I'm sure this game is almost exactly the opposite of what you had in mind with your PC manifesto, but thank you for putting this video together. It saves me a lot of money and frustration knowing not to waste my time.
Game is also an open robbery, costing 80 euros on steam. Like its one thing to price hike to 70 euros this gen, but 80? Square Enix has lost its mind with their NFT addicted CEO
@@wile123456 this got to be the historic first for a standard AAA game to cost 80 Euros. And then they slap a cheap engine into it that can not do RT reflections... -.-
@@techpriest4787 Not cheap. Their custom engine probably cost them a heck of a lot of money to develop. They just cannot compete with professional engine creation, testing, and development over a huge market spread.
@@wile123456 I know it's crazy, but that's exactly what Sony did with PS5 games and suggested that other developers follow: increase prices from the standard $60/60€/£50 to $70/80€/£70. They've done the same thing with FF7R and this will also happen with Returnal.
Another unbelievably detailed (and necessary) deep dive. Loved the N/S/E/W camera movement analysis, always blown away by the ingenuity of the DF team.
Very honest and great review. I tried the Demo on my RTX 2070 super at 1440p and seriously the poor performance for such ridiculously bad graphics is completely mind boggling. Even 10 year old games have better texture quality than this.
It’s pretty much what we all feared. If we have to upgrade our hardware for vastly improved visuals, fine. But upgrading our hardware to run games that don’t look any better? Oh boy.
Honestly, it's not even the texture quality. That's actually fine really. But dear god, it's the most visually dull I've seen in years. The lighting is terrible, zero depth. Shadows are screwed, no fallback for long distances so stuff in the distance has no shadows. Overall environment complexity is non-existent. The lighting sucks. Ambient occlusion just seems broken. Oh and lighting is terrible Just look at 01:12 - 01:20, perfect example of how bad the game looks. The whole thing looks so empty and dead! Missing shadows a few dozens feet away right in front of the camera. Lighting makes everything literally the same color, it's completely uniform. Absolutely dull environment with just basic elements that seemed to be dragged there and never iterated on afterwards. And that's how the whole game looks. Outside of cities it's just basic terrain with trees, grass and other bolted on structures, with basic variability in environment structure.
@@notlekrut I love how you mentioned lighting sucks 3 times xD and yes you are right, textures are alright. For example in Resident evil 6, textures are very low quality but boy the ambience , colors, and lighting makes up for it and game still manage to look really good even by todays standards which honestly have gone down to gutter with releases like gotham knights and forspoken. That's why artistic direction is more important than all the shiny RT tech devs slap on nowdays.
Just a note Alex clouds being lowered do affect some fog like clouds at ground level that go missing on lower settings, otherwise yes the clouds in the sky look no different.
@@HondEpic The fog one controls the mist into the distance. As i said their is some ground level cloud like stuff that looks like a cloud like thing but on the ground, the lowest setting removes it and the highest setting has an almost volumetric looking cloud at ground level. They are not the same thing.
Devs should be paying big sums to you guys to test their games ahead of launch. I look forward to these videos. Only thing is I wish you got code early enough to post on launch date. I'm 6 hours into the game banging my head because I didn't turn off RT earlier. I'm on a 4080 but paired with 3700x and RT is killing me in this game. Cyberpunk I could do on psycho and get mostly above 60 except in the heavy city areas.
I think those tech reviews are probably a good reason why the devs like FromSoftware will likely never give an early code to DF guys when they know they didn't put much effort into PC port.
@@Z3t487 You gamers should get on high standards. Find the best parts in the net and force your games, even an NES game to go up to 4K and 120 FPS. No. Frame. Drops.
Thank you for your work Alex! We know you're gonna be on a tight schedule in the next weeks, but the quality you are putting in your analysis is always outstanding. Much love! ❤️
13:54 I imagine HDD owners are having a fun time, hearing their drive churn away endlessly while the game is struggling to read 90+GB's of data from it for... some reason.
I mean this game is a bad example, but I really don’t think games being designed around SSDs in 2023 is unreasonable. Something weird going on here tho
I pity the fools still running games from HDDs anyway. - I mean, come on, really?... I'm often a late adopter, but I had no budget around 2010 and got an SSD. Never looked back. - You can get ANY decent SSD used for a few tenners, even if it's just like half a or even a quarter of a terabyte. I would even recommend using a USB-drive over an HDD. - I feel like an HDD might just die with this game. - HDDs should be relegated to storage or backup use only. They're great for that.
wow... just wow.... so I guess I can't play this game on my RTX 2080 super (8gb VRAM GPU). I can play Witcher 3 with full RT and Cyberpunk 2077, but not "sporfoken"? Wow just... wow! when I heard the 12GB VRAM part I literally chocked... what the hell are they doing?! The day when CACA-O looks better than RTAO, I never thought I would see... Fantastic Video as always! Kudos
I guess sometimes this must be a frustrating job to do (specially for Alex on pc) but exposing such poor game developments (and the companies behind them) is so important that I can't thank you enough for doing it, DF.
Both the PS5 & PC version have a memory leak issue too. Most won't encounter it on PS5 unless they play a session for 8-12 hours, but the PC will be hit way faster depending on settings & how much RAM you have.
So let me get this straight. The game is not what I would call a success, the review was a fricking bomb, and, oh, yeah, you still make fun of it? Yeah, ok, that is something comment sections do now.
Thanks for a solid review on PC Alex. I bet this game wasn't the most fun to do a deep dive on, but your work is much appreciated from the consumer side.
I feel bad for Alex having to continue to tackle bad PC ports of new AAA games given what he had to deal with in 2022. I really hope one day he can finally happily say we got a great PC port for the latest AAA video game.
THANK YOU!!! ❤️ This is a big FU to all the laptop used who spent money on the 3070/3080 with 8GB VRAM. Thanks for saving me the time to buy and refund it later ❤️
I was waiting for this video not because Forspoken interested me but because of the insane PC requirements, why did it require so much Ram and VRAM? too bad Alex didn't touch the subject of System Ram. But this ultra fail so early in the year is a blessing if other game companies take note and don't allow this to happen to them.
Yeah, no talk about ram or dual sense feature support or lack there of is also something that I don’t get. Personally lately I find DF’s videos have been lacking.
