have a Series S lol but i am having fun Playing Through it nonetheless. There is an Option in the Menu on the Consoles too Cap the in-game Cutscenes at 30fps, with Gameplay remaining at 60fps as far as believe but I've kept it as Standard on the Series S. Gameplay is definitely Dated even in NG2: Black, especially with the Platformer etc but the Combat is just as fun as ever 👍.
Apologies for the rough voice over. Recovering from laryngitis after a bad cold or whatever it was. Still recovering.
All good fella - get well soon!
Hard worker! Hope you get better soon, rest up!
Get well soon.
Felt weirdly immersive for me, while I'm recovering from COVID and have the same sort of gruff voice as you got, John. Hope you get well soon! Awesome video, as I had no idea how much they had changed visually compared to the original games!
Get well soon! Thank you for bringing joy and knowledge to this great hobby.
Give John sick leave, Rich
More like force John to take sick leave
Rich : In the here and now, the year of our lord... no.
@@mechanicalmonk2020Yeah, Rich gave me time away while sick but I wanted to get back to making videos perhaps a little too early.
@@SogonD.Zunatsu Also Rich: What can I say?
@@dark1x for the love of the game(s)
You don't want to use 120fps on PC either, because the gameplay actually changes at 120fps, some combos are not connecting fully (ex. vs Alexei + lunar) whereas at 60fps, the full combo will connect.
Ah man, well, I guess it worked out then! That’s disappointing as heck.
Its 2025 and devs are still tying game logic to frame rate?😔
Awesome, I thought that was just me. Also, anyone noticed jutter with DLSS 4 on Cyberpunk 2077? Although, it looks and performs absolutely stunning now aside from the little jutter when moving forward and looking behind you.
@@freefallp885i dont think its easy to make these type of games work at different framerates. Even dmc 5 has different timings for certain attacks at 100fps+
@@freefallp885To be fair, this is essentially a port of a PS3 game under the hood lol
A visual thing that I noticed with this game is when you flick the blood off of a weapon while standing in a body of water (such as in the first stage Sky City Tokyo) the blood doesn't land on the surface of the water, it lands on the ground at the bottom underneath the waters surface. It's one of those weird small things that in the grand scheme of things doesn't necessarily matter but still it's a visual thing that I've noticed in this version.
Classic Reborn
I do agree that the original NG using "black night" rather than that light blue look that plagues modern games is better and more atmospheric.
Can't imagine getting angry about the colour blue, tbh
Have you ever seen a full moon at night? The sky is blue
@@QWERTYCommander who tf cares how it looks irl, we're talking about art
@@idakev Angry? A fair critique?
Thanks for picking this up John! For anyone interested in a detailed comparison between OG NG2, Sigma 2 and NG2 Black from a content and gameplay perspective, there's a great video on The Electric Underground.
agreed, he goes into a ton of detail. made me subscribe to his channel!
No Player's Eyes Were Hurt With The Implementation Of Unreal Engine 5 On Ancient Hardware
That's a new one for me.
I miss baked lighting in non-open world games.
Yeah, RTGI mainly looks amazing in Open World games like Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.
@@cube2fox Kingdom Come 2 uses Cry Engines SVOGI, which is a real time non ray traced GI solution. It's even present in the Switch version of the Original KCD1
NO! Real time lighting is the best and I love it, it's especially good in single player half open or corridor games.
@@cor.tenebrarum I'mma take that as sarcasm as that increases the system requirements for no logistical reason when you can get away with faking it since it's not under heavily dynamic situations since it's a glorified box room (Like mount Fuji being a 3D model is 100% unnecessary since it is far in the distance enough that a parallaxing 1080p jpeg with some baked DOF would have the same effect for significantly less cost).
You do not even need baked lighting you can pre compute of a lot of it and still having interactable light, dynamic time of day existed before and it was not 100% dynamic because it would have been to heavy, you precompute stuff then use clever tech to make it work and nobody knew
*However*
NG 2 Black file size = 86 GB.