@@Lock2002ful well john talked about dual sense features on the ps5 video and said he wouldn't recommend using it in this game , so maybe that's why it wasn't mentionned But i agree , i think their videos a while back were better but maybe it's just because forspoken isn't that good
Oh sweet summer child, it’s going to continue all year every year. Just you wait till Starfield comes out. 😂 I get a morbid sort of joy out of experiencing Bethesda launches first hand.
@@tomaspavka2014 but the problem is that this increase in unwarranted since the game has average or sometimes questionable texture quality , if it demanded 12gb and delivered a truly next gen experience it would be a bit understandable but the problem is that it's unoptimized , really demanding and has nothing to show for it in terms of fidelity
Ray Traced AO is only active in very small radius around the main character and by very small, I mean very small. If you turn the camera around in game and directly look at the main characters face, you can clearly see the difference between RT on and RT off. The same goes for characters that are close to Frey. My guess is that RT AO was only implement to have better AO on characters you are talking to in the game. RT AO actually makes the characters noticeably look better, so it's definitely something that I won't turn off. I guess the reason why RT AO works with the shoes on the shelve is that the shelve is within the very small radius around the main character that has RT AO. I've seen RT AO have an impact on objects very close by, but taking one or two steps back and it changes to normal AO.
In that scenario it's a complete waste of resources. CACAO could have accomplished the same thing if they didn't tune it to be absolutely hideous. The default values for that shader are so significantly better, idk what they were thinking.
@@kickfister judging from the overall state of the game... I'm not to sure they were thinking. This thing was a huge flop before it came out and they still didn't bother to listen to complaint's ( actual complaints btw )
I could see them doing that theoretically for performance reasons, but, a.- we're not seeing performance benefits you should see from something like that, and, b.- it would be fairly straightforward to apply RTAO specifically only to characters. Applying it to a small radius around them is a really backwards, awkward, and unnecessary way of doing it, if they were trying to do that. (Which I'm honestly skeptical they were.)
They always compare a console $499 to a PC with 4090, of course PC looks good then. Would be VERY sad if not! But never a comparison with 1060, 1660 or other GPUs which are MOST USED in Steam (hardware survey) because THEN the PC would look very bad... Every PC gamer has a 3080 or 4090 .... yeah right .....
1060 3gb... in my six year old pre-built I bought for $300 five years ago. It was a huge step up from my PS4 at the time. Still does a fine job with my backlog too.
@@razor_no1 Maybe because all those GPUs came out before the PS5? Steam surveys don't mean jackshit. Most of those people are playing F2P MP titles. Even a 3060 Ti will slap around a PS5 in most games.
@@razor_no1 Facts! I believe the Nvidia RTX 3060 - 3080Ti or Radeon RX 6650xt - 6800xt are sorta the sweet spots for pc 1440p / entry 4K gaming. Anything above or below these cards are kinda disingenuous in a PS5 / Series X comparison. These consoles seem optimal from around 1440p native to 4K with upscaling technology.
15:47 *Y I K E S* Also....Forspoken and the complete version of that Final Fantasy Remake game are the only 2 games that are 79.99euro (instead of the "usual" 69.99euro) on Steam! And yes...both of these games are published by the same publisher...Square Enix.
They need every cent because they start to feel the effects of making trashy games for years and being taken by surprise that these bad games underperform sales wise.
Modern Warfare II also use the new higher pricing scheme. Sony started the trend with 70 USD/80 EUR pricing on PS5. Then publisher followed, I guess both Square Enix and Activision are bringing this trend to PC market.
Yeah it's ridiculous. I'm not european, but both games are also insanely expensive for me too. In the US store they're 69.99usd. But on MX store they are 76usd lmao. How tf do they expect us to buy a more expensive version, when in average we earn 4 times less than people in the US? Same goes for europeans, some live in 1st world countries and can afford it but others don't yet they still get screwed by the EU pricing EDIT: I forgot to say, fuck Squeenix
@@wizzenberry As proven in this video, it's not just about loading screens. 4s vs 6s isn't a big deal. It's about relieving the CPU of its workload and moving it to the GPU. Spider-Man would be amazing if it had Direct Storage because it's CPU bound and stutters and freezes while streaming the world assets when swinging.
This might be a long shot, but in 9:10 the rtao seems to fade when Frey's actual 'head' from the model steps back? Maybe in gameplay, for some reason, the RTAO is based on proximity to Frey's head instead of the Player's camera.
I wonder what will happen with Luminous and the Luminous Productions. It's been 7-8 years and there are still only two games made with that engine. I really think they should move away from big budget titles and either try out AA titles, which works well for Square or split the dev team among the other dev teams and shelf Luminous Engine. Basicly all of Square moved on to UE4/5 aside from XIV and XVI which ironically use a very early branch of Luminous, but that team just turned it into something completely different.
The problem is Japanese devs usually waste time and money reinventing the wheel with every game. They wasted time building new engines and not enough time developing the middle ware. So they end up with a good renderer when they first announced it, but no one else used it because it's so hard because of no support. So they probably ended up with all kinds of bugs that they can't even track down.
@@Dratio lol the fact the ReEngines been rewritten for the RE games (first and third person) street fighter, and their new game prag Mata, it not only looks beautiful but optimized, safe to say REegines winning
You're doing such a good job that I understand the game is bad in optimization if its not approved by you. I think every developer should send you their copy for extensive testing before releasing their game.
Honestly shocked the game even has DLSS support! Edit: The sparkling is no doubt a bonus for Twilight fans! I wonder if fans will be able to hack in some RT that isn't a joke. Seems unlikely given that this isn't a UE game... It seems that DirectStorage will be progressively more useful for those of us with mid range CPUs
I have to comment on these reviewers that are thrashing this game. I've been playing games for over 4 decades and having played most genres... you can tell when a game is going to be good or not. Sort of like watching a trailer for a movie or watching the first 15 minutes of a show and turn it off because you just KNOW! SOMETHING about this game kept pushing me to check it out. Even though everyone thrashed it. I'm a huge Read Dead guy, love games like Control, Mad Max, Just Cause, Dragon Dogma, Infamous, etc... SO, I picked it up and have been playing it non-stop since. I'm about 15 hours in at this point. Here's my quick take... A good buy and I've been having alot of fun. Alot of fun. ALTHOUGH, you have to walk into this game with clear expectations so you can get past a unfortunate hump in order to experience the game as it was intended.... It takes almost 8 hours to get past the hump. YES, 8 hours. I'm with most reviewers in that it's a really strange choice to cause a player to go through 8 hours only to finally open the game up to play a game that I believe is the core of what the developers intended. I also realized about 3 hours in that I could remap my buttons on my PS5 controller. Once I did this, it was smooth. WAY BETTER. For example, I remapped the shooting button from Trigger to Square. Parkour / Run to R1 and Magic selection to trigger. No joke this changed everything for my play style and was smooth. I also bumped the sensitive up. All this combined to make combat smooth and fun. Once I hit that 8 hour mark, the game opened up, combat became alot of fun, parkour was a blast and the game just became very smooth and fun to play. I'm hooked at this point and looking forward to jumping back into keep going. THIS is in my opinion the problem with the reviews. I'm not sure they actually played past the 8 hour mark and if they did they were so focused on obvious issues they couldn't enjoy the game at the core. Combat and Traversal. That's unfortunate. I also think there's alot of reviewers that are ALLLLLLLL about story instead of gameplay. They JUST can't get past dialogue or the story. Which also is unfortunate because a game is called a game for a reason. Not a movie, not a TV show but game. YES, the story sucks and dialogue is bad BUT the gameplay is awesome and the world is somewhat empty but really fun to explore. So many open world games that were empty and looked like crap and people still gave it raving reviews. Enemies aren't that varied but still fun. IT'S FUN. Again, been playing for 4 decades and todays gamers just seem spoiled and entitled. I remember playing Soldiers of Fortune and original Far Cry and Golden Eye and having a blast. It was all about the gameplay, not graphics, not story. SO, I'm really enjoying it. My son made fun but tried it out and now he keeps asking me everynight if he can borrow it. He's a hardcore Souls, Elden Ring, Bloodborne guy, he's on game plus 4 times over on each. For me that says something. Give it a go, get past the long 8 hours and boom, awesome game that I'm HOPING the developer is capable of coming back with a sequel and improve on all the stuff that gave it that unfortunate hump.
The game doesn't have directstorage 1.1 implementation it has the basic implementation of directstorge which uses CPU for decompression as opposed to GPU decompression that's why we see different loading times on different CPUs
Thanks for your coverage, Alex. Obviously not a great outcome, on the games' side, but valuable insight and reporting for users. It really seems like this title was a troubled project, in general. A real shame.
Dynamic scaling frametaimes mirror those in recent AC games. probably relating to the game hedging between two resolutions, one below the MS budget and one above. So it rapidly swaps between "oh, i'm over budget for this resolution, better downres." "now i'm under budget, better res back up!" indicates there's a treshold for the scaler that should handle when to step back up the internal res that isn't doing its job.
Weirdly enough enabling rt ambient occlusion increases fps for me and sometimes is decreases it. Also the stutter that isn’t visible on framerate graph is something I also noticed. I’ve also had it when moving fast
Now that you did that manifesto it would be neat to add the checklist of the game at the end of the video to get an overall idea on the features present in a title :D
Dang PS2 games had bad textures but the pop in and texture loading was great on ps2. Actually this seems like a game that was rushed and not finished, especially in the performance.
Eh, I've seen PS2 games look less dull than this (better lighting, go figure)... This game could have the highest resolution textures & it still wouldn't save it from looking mediocre.
@SirMo Yup, Nvidia was having a day of stupidity when then made that card with that amount of vram. They didn't take account of the bad optimization of some new games and demanding software of the future.
It’s a game. One of them. Of all time. Makes sense. (It’s a common mishap on forums to forget the adjective I.e. ‘greatest’. They are playing on that meme but being literal here. It is just literally one of the games of all time lol)
The camera motion stutter seems tied to the RT Shadows option being on - it was either gone or highly mitigated for me when RT shadows was disabled. I hadn't realised it was to do with camera though, just thought it was microstutter/framepacing getting hit. Was hoping you'd have been able to dig around though regarding your lighting being broken on that court scene, after seeing myself and others on PC without the same issue (I know, I know, "Works on MY Machine™"). Also amazing to hear the loading speed is just that good and not THAT reliant on DirectStorage.
Meanwhile at the Square Enix Quality Control and Performance Optimization Office: *wind rustles softly as a tumbleweed drifts by - emptiness, void, barren*
You should try testing loading times and performance on much slower SATA SSDs and HDDs, loading time in demo on a SATA was a second compared to HDD's 2 minutes.
@@TheRedRaven_ I has instant loading times if you use ram cache. I have absolutely 0 second load times on my nVME with 120 GB ram cache. It's still rubbish because the textures are just so bad with 8 GB of VRAM. I'd prefer if I could just disable texture streaming and choose the texture option myself.
In the Forspoken Demo, the frame limit does not work properly. RTSS also doesn't work well. Set your monitor to 60Hz and turn on vsync and it's smooth camera.
as far as i can tell there is no way to run the game at 60hz exclusive fullscreen if you have high refresh rate monitor in this game... which is baffling
@UnrealStutterEngine RDR2 has a similar problem and when you rotate the camera there are minor stutters even with fps locked and Gsync. This solves disabling Gsync entirely in NVCP and relying on normal in-game vsync. In Forspoken you just need to rely on vsync because the game engine doesn't like the fps limiter but you don't need to disable Gsync in NVCP. Conclusions. Forpoken doesn't like the fps limiter. RDR2 has a problem with overwritten vsync when using Gsync so you need to disable it and rely on vsync in game.
@UnrealStutterEngine it all depends on preferences and individual tolerances but freesync and gsync-compatible are not super stable. the monitor refresh rate goes up and down even if the framerate is locked solid (check out battle nonsense's video on the topic). i personally don't like using freesync below 80fps and prefer vsync at 60 if they are working correctly (with freesync as a backup). also you should consider using rtss to lock the framerate because they are much more stable and do better job at locking frame rate than nvcp.
My question is still the same: Are these issues due more so to the dev time (which was extensive) or management issues or is the engine the biggest bottleneck here? I just can’t understand how they put out a game that’s very visually unattractive AND incredibly heavy to run when SE typically at least puts out games that LOOK visually pleasing.
I mean we're never gonna hear it straight from the source but considering it's Square, management issues look the most likely to me. The game screams "let's build out that tech demo into a full game because money" while not giving it the proper resources and attention an A-tier project would theoretically get. Again, it's Square. Their history speaks for itself honestly. Even their A-tier projects scream mismanagement in many cases. It's a miracle (miracle is too positive a word) that they even get games out.