*Entire master collection (3 games) = 14 GB.*
And you can mod the master collection to play close to og 2 so you get more than just a suped up sigma for not even a quarter of the storage space black takes up.
ehh textures? lmao what do you think the resolution was in the screen tearing fest of the Xbox 360?
My god why does everything have to be real time with lighting? Its not like this is an open world with hundreds of physics objects.
Why not just bake in everything after rendering like Source engine? Leave the real time for character shadows and have the rest of the lighting faked.
Thats what they used to do in Uncharted 4 right?
Someone please correct me
This
Real time lighting can streamline the development process by eliminating needing to preprogram how shadows cascade, how the light bounces in the environment, as well as having the benefit of showing off how powerful the hardware is that can handle it.
Baking the lighting limits how it can interact with the environment, and to be comparable to a real-time process, would need extensive oversight and adjustments that often go completely unnoticed by players. It's less intensive and can look fantastic, but it's also a lot more work, which needs to be considered with how much time a game needs to be developed as well as funding.
Real time lighting is a lot quicker to implement and they don't have to redo their work if they decide to change the level geometry or lighting conditions.
Makes the developers' lives a bit easier and it looks good.
I mean, on certain objects, it can be beneficial, but generally I agree. There's little consideration for "what best in what situation" I feel like in modern dev. It's usually just them throwing the kitchen sink at the issue with bloated tech that "generally" solves for anything. I think that might be why performance struggles and stuttering and image breakup issues are so common these days.
"Image quality on Series S is so bad that I would almost consider it worse than the Xbox 360 original."
John Linneman
I blame unreal engine 5
@tyler328 i blame series s
A remaster that is a downgrade. What a time to be alive.
@@stanislavkimov2779 It's absolutely not a downgrade. lol. Series S is not the standard. Play some games instead of being a drama queen 👍
@@stanislavkimov2779 Look at Nintendo games... They even do remakes that are a downgrade.
The original looks much better for the most part. We're losing distinct looking games with everyone just using common rendering from all these similar game engines.
Shadows pop-in so close to the character is actually a reminiscence of the classic NES game Shadow of the Ninja. They appear out of nowhere.
Including the Lumen debug views was such a cool touch!
Fascinating to see how it approximates the scene. Strangely reminiscent of older techniques like planar reflections or the mirrored geometry trick, which also often used low-detail approximations.
Ninja Gaiden 2: Not Black Enough
John: "But now I'd like to talk briefly about my PC experience. I am not Alex, so we're not gonna get into tremendous detail here"
Also John: _shows Lumen debug view to explain what's wrong with hardware Lumen in this game_
Great video as usual, get well soon my man.
I emulated the original after trying to play Black.
It not only had a better aesthetic.. but it felt slightly better to play (UE engine games have some kind of feel to them if not extremely well programmed). Absolutely flabbergasted how badly Black ran even on a 4090, complete with Lumen's slow lighting recaclulations. Another game crippled by UE5, performance wise and visually.
If Xenia didn't have its sound bug with the game, I'd recommend everyone throw on Lossless Scaling framegen and enjoy the original downsampled at 120FPS.
Yup i been running thru the OG on xenia, it has way more enemies on acolyte and it def feels more responsive. I only got the soundbug once so far where it cut out during a load section after firing at the orb when you first get the bow., but reloading from my save fixed it.
I enjoy the gameplay of 2 Black (which is my first Ninja Gaiden) so much that I'm planning to buy an Xbox One X just to play the original in 4k and stable 60fps, since I have read from others that emulation is not ideal and also introduces additional input delay. The Xbox One X seems to be rather cheap when buying used. I'm very curious about the OG Master Ninja difficulty. Ninja Gaiden 1 Black looks also very interesting.
@@ZackZavage The OG 360 NG2 in Series X with backwards compatibility looks amazing with perfect image clarity at true 4K, and plays like butter with imperceptible input-lag compared to NGB2... NGB1 is also very good.
@@ZackZavage og ng is hell! And you need change ssd
When I first played it, I put it on 120 fps mode on the series X and I couldn't believe how bad it looked. Take care, John!
Yeah, I was shocked at how rough this looked. Oof.
Idk why the game wouldn't let me play it at 120 fps on my series x despite having a 120 hz display
@@Z-Mikes00 is the xbox set to 120hz output in the console video settings?
@@kurtwells711 it was. I just fixed it. The video fidelity and overscan override was not working properly with my display and games weren't running 120hz when they should. Now it's working.
Only the UI was running at 120 hz
@@Z-Mikes00 Yeah, mine is super picky with stuff at 120 hz, especially with video streaming.
I think the real takeaway here is that the 360 version looks damn good! I prefer the lighting and the original character designs, as intended.
And in Series X with it has much lower input lag (ya know, important for action games).
John you sound rough man, go get some rest you deserves it
For the Series S, yes, it's a blurry hot mess BUT turn off HDR and the difference was night and day. Anti-aliasing seems to take a hit being nearly turned off and loses that hdr soft semi blur effect but looks so much sharper in return. Its actually playable now
HDR making games soft is a much returning problem for consoles, even the best ones
John gives his last breath for us! Gute Besserung!
Look of the old DOA engine and artstyle was always so clean and cohesive and just looks timeless to me. The remake just looks kind of souless like it's using the UE5 default lighting and tone mapping and terrible motion artifacts. The large enemy counts is a huge loss, these games are more fun with them and should have been a difficulty option like DMC Legendary Dark Knight mode.
I love the old engine DOA3, NGB on original xbox. Buy I love this Unreal Engine too. I'm not a fan of DOA5 and DOA6
The UI in the original responded to your button inputs with animation.
The UI in the remake is just a static image.
The busted door to the building in the intro is completely missing in the remake.
Small details like that being lost is really telling...
John coming out of his sickly stupor to cover this is really nice, if I think of Ninja Gaiden or DoA, I instantly think of Xbox and John, they go hand-in-hand nowadays.
edit: as far as visuals go, I like most of the changes but generally prefer the colour direction in the original release and have a soft spot for the old character models, I can't say either is definitive though.
8:09 Crazy how the original NG2 with it's limited tech can sometimes manage to even look better than Black 2. It certainly was a different, talented Team Ninja back then. Also, ya'll should do a DF Retro on the first NG! That thing was a technical masterpiece on the OG Xbox, as were the DOA games.
Dude the first Ninja Gaiden was an NES game. You mean the first modern one.
But you’re right it is impressive as hell.
@@lightechoes Correction, yes I meant the first 3D modern one! Still, the one on the NES was a bit of a standout in it's own right too haha
Fiend Busa already has a mod out for the PC version that increases the enemy count and other elements to NG2 levels. Right now it's just for Mentor and MN difficulties but it makes a big difference in restoring the chaos that is the original NG2.
That's great and all but I still feel the Sigma 2 versions of the levels are inferior to the original and that the extra stages are terrible pacing wise.
@@Omega-616 let's hope the devs will fix at least some of the issues in the upcoming patch
Interesting to see that John seems to have not been affected by the input lag that a lot of people including me experienced
Not to disregard John, but I wouldn't call "CPU heavy" a clearly unoptimized game that doesn't even gets to 40% CPU usage on my 12900H. The game has clear optimization issues, and that tendency to send everything to the toilet if the frame rate gets even 1fps outside of 30/60/120 is absolutely unacceptable. I finished my Path of the Warrior Run a few days ago, and the last 4 stages where hell because even the combos and inputs are dropped with those frames. Insane to think that 2 Black's harder boss fight is against its trash tier frame pacing.