@@brinewind8732 Which is funny because Rage 1 also had texture streaming. So this game isn't first with that. Only with directstorage, which I could be without if I got better textures.
11:11 I have this stutter in most games. Unless I turn on g-sync, turn on v-sync and turn off frame rate limiters. Yes fps limiters, such as in nvidia control panel or in Riva Tuner Statistics Server, make my variable refresh rate stop working. And it's very noticeable on 60 Hz screen with not super high fps. But it seems like some multiplayer games don't have that issue. Stutter happens even if I set fps limit to 60 and the frame times graph is flat line. My amateur guess is that it's periodically skipping a frame. Because the timing isn't perfect. With just g-sync and v-sync, the frame times go all over the place. But no stutters. My screen is FreeSync BTW. Using as g-sync compatible.
Yesterday you guys mentioned a second Dead Space in depth look coming today, but I assume this was delayed due to the hotfix that came in yesterday afternoon correcting the VRS issues. Appreciate you being able to swap in a new topic.
Pretty sure Oliver's video already went live to Patreon supporters yesterday. They might make an updated video but that could mean waiting another 2 days for everyone else in order to give Patreon members early access.
Based on the texture comments in the video, I'm left wondering if they are using some kind of bad compression/storage algorithm that is adversely affecting the engines ability to provide quality outputs when increasing texture quality.
So... @15:22 where Direct Storage allows the GPU to access main memory over the system bus, does this indicate that: 1) the CPU bottleneck has been removed (it appears to have been) 2) having 3D cache on the processor would present 0 advantage (this seems like the take-away in this instance) 3) having the maximum DDR5 RAM speed and fastest system bus possible would be the best setup? (DDR5 8000 currently?) Seems like there's a LOT to dig in here on after the 7950/7800 X3D parts come out testing those against max ram Intel setup. Or it may be better not to wait on X3D parts and just get higher clocked 7700X/7900X
I watch this channel for years and this is the first time that’s I see one game don’t have an “optimized settings” because is a dogs***. Thanks for saving money for a lot of people.
Luminous could've been a great competitor to Unreal 4/5, and Square Enix's version of EA's Frostbyte. Instead it's still woefully underperforming, and by all accounts inferior to UE5.. as is anything else due to Lumen and Nanite.. especially Nanite (still poor LoD transitions so close to the camera in this footage). I thought a DX12 upgrade to FFXV would drastically help its performance because the game gets CPU bottlenecked (especially with model LoD on 'high'), but now.. I just see tradeoffs. Though, not like SE would 'waste' the money anyway. Really sad state of the gaming industry, and Square Enix in general.
Yeah its really sad. And its not like they cant do it either. FF7 looks pretty great at Times. It does have some Issues with Textures as well on PS4 at least, funny enough. But... it was WAY better than Forspoken here. So whatever Issue SE has with Games these Days... it seems its not just an Engine Problem (but i do think their Luminous Engine is kinda bad) but has something to do with how they programm in Generell. Its like... this is really just a Feeling but for me it seems they are so close to have awesome Games but they arent.
UE5 is so far out of reach for Luminous. Even some UE4 titles looks much better than this. The main problem of Luminous is that it ask too much (in terms of system performance) yet gives so little in return.
@@bltzcstrnx Still better than the atrocity of the engine Team Ninja has been using. Stranger of Paradise is unmatched in terms of abysmal performance, but that's mostly due to the developers just not optimizing the game.. at all, ever. It looks 10 years out of date, yet even an RTX 4090 can't even keep 120FPS with DLSS on at 4K, it's horrific. Plus they have FPS issues and lock cutscenes (in-engine) to 30, and in previous versions of the engine (older games like Nioh and Dissidia NT), max out gameplay at 60. Nioh2/SoP increased that to 120, but still kept the 30FPS cutscene lock (and actually patched it into SoP, was uncapped). Now I haven't played Nioh 2 to see how it performs by comparison, but from their work on SoP, I wish they were using Luminous instead. I also wish they were given time to develop the damn game and not shove it out blatantly unfinished..
@@AceStrife Team Ninja is Koei Tecmo right? Most of their games indeed have abysmal performance. Just look at the latest Dynasty Warriors for example. Though Japanese developers often have problems in their games performance. This includes FromSoftware even with Elden Ring. One notable exception is Capcom using their RE Engine.
@@AceStrife let me tell you nioh 2 is poorly optimized as well. i'm running on a rtx 580 so my system is on the low end but there are plenty of moments in nioh 2 where framerate just dips into unplayable range for no apparent reason. it's as if the game is rendering parts that are outside of view. like i'll face a wall in a certain direction and performance will tank despite that singular wall being the only object in view
Did I just do that? Did I just like the video? I just liked the video, with my hand. I just liked the video, with my freaking hand! I'll probably subscribe next
These reviews just help me make good informed purchasing decisions. I should have waited for the Dead Space deep dive, I unfortunately had to refund as my i7-9700k/2080 super could not get the game playable at all.
Oddly enough, the game never crashed for me (18 hours played), nor did I have missing textures/objects. (on a 7900XT). But the fps drop for camera movement is there.
I have an RX 6700 XT + Ryzen 9 3900XT + 32GB 3600C16 with S.A.M enabled and so far, no texture issues nor crashing. Game still most DEF needs optimization patches. Areas with high foliage will tank fps. Aside from that, it's been generally playable (for me) at 60fps.
On my RTX 3080 I also get the bug with textures not loading even when dropping it down to standard. Really shameful launch this game. The eye opener is the SSD usage figures, I can't see that as being healthy for an SSD
I thought one of the goals of DS is during gameplay to have data streaming directly from the NVMe to GPU. Wouldn't this be texture streaming, along with other data to create an image? If the NVMe is constantly moving data for a time period is it possible that this is still info for the current map/area and play starts without all information that needs to be loaded in DRAM just isn't there yet? THANKS for the great break down on what you see, this is one of my favorite parts with this channel, such detailed info about these new games.
Looking forward to your Dead Space Remake video. I finished it today and it has so many technical problems on PC, the stuttering is wild, and the last boss is borderline broken as it has some of the worst frame rate drops and stutters I've ever experienced, so I hope you can make it to the last boss (or borrow a save file).
Oh damn, thanks for the heads up. I've been very tempted to pick it up, but I'll definitely wait if there are major issues like that. Callisto Protocol ran extremely well for me when I bought it on a bit of a sale a few weeks ago, with no or very little shader compilation stutter, but evidently the stutter struggle is an ongoing one... And sadly not something _just_ regulated to shader management.
@@reNINTENDO I would 100% wait. The hardware doesn't exist to brute force the traversal stutter so it has to be fixed with a patch. And even though DSR does precompile shaders on the menu, I'm not convinced it works correctly, as I definitely suffered from compilation stutter many times during my playthrough, with the last boss being completely ruined by it (I ran the fight a second time to confirm and it was perfect, so at the very least the last boss is not being precached). Overall it's a very uneven, disappointing experience from a technical POV, but the actual remake itself is glorious, and I wish I had waited to play it. I will be doing a NG+ run once it has been fixed.
How often are you seeing stutters? I've been playing it without much issue, I've seen a couple stutters but they have been few (literally 2 of them 3 hours in) and far between. Running at 4k Ultra w/ DLSS Quality on a 3080ti, it runs at a solid 60fps
Found a workaround for the texture popping in and out and not loading correctly for all nNidia 3070 Ti 8GB (maybe others?) users: set the texture memory to ultra-high. While not perfect, you'll see some the majority of issues disappear.
Does the sparkling come from forced sharpness if they included a DLSS dll earler than 2.5.1 which force-disables sharpening? It sounds like DLSS godawful motion sharpen in case it only happens during movement.
@@DigitalFoundry damn weird then, don't think I've ever seen that effect from DLSS when it wasn't tied to sharpening such as the shore sand in God of War for example, etc.
I tend to buy a very high end PC every 4 years or so. My ageing NVidia 2080 Ti equipped machine is now due a replacement. But looking at the current state of PC gaming, I think I will stick with my current PC, coupled with my PS5 and XBSX for at least another year.
Another incredible analysis Alex! this developers shoud be put to shame. The 8gb textures are just terrible. The RT implementation is a joke. Stop wasting money on DENUVO and pay people to actually care about the work being done. - - content idea: HALF ASSED PC port ranking for 2023
Does the DirectStorage implementation of Forspoken on PC actually contribute to more efficient texture VRAM utilization? I've noticed that the most recent lineup of GPUs from Nvidia and AMD have quite a lot of VRAM, often more than the usual 16GB of regular RAM. I've noticed that a lot of games recently have become very VRAM hungry. I was hoping this would somewhat mitigate this issue.
GPU VRAM doesn't just sit doing nothing because the game process registers below whatever your GPUs VRAM is. Take a 3080, if you're playing Forspoken and filling up 8GB, there is 2GB more unaccounted for in Windows that is used as a cache for other data the game frequently calls. So in terms of efficiency there is not anything to gain because the game will either use more VRAM than you have, or use less and fill the rest as a cache. The only performance increase you might see is when a certain range of settings would require more VRAM than your card has as a "baseline", then you get I/O issues from fetching data off your drive frequently. In that instance, DirectStorage /should/ produce better frametimes, but whether it actually does in practice for Forspoken remains to be seen.
@@MarceloTezza You can go and look up VRAM benchmarks for games on the same preset with different GPUs. They'll run the same settings and yet Windows will report different VRAM usage. Or you could go read the DirectX documentation, it's done automatically by DX. When data is read into the GPU, your GPU will hang onto that data in VRAM. If you come up against a wall, your GPU will free that cached data and replace it with what it needs for the next frame. It's why my RTX 3080 has higher usage in Hi-Fi Rush the longer I play, because more assets have been loaded into VRAM without the need to discard. Windows does the same thing, it will cache frequently/recently opened program data ready for when you click it. If you have 32GB of RAM, and Windows reports 10GB usage, the other 22GB will be cached data used to speed up general use.
@@MarceloTezza Just think of it like this: Why would your GPU read in data, and then discard it when it has spare memory to store it? Otherwise, every time it needs that data, even if it's only a few times, it has to go through the CPU (not DirectStorage) to get the asset from RAM. It makes sense to hold onto it and reduce the amount of time spent requesting and transferring data between RAM and the GPU itself. This is even MORE obvious when you consider that GPUs don't have an equivalent of L1-L3 cache, so it's even more important that VRAM is utilised in a way to maximise asset search times and reduce the amount of calls to other parts of the system that are off the PCB.
@@Spellzy Not true, dx will not cache any data unless the dev has said the game to do it. Some games will use your gpu excess vram as cache, others wont, the difference of vram usage on different cards has more about the memory bus and how those memories are distributed than a directx memory management behaviour. You are mix matching facts with your guesses. If what you were talking about was true, every game would always be maxing out vram. So no, not true. Windows manages ram differently than manages vram. Anyway...
Really sad to see how it turned out for the engine. Its probably it's end here. The last piece of this crazy mid 2000 dream Square had is falling apart. May be for the better. But still, it's sad. There is a timeline where there is a lot to love in this game.
how does the camera add stutter while rotating the camera around 11:15, and yet having stable frames? very intriguing, you should investigate that further, is it a bad implementation of the ingame camera? how? or is the game somehow cheating on the stable frames?
I'm sure this game is almost exactly the opposite of what you had in mind with your PC manifesto, but thank you for putting this video together. It saves me a lot of money and frustration knowing not to waste my time.
Game is also an open robbery, costing 80 euros on steam. Like its one thing to price hike to 70 euros this gen, but 80? Square Enix has lost its mind with their NFT addicted CEO
Japanese companies don’t understand pcs
@@wile123456 this got to be the historic first for a standard AAA game to cost 80 Euros. And then they slap a cheap engine into it that can not do RT reflections... -.-
@@techpriest4787 Not cheap. Their custom engine probably cost them a heck of a lot of money to develop. They just cannot compete with professional engine creation, testing, and development over a huge market spread.
@@wile123456 I know it's crazy, but that's exactly what Sony did with PS5 games and suggested that other developers follow: increase prices from the standard $60/60€/£50 to $70/80€/£70. They've done the same thing with FF7R and this will also happen with Returnal.
Another unbelievably detailed (and necessary) deep dive. Loved the N/S/E/W camera movement analysis, always blown away by the ingenuity of the DF team.
Very honest and great review. I tried the Demo on my RTX 2070 super at 1440p and seriously the poor performance for such ridiculously bad graphics is completely mind boggling. Even 10 year old games have better texture quality than this.
I have the same GC. I’m glad to read it because I bought the ps5 version. Even if the ps5 version looks not really good.