It's hilarious that there is stuff in the remake that looks worse than the original from 2008, still good though, runs well enough for a UE5 game using Lumen(for some reason) and nanite.
edit: wait, why is the game CPU heavy? under the hood this is running just a modified Sigma 2, NG2 and Sigma2 ran at 60fps on Xbox360 and PS3, game should easily run at 360fps on a 12900K.
You alrady know why... just cause... UE5 🤷
You just answered your question nanite and lumen are very cpu intensive
Hope you get Better soon John .. sounds like you've had a rough few days !!
@8:20 that rain in the new version looks really bad. The original clearly better and more dramatic.
Totally agree! That stage with the downpour stuck with me so much that I would often think of NG2 when a storm/downpour happened IRL! On the new version it just looks so fake and boring. Very sad and proof that while new engines are easier, they aren't always better!
A very important review by a very important reviewer.
Ninja Gaiden is back, and never has it been needed more!
Hello. You mentioned that there's two engines in the game. UE5 for rendering, Sigma II for gameplay. Then you mentioned Tekken 8 employing the same approach. This is the first time I've heard of it.
its definitely running on Sigma 2's code. Even the hitstop when you delimb an enemy is still there.
Tekken 8 I mean. That it uses a dual-engine approach.
iirc Halo Master Chief Collection and Demon's Souls remake also work the similar way
I don't understand this at all.
Their source code of the old engine was compatible with Unreal (C++), and they transplanted the gameplay part of it it over into UE5, and used all UE5 code to do the rendering part?
I've never heard or seen something like that done before.
Unless Sigma 2 was made on Unreal too... but googling says it's a "hyrbid" engine. Very confused.
Best wishes to John to get well soon. Health matters most! Great video btw.!
Wild that og Ninja Gaiden still looks damn good to this day
The aesthetics of the original are superior throughout this whole video, sadly you can't make a good looking game through technical graphics alone, which seems to be a common thread with UE5.
Maybe I'm changing, because I used to love all the technical aspects of graphics and high fidelity, but now I'm preferring low res and aesthetic far more these days. I'd play the original xbox version over the new one any day.
12900K being called a mid range CPU just shocked me who's running a 7700K.
Still some years newer than mine
it’s 8 years old man
@mmpsp693 12900k is not mid range, unless you're a tech review channel or an insane person that upgrades their PC every year.
@@ka7al958DF is weird in what they consider mid-range hardware. Mid-range is core i5s and Ryzen 5s up till the x3d am4 cpus. Anything Zen 3 like 5600 or above is mid tier. GPU wise the 3060, 4060, 6700 xt, 7700,6800,and B580 are mid range.
Anything above that is upper mid like 7900 GRE, XT, 6900, RTX 4070, and laptop variants. Anything above this is high end with the 4090 and 5090 being Enthusiasts tier.
Lumen tracing not including dynamic models from the scene, might as well be using a cubemap for reflections instead. For all intents and purposes, it's going to achieve the same outcome.
Sobering thought that our 12900k cpus are now just mid range level.
If you run strictly stock maybe? It can be clocked up and memory tightened to be in the top again- disabling e cores allows mroe power to the cache speed and limits potential scheduling quirks on games that may have them- so there's lots you can do with the chip to suit a need. I mean, why buy enthusiast hardware if you're gonna leave it at stock...
Which CPU is at least 50% faster? 😮
That's some nonsense, though. The 12900K is not mid-range in any capacity. The 14900K is not even a generational leap over it, on average being about 14% better in most tests.
@@kingsigy88 my point exactly. 👍
Get well soon John!
I realize right at this very moment that ive been watching this channel for years and have never subscribed. My bad.
9.5th gen console running a 7th gen game 😑
Imagine a Sega Genesis with CD and CD/32x engaged running a ATARI 2600 game with minor advantages, and recognized visuals...