It’s pretty much what we all feared. If we have to upgrade our hardware for vastly improved visuals, fine. But upgrading our hardware to run games that don’t look any better? Oh boy.
Honestly, it's not even the texture quality. That's actually fine really. But dear god, it's the most visually dull I've seen in years. The lighting is terrible, zero depth. Shadows are screwed, no fallback for long distances so stuff in the distance has no shadows. Overall environment complexity is non-existent. The lighting sucks. Ambient occlusion just seems broken. Oh and lighting is terrible
Just look at 01:12 - 01:20, perfect example of how bad the game looks. The whole thing looks so empty and dead! Missing shadows a few dozens feet away right in front of the camera. Lighting makes everything literally the same color, it's completely uniform. Absolutely dull environment with just basic elements that seemed to be dragged there and never iterated on afterwards. And that's how the whole game looks. Outside of cities it's just basic terrain with trees, grass and other bolted on structures, with basic variability in environment structure.
FF15 looks better than this game.
@@notlekrut I love how you mentioned lighting sucks 3 times xD and yes you are right, textures are alright. For example in Resident evil 6, textures are very low quality but boy the ambience , colors, and lighting makes up for it and game still manage to look really good even by todays standards which honestly have gone down to gutter with releases like gotham knights and forspoken. That's why artistic direction is more important than all the shiny RT tech devs slap on nowdays.
Just a note Alex clouds being lowered do affect some fog like clouds at ground level that go missing on lower settings, otherwise yes the clouds in the sky look no different.
The skybox looks dated as hell.
Then they should've call it fog quality.
@@MASJYT Or better yet, seperate the settings for fog and clouds.
@@JustFeral There actually is a fog quality setting right right above cloud quality 🤔
@@HondEpic
The fog one controls the mist into the distance. As i said their is some ground level cloud like stuff that looks like a cloud like thing but on the ground, the lowest setting removes it and the highest setting has an almost volumetric looking cloud at ground level. They are not the same thing.
Devs should be paying big sums to you guys to test their games ahead of launch. I look forward to these videos. Only thing is I wish you got code early enough to post on launch date. I'm 6 hours into the game banging my head because I didn't turn off RT earlier. I'm on a 4080 but paired with 3700x and RT is killing me in this game. Cyberpunk I could do on psycho and get mostly above 60 except in the heavy city areas.
I think those tech reviews are probably a good reason why the devs like FromSoftware will likely never give an early code to DF guys when they know they didn't put much effort into PC port.
Digital Foundry QA Consultant when😆
The 24GB of ram got me lol
Yep, the Boogeyman of getting 32 GB RAM is finally here...
Lol, this game needs 24 GB of RAM?
@@Z3t487 You gamers should get on high standards. Find the best parts in the net and force your games, even an NES game to go up to 4K and 120 FPS. No. Frame. Drops.
@Z3t487 bad optimization makes things like this possible xD
When i run the Switch emulator and Smash Bros without a graphics card, that's the total amount of memory my system uses.
This is where the fun begins!
Thank you for your work Alex! We know you're gonna be on a tight schedule in the next weeks, but the quality you are putting in your analysis is always outstanding. Much love! ❤️
high quality technical review, as always! thank you very much for your service.
13:54 I imagine HDD owners are having a fun time, hearing their drive churn away endlessly while the game is struggling to read 90+GB's of data from it for... some reason.
I mean this game is a bad example, but I really don’t think games being designed around SSDs in 2023 is unreasonable. Something weird going on here tho
HDD owners should buy an SSD
@@moonknightish yeah, nobody deserves HDD xD
I pity the fools still running games from HDDs anyway. - I mean, come on, really?... I'm often a late adopter, but I had no budget around 2010 and got an SSD. Never looked back. - You can get ANY decent SSD used for a few tenners, even if it's just like half a or even a quarter of a terabyte. I would even recommend using a USB-drive over an HDD. - I feel like an HDD might just die with this game. - HDDs should be relegated to storage or backup use only. They're great for that.
@@michaelmonstar4276 Agreed
I already forgot about this game. Forspoken should be retitled Forgotten.
wow
Savage
Oh look there’s a kid being edgy 😂
@@a36538 nah the game is just shitty
@@a36538 yeah he thinks that he is funny
Thanks for another great review Alex 👍
wow... just wow.... so I guess I can't play this game on my RTX 2080 super (8gb VRAM GPU). I can play Witcher 3 with full RT and Cyberpunk 2077, but not "sporfoken"?
Wow just... wow!
when I heard the 12GB VRAM part I literally chocked... what the hell are they doing?! The day when CACA-O looks better than RTAO, I never thought I would see...
Fantastic Video as always! Kudos
Been waiting for this!!!
I guess sometimes this must be a frustrating job to do (specially for Alex on pc) but exposing such poor game developments (and the companies behind them) is so important that I can't thank you enough for doing it, DF.
Both the PS5 & PC version have a memory leak issue too. Most won't encounter it on PS5 unless they play a session for 8-12 hours, but the PC will be hit way faster depending on settings & how much RAM you have.
ps5 has such bad memory leak
Oh my gosh did you freaking just ACTUALLY review the game Forspoken. Oh my god this is so crazy, I guess you do this now. -Forspoken Style Dialogue
🤣
😂😂
They're trying to appeal to the GenZ crowd and those terminally afflicted with valley girl uptalk dialects. (i.e. Californians).
He reviewed it... With his freaking MIND
So let me get this straight. The game is not what I would call a success, the review was a fricking bomb, and, oh, yeah, you still make fun of it? Yeah, ok, that is something comment sections do now.
Thanks for a solid review on PC Alex. I bet this game wasn't the most fun to do a deep dive on, but your work is much appreciated from the consumer side.
I feel bad for Alex having to continue to tackle bad PC ports of new AAA games given what he had to deal with in 2022. I really hope one day he can finally happily say we got a great PC port for the latest AAA video game.
Its the superior version. He’s luckier that john
@@ArchieBunker11 Yeah, it's better than PS5, but that isn't saying much, it still isn't a good PC port.
Dead spaaaaaace
OR...hear me out...we all understand that PC gaming is dying and embrace consoles and mobile
@@generalcjg Well it certainly as quality as the game itself I guess?
Thank you so much Alex. Es ist einfach traurig.... Ich danke dir wie immer unendlich für deine Videos
THANK YOU!!! ❤️
This is a big FU to all the laptop used who spent money on the 3070/3080 with 8GB VRAM. Thanks for saving me the time to buy and refund it later ❤️
I was waiting for this video not because Forspoken interested me but because of the insane PC requirements, why did it require so much Ram and VRAM? too bad Alex didn't touch the subject of System Ram. But this ultra fail so early in the year is a blessing if other game companies take note and don't allow this to happen to them.
Yeah, no talk about ram or dual sense feature support or lack there of is also something that I don’t get.
Personally lately I find DF’s videos have been lacking.
@@Lock2002ful well john talked about dual sense features on the ps5 video and said he wouldn't recommend using it in this game , so maybe that's why it wasn't mentionned
But i agree , i think their videos a while back were better but maybe it's just because forspoken isn't that good
Oh sweet summer child, it’s going to continue all year every year. Just you wait till Starfield comes out. 😂
I get a morbid sort of joy out of experiencing Bethesda launches first hand.
The game is play5 exclusive + 50% Ram compared to xboxS. Every graphics card with less that 8go Ram are fu..ed even with 6 teraflop
@@tomaspavka2014 but the problem is that this increase in unwarranted since the game has average or sometimes questionable texture quality , if it demanded 12gb and delivered a truly next gen experience it would be a bit understandable but the problem is that it's unoptimized , really demanding and has nothing to show for it in terms of fidelity
Ray Traced AO is only active in very small radius around the main character and by very small, I mean very small. If you turn the camera around in game and directly look at the main characters face, you can clearly see the difference between RT on and RT off. The same goes for characters that are close to Frey. My guess is that RT AO was only implement to have better AO on characters you are talking to in the game. RT AO actually makes the characters noticeably look better, so it's definitely something that I won't turn off.
I guess the reason why RT AO works with the shoes on the shelve is that the shelve is within the very small radius around the main character that has RT AO. I've seen RT AO have an impact on objects very close by, but taking one or two steps back and it changes to normal AO.
In that scenario it's a complete waste of resources. CACAO could have accomplished the same thing if they didn't tune it to be absolutely hideous. The default values for that shader are so significantly better, idk what they were thinking.
@@kickfister judging from the overall state of the game... I'm not to sure they were thinking. This thing was a huge flop before it came out and they still didn't bother to listen to complaint's ( actual complaints btw )
I could see them doing that theoretically for performance reasons, but, a.- we're not seeing performance benefits you should see from something like that, and, b.- it would be fairly straightforward to apply RTAO specifically only to characters. Applying it to a small radius around them is a really backwards, awkward, and unnecessary way of doing it, if they were trying to do that. (Which I'm honestly skeptical they were.)
"HIGH CACAO?" Is there some kind of chocolatey form of ambient occlusion I don't know about?!
(I Google'd it immediately after making this comment BTW.)
More like CACA said John lol.
I'm sorry for you Alex... These pc port are hitting right on the feelings. I hope you will feel better with the play and the test of Hi-Fi Rush
this game is trash on every level, storyline and gameplay are if anything worse than the visuals. What an irredeemable dumpsterfire.
@@anasevi9456 hi Sony! Don't you think you are too old to create fake accounts and show hate on opponents games?
@@GekyumeD Do they actually put an effort to create fake accounts? Honest question.
Great job Alex!
"If your GPU has 8GB of VRAM, I can't recommend you play this game"
Laughs in 1060 6GB
1050ti 4GB
They always compare a console $499 to a PC with 4090, of course PC looks good then. Would be VERY sad if not! But never a comparison with 1060, 1660 or other GPUs which are MOST USED in Steam (hardware survey) because THEN the PC would look very bad... Every PC gamer has a 3080 or 4090 .... yeah right .....
1060 3gb... in my six year old pre-built I bought for $300 five years ago. It was a huge step up from my PS4 at the time. Still does a fine job with my backlog too.
@@razor_no1 Maybe because all those GPUs came out before the PS5? Steam surveys don't mean jackshit. Most of those people are playing F2P MP titles. Even a 3060 Ti will slap around a PS5 in most games.
@@razor_no1 Facts! I believe the Nvidia RTX 3060 - 3080Ti or Radeon RX 6650xt - 6800xt are sorta the sweet spots for pc 1440p / entry 4K gaming. Anything above or below these cards are kinda disingenuous in a PS5 / Series X comparison. These consoles seem optimal from around 1440p native to 4K with upscaling technology.
15:47 *Y I K E S*
Also....Forspoken and the complete version of that Final Fantasy Remake game are the only 2 games that are 79.99euro (instead of the "usual" 69.99euro) on Steam!
And yes...both of these games are published by the same publisher...Square Enix.
They need every cent because they start to feel the effects of making trashy games for years and being taken by surprise that these bad games underperform sales wise.
Modern Warfare II also use the new higher pricing scheme. Sony started the trend with 70 USD/80 EUR pricing on PS5. Then publisher followed, I guess both Square Enix and Activision are bringing this trend to PC market.
Yeah it's ridiculous. I'm not european, but both games are also insanely expensive for me too. In the US store they're 69.99usd. But on MX store they are 76usd lmao. How tf do they expect us to buy a more expensive version, when in average we earn 4 times less than people in the US? Same goes for europeans, some live in 1st world countries and can afford it but others don't yet they still get screwed by the EU pricing
EDIT: I forgot to say, fuck Squeenix
Despite the woes I’m excited for direct storage
DirectStorage is great. This implementation by Forspoken was terrible.
@@wizzenberry As proven in this video, it's not just about loading screens. 4s vs 6s isn't a big deal. It's about relieving the CPU of its workload and moving it to the GPU. Spider-Man would be amazing if it had Direct Storage because it's CPU bound and stutters and freezes while streaming the world assets when swinging.
This might be a long shot, but in 9:10 the rtao seems to fade when Frey's actual 'head' from the model steps back?
Maybe in gameplay, for some reason, the RTAO is based on proximity to Frey's head instead of the Player's camera.
lol, it could be, PS5 is pretty capable when it comes to RT, just look at metro exodus 60fps with Ray traced dynamic GI and that too at 60fps..
It should be called LMAO config instead of RTAO.
I wonder what will happen with Luminous and the Luminous Productions. It's been 7-8 years and there are still only two games made with that engine. I really think they should move away from big budget titles and either try out AA titles, which works well for Square or split the dev team among the other dev teams and shelf Luminous Engine.