I like your vids the most, John. There is no need to sell yourself short when it comes to talking about the tech way in depth. Its cooler hearing about more console trivia. Takes me back to the old days.
I’m disappointed that you didn’t even mention the severe input lag in the series s version.
I'm playing on Ps5, a lot of input lag too. I don't know why no one mention that.
@@animaversus7407no it just you i think. I play on xbox series, and it work great in 60 fps. I'm pretty sure ps5 do the same. Maybe it something with you gamepad?
Many streamers play on ps5 on mentor/masterN, and it work fine.
There's a bit of input lag in Series X as well, I guess it's the same in all versions
@@ezesosa7472 i play 60 fps, and currently beat on mentor, now play on unlocked masterN, every time boss use wrong move, i punish them, every time i do bad move, enemies punish me.
I also play NG2 original on series X to compare games by myself. There is no input lag, i can do easily the same combos in both NG2 and black.
Just the overall controls of Ruy - is based as fighting games as DOA. If you hit in enemy block, you get negative frame, doesn't matter how fast you press attack - Ryu don't do it, and you get hit if not press block instead. It is not input lag, it is how this game work. It is work the same in NG2 original. After some moves Ryu need time to get into "neutral" stance, and he can't do next move, until don't do this, doesn't matter how fast you trying press button
It's not an input lag, it's how the game works. You can't do an action until you are in neutral
Nanite definitely doesn't eliminate pop-in, there are examples of LOD pop-in all over this very video, lol. Not saying the geometric detail doesn't look great, but c'mon.
There is no such thing as problematic pop in at DF, it's just something you need to get used to.
It definitely should eliminate pop in though, the fact that devs arent utilizing it properly is another thing.
Did you watch even a milliseconds after that? He said the Nanite enabled ones only so he noticed them
Seems as stated it's only select models that has it on. Which is a peculiar choice not gonna lie.
I've missed John. Glad he's back. Great video as always. Btw I expected some info about input lag since I've heard it's pretty noticeable
it's pathetic that a linear character action game with narrow environments is so exhausting to run. what even changed to make it so CPU-heavy if it's just an xbox 360 game with new visuals?
nanite and lumen.
The reason is, that UE5 is still a bloated piece of shit + no one knows how to optimice this days anymore.
Was expecting this review man, im gonna watch while eating breakfast
What we're having?
I have this on PC with a rtx 3060 and it plays great at around 1080p.
Get well soon, John. Praying for you!
Great video.
Every time I hear Unreal 5 I raise a brow and this is no different. The game runs stupidly bad on PC for how it looks and that's just sad.
Clicked so fast on this video, UA-cam hasn't even processed it in high resolution yet 😅
"Lumen and Nanite *might* be possible on consoles at 120fps"
So, 120fps were definitely possible without them?
nail on head
It's already a decent 120fps if not for the weird stutter issue
Obviously yes
Intersting enough, is that the TGS 2007 demo (still remember it), the second stage was also in daytime (the stage selection they showed). Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 Plus on Vita had the gore (soft of), wonder if they looked at that for this version.
Can't wait for Ninja Gaiden II Black Sigma to come out
The appaling Series S image quality and CPU usage really shows how this game spends ridiculous amounts of cycles on realtime lighting for a game with static environments! They probably outsourced most of the asset creation and just threw them in there putting barely any though on optimization, "no need for LODs, nanite will take care of that" they let YOUR GPU do THEIR job.
So unfortunate that this is a rapidly growing trend that isn't just seen on very low budget studios and publishers anymore, I mean this is kind of an asset flip at this point. So much institutional knowledge is being lost from just using over relying on unreal 5 and doing the bare minimum.
Agreed, it sucks!
In a nutshell, they made it how I remembered it in my head lol.
ran and looked great on ps5 pro. great video as always John
plays also great on game pass on series x happy to found codes and reduction for 2 years 120 bucks
@@piensluc7444 Sure but with GamePass we don't own the game. If you stop subscribing, you have nothing. There are pros and cons to purchasing or renting. Renting is cheaper but you don't own anything
@@piensluc7444and that’s why Microsoft putting their games everywhere …y’all dont buy games
Welcome to mid-range 2018 PC gaming.. PS5 Pro is a scam
@Kubush1 bla bla bla.
The pro is awesome, awesome performance and awesome PQ.
The best console experience, don't compare a pc to ps setup
What's the difference between PS5 and PS5 PRO? Where is the comparison?
Resolution upgrade and 5fps better frames on 120fps mode.. the game is very CPU limited and not very well optimised it even struggles on pc so don’t expect big upgrades
Also higher draw distance on Pro in 120 fps mode 11:04
@@DrJones20 stop it. its the same
Digital foundry must be a bit butt hurt still
14:04
Yeah, that's why when I played this game on the Xbox Series X, I just switched the cutscenes over to 30fps, and honestly, that's how I prefer it. And honestly, I'm sick of other people shitting on 30fps when its fine when most of their anecdotes are based on shitty ports of console games they played...I'm looking at you Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 on PS4/Xbox One with their stupid frame skipping crap. Thank god Dark Souls 3 got that 60fps update on Xbox Series X...
I never played the Xbox 360 version of this game, so the city scenes just keep reminding me of Ninja Blade, which wasn't a great game, but I'd love to see a remake of it for the sheer spectacle of it.
Ninja Blade was a fun if bland little distraction. I liked it for what it was.
I understand there are a lot of challenges involved, but I wish there was a stronger commitment to keep closer to the original look with remasters like this. This video 100 percent sold me on playing the original over this new version
For PC, lock FPS to 60 in game and then turn on frame gen. It will go to 120 and play smoothly.
John Linneman sounding like John Marston in this one 😄
Thorough analysis as always!
Glad to hear you again, but sorry about the laryngitis!
I had JUST started playing Sigma 2 on PC modded to add the blood, and it's been really refreshing for a game to run smooth and crisp with no artifacts. I don't think I can add in all these modern issues now
At the moment, it's not worthy of the title BLACK. Updates and dlc can improve that. There's an update coming mid-February, and hopefully, it'll meet veterans and newcomers' expectations.
In the last few days since this released I learned that Ninja Gaiden ultrafans exist and the whole concept is wild to me.
the fact that they are so vague about what is being added in the febriary update doesn't give me much confidente. Guess we will have to wait for mods again
Just give me the windmill shuriken and a handful of new enemies, and i'm happy.
@@RobOngruiYou have no idea.
@@excludedkratos or the flaming shuriken
Developers should stop using Nanite and Lumen, it is not worth it and make the image so dirty with all these artifacts and UE TSR make the problems even worse. all these graphic additions are increasingly dirtying up the on-screen image. I bet that with classic development techniques we would have had a more visually beautiful game capable of running even at 120fps and at native resolutions (4k for 60fps and 1080p for 120)
I’ve been using unreal for over 10 years and I can’t stand how modern unreal games look. To be fair it’s up to the dev but man so many artifacts it looks like trahs
Lumen and Nanite are used to save development costs, that's probably why it was used here. We might not have got this game at all if it were too expensive to develop. It's just a tradeoff that needs to be accepted in these current economic times.
It's not lumen and nanite "dirtying up the screen" it's TAA and TAAU being bad anti aliasing mathods and bad image quality up scalers. That's why DLSS looks better. This game doesn't look dirty at all with TAA or TAAU unless at a lower res native res and DLSS looks great too.
I literally won't play a UE game if it doesn't have Lumen. Serious upgrade to the lighting, UE5 has been around for years, no excuse not to use the modern feature set unless you are trying to appeal to 3060 users. Lumen isn't going anywhere lmfao, get used to it. Maybe buy a better monitor?
@@bluack123 PS5 and SeriesX still struggle to support those features so they have to relay on temporal reconstruction technique that only produce ghosting and artifacts. It is not worth it. You can still have amazing looking games with traditional technique that can be made even better than before.
1:25 You speak as if that was a bad thing. Reduced enemy numbers was a big improvement in Sigma. Remember that in the beloved Ninja Gaiden Black, you would fight enemies in waves of 3. Enemies were tough and challenging. Those Spider Ninja Clan guys, which in Ninja Gaiden Black were just ninjas in black, were so dangerous. They would come in only a group of 3, but they were tough as nails, fast, would dodge, block and put up a hell of a fight Ninja Gaiden 2 turn the number of enemies to 7+ at once, yet it was significantly less challenging. The higher number would come even in small areas. It's a mess. Enemies are weak and disposable, sometimes you can't even see anything and the game rewards button mashing. Ninja Gaiden should be quality not quantity. Sigma 2 fixed it. It's easy to compare NG2 with Sigma 2 and see the reduced number of enemies is a downgrade and justify as the PS3 not able to handle that many enemies, but that change made the game a lot closer to the original. Ninja Gaiden should not be about fighting hordes of weak enemies that falls apart after 2 slices... it should be about small tough groups that really makes you fight for your life. Every encounter is dangerous. NG2 threw that out of the window with weak enemies in numbers that you can easily cut through.
that's bs. sigma was a lot easier than the 360 version. sigma was dumped down in all areas.
The Software Lumen Debug mode looks like if the game was ported to Switch.
lmao
Heck yeah, so glad John’s a Ninja Gaiden fan. I’ve had controls issues. But I might just be bad at the game
Yes. As always, the PC version has hiccups and stutters. I am the owner of I9-14900K and RTX4090, 64GB 7200 RAM and SSD 5 Gen. And I can confirm it even at 60 FPS. DF no need to hope - need to push developers to do their job. STOP being so polite! OMG...We need to fight for rights to play in optimized games on release.
Yup. My performance is pretty shitty on pc. Maybe I’m being a bit greedy nowadays but I really don’t think that a 9800x3d with a 3090 and dlss enabled should have an issue with 60fps at 4k. I quite frequently get dips into the 40s/50s.
@@kornykidd0 Greedy? Mate, you have the strongest and the best processor on the market and a strong card! You must run this game smooth like butter! So give me hope that others will see this comment! Because now we must yell about it! Because in the last few years PC gaming has become a disaster!
Damn right broski. Games just aren't optimised enough today like they used to be I saw black coding magic going on when I was a kid with literal megabtytes of memory (RE2 for N64 for example) games that are made with the system in mind or ability to upscale to the systems highest settings.. I find a lot of games don't even push the PS5, not unless their first party anyway, showing how totally unoptimised that console even is, what hope has any PC port got? They have always been terrible... (particularly square and final fantasy games) but now it just feels all games coming out are mostly hot garbage and a mess. Even the highest performing computers are struggling to run games that look no better than 10 years ago really and are so poorly optimised the damn PC owners and modders literally fix their mistakes for them for free... Then often try and sue the damn modders who actually help the games?! It's a wierd industry my friend. If you can't play a new game without all that DLSS crap in 60fps 4k on the most powerful of PC's, there's no hope for us is there? Why aren't graphics getting any better? The rate of progression I saw as a kid.. I thought we would of achieved hyper realism by now tbh tech was developing at such an extreme rate.. Hope you get the results you should be having soon dude. This is why I literally don't game anymore. No creativity, everything's been done before, and the stagnation in innovation and advancements in tech, putting to much stock into AI that will never replicate the human mind when it comes to art.
@@davidgeorge3944I agree only with half part of your post. But, I read it with pleasure. I think we need to fight back much louder! And we will get what we want.
I get some pretty bad judder on cutscenes on PS5. They seem to happen whenever a new camera cut happens and then it clears itself up
Updating the DLSS DLL from Cyberpunks latest patch seems to fix the DLSS and frame gen issues for me. You have to make sure to set it to the J model with inspector too. And it fixes the issues for me. Very smooth.
I use K personally looks great even on performance at 4k
Oops, I just finished the game on the 120hz mode on my brother’s 75” 4k tv lol. I definitely noticed the hit to image quality but I just accepted it for the sake of more frames.
John is wrong here because the 60fps version has awful input lag. You made the right choice playing at 120
I hope John recovers soon. I’m sure making this was hell.
12:11 Xbox Series X is in 3rd huh? 🤔
Lol. Yeah I saw PS5 dropping lower than Series X most of that time. But in the cutscene ps5 was better.
That didn't make sense, at least based on what he showed. The Xbox Series X gameplay was above the base PS5 during most of the screen capture with some dips below. The cutscenes were definitely a bit lower.
I bought the game day 1 but was hoping for a DF verdict. And here it is!
Great video John, thank you!! Get back to 100% soon.
Seeing how this runs there's no way they're going to add the additional enemies the original had. I don't think they'd sacrifice performance for that insanity. The og team was just built different.
Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2: Definitive Edition.
After all these years, the 360 version still holds up very well. That thing really punched above its weight. I hope they keep tweaking so we can get a better experience on PS5 Pro.
Series S with another pathetic outing
10:43 I saw that on my playthru and thought it was actually pretty neat, like a ninja after image effect, no idea it wasn't supposed to be there.😅
That Series S version is really struggling. I wonder how the Switch 2 will compare to the Series S.
30fps
youre a trooper john. this is good work especially if you cranked it out while ill.
Good job on recording this while sick John, amazing video considering you cranked it out in such a small time.
I've been playing it on my channel with a 5080. It looks really good. I have RT and FG off and it still looks clean AF!
This shadow ninja dropped so hard
I’m playing on the default 60 fps gameplay and 30 fps cutscenes. Much much better experience than 120/60. Game rules.
What is the native resolution on PS5, XSX and PS5 Pro? I notice the draw distance is better on PS5 Pro in 120 fps mode 11:04
I use 12600KF and 4080 super, and this game runs 120fps without any problem in 4K DLSS Quality without raytracing without DLSS FG. I don't understand why you don't have 120fps with 12900K
This video left me with two takeaways.
1. Could they be including the 120 mode to future proof themselves for the next generation of consoles that hopefully will be backwards compatible and be able to handle the 120? Add it now instead of patching it in later?
2. They ruined Sonia's model, her more pronounced nose on the original model made her stand out more compared to other Team Ninja female characters who can all look kind of similar. It also showed that a willingness to design a character outside of the conventional beauty standards.
grizzled war vet John Linneman this episode
Thanks John! Its was a great and very objective review.
Awesome Review Video DF.
I am checking out NG2: Black on Xbox Game Pass, I'll probably Double Dip at some point with the PS5 Version or a Switch 2 Port possibly, the only Problem is i have a Series S lol but i am having fun Playing Through it nonetheless.
There is an Option in the Menu on the Consoles too Cap the in-game Cutscenes at 30fps, with Gameplay remaining at 60fps as far as believe but I've kept it as Standard on the Series S.
Gameplay is definitely Dated even in NG2: Black, especially with the Platformer etc but the Combat is just as fun as ever 👍.
That tsr flicker is shocking at the pc side by side. Guess im switching to xess
TSR had tons of weird artifacts on Tekken 8 as well. Doesn’t seem like a good upscaler so far.
TSR is better than FSR, but god do both of those upscaling solutions look like shit.
19:47 “big patch announCHed”
I’m loving the game so far. Never played this series but makes me excited for the new game.
Hope DF at some point does a comparison on how GGST runs on switch in comparison to the other console/PC versions
Maybe I missed it, but I'm surprised at the lack of mention of the severe input lag.