Basicly all of Square moved on to UE4/5 aside from XIV and XVI which ironically use a very early branch of Luminous, but that team just turned it into something completely different.
Tbh I wouldn't be surprised if they just old yeller both of them if forspoken underperforms.
The problem is Japanese devs usually waste time and money reinventing the wheel with every game. They wasted time building new engines and not enough time developing the middle ware. So they end up with a good renderer when they first announced it, but no one else used it because it's so hard because of no support. So they probably ended up with all kinds of bugs that they can't even track down.
@@ibrohiem Capcom's RE Engine seems to have turned out pretty damn good though
@@Dratio lol the fact the ReEngines been rewritten for the RE games (first and third person) street fighter, and their new game prag Mata, it not only looks beautiful but optimized, safe to say REegines winning
@@bankaispirits Used on DMC5 as well. A very strong engine indeed.
12:38 you have mistake on the sata ssd, it's definitely not 500gb/s but 500MB/s
You're doing such a good job that I understand the game is bad in optimization if its not approved by you. I think every developer should send you their copy for extensive testing before releasing their game.
Honestly shocked the game even has DLSS support!
Edit: The sparkling is no doubt a bonus for Twilight fans!
I wonder if fans will be able to hack in some RT that isn't a joke. Seems unlikely given that this isn't a UE game...
It seems that DirectStorage will be progressively more useful for those of us with mid range CPUs
@@vivifell The RTGI reshade plugin is screen space only but it can definitely save some very average looking games!
I have to comment on these reviewers that are thrashing this game. I've been playing games for over 4 decades and having played most genres... you can tell when a game is going to be good or not. Sort of like watching a trailer for a movie or watching the first 15 minutes of a show and turn it off because you just KNOW! SOMETHING about this game kept pushing me to check it out. Even though everyone thrashed it. I'm a huge Read Dead guy, love games like Control, Mad Max, Just Cause, Dragon Dogma, Infamous, etc... SO, I picked it up and have been playing it non-stop since. I'm about 15 hours in at this point.
Here's my quick take... A good buy and I've been having alot of fun. Alot of fun. ALTHOUGH, you have to walk into this game with clear expectations so you can get past a unfortunate hump in order to experience the game as it was intended.... It takes almost 8 hours to get past the hump. YES, 8 hours. I'm with most reviewers in that it's a really strange choice to cause a player to go through 8 hours only to finally open the game up to play a game that I believe is the core of what the developers intended. I also realized about 3 hours in that I could remap my buttons on my PS5 controller. Once I did this, it was smooth. WAY BETTER. For example, I remapped the shooting button from Trigger to Square. Parkour / Run to R1 and Magic selection to trigger. No joke this changed everything for my play style and was smooth. I also bumped the sensitive up. All this combined to make combat smooth and fun.
Once I hit that 8 hour mark, the game opened up, combat became alot of fun, parkour was a blast and the game just became very smooth and fun to play. I'm hooked at this point and looking forward to jumping back into keep going. THIS is in my opinion the problem with the reviews. I'm not sure they actually played past the 8 hour mark and if they did they were so focused on obvious issues they couldn't enjoy the game at the core. Combat and Traversal. That's unfortunate. I also think there's alot of reviewers that are ALLLLLLLL about story instead of gameplay. They JUST can't get past dialogue or the story. Which also is unfortunate because a game is called a game for a reason. Not a movie, not a TV show but game. YES, the story sucks and dialogue is bad BUT the gameplay is awesome and the world is somewhat empty but really fun to explore. So many open world games that were empty and looked like crap and people still gave it raving reviews.
Enemies aren't that varied but still fun. IT'S FUN. Again, been playing for 4 decades and todays gamers just seem spoiled and entitled. I remember playing Soldiers of Fortune and original Far Cry and Golden Eye and having a blast. It was all about the gameplay, not graphics, not story. SO, I'm really enjoying it. My son made fun but tried it out and now he keeps asking me everynight if he can borrow it. He's a hardcore Souls, Elden Ring, Bloodborne guy, he's on game plus 4 times over on each. For me that says something. Give it a go, get past the long 8 hours and boom, awesome game that I'm HOPING the developer is capable of coming back with a sequel and improve on all the stuff that gave it that unfortunate hump.
The game doesn't have directstorage 1.1 implementation it has the basic implementation of directstorge which uses CPU for decompression as opposed to GPU decompression that's why we see different loading times on different CPUs
Thanks for your coverage, Alex. Obviously not a great outcome, on the games' side, but valuable insight and reporting for users.
It really seems like this title was a troubled project, in general. A real shame.
Dynamic scaling frametaimes mirror those in recent AC games. probably relating to the game hedging between two resolutions, one below the MS budget and one above. So it rapidly swaps between "oh, i'm over budget for this resolution, better downres." "now i'm under budget, better res back up!"
indicates there's a treshold for the scaler that should handle when to step back up the internal res that isn't doing its job.
Well said.
Weirdly enough enabling rt ambient occlusion increases fps for me and sometimes is decreases it. Also the stutter that isn’t visible on framerate graph is something I also noticed. I’ve also had it when moving fast
Now that you did that manifesto it would be neat to add the checklist of the game at the end of the video to get an overall idea on the features present in a title :D
I have a 10gb vram card and the same texture loading problem occurs at any setting, so 12 is probably the bare minimum to avoid "PS2 nostalgia"
Dang PS2 games had bad textures but the pop in and texture loading was great on ps2.
Actually this seems like a game that was rushed and not finished, especially in the performance.
Eh, I've seen PS2 games look less dull than this (better lighting, go figure)...
This game could have the highest resolution textures & it still wouldn't save it from looking mediocre.
Glad I bought the rx6800 (16GB) over the 3070 (8GB).
@SirMo Yup, Nvidia was having a day of stupidity when then made that card with that amount of vram.
They didn't take account of the bad optimization of some new games and demanding software of the future.
Ridiculous requirement honestly.
One of the games of all time
yes, one of the games of all time. make this make sense lol
It’s a game. One of them. Of all time.
Makes sense.
(It’s a common mishap on forums to forget the adjective I.e. ‘greatest’. They are playing on that meme but being literal here. It is just literally one of the games of all time lol)
@@duppypixels It's not an amazing game but it's not a terrible game. It's just a game, one of the games ever made
The camera motion stutter seems tied to the RT Shadows option being on - it was either gone or highly mitigated for me when RT shadows was disabled. I hadn't realised it was to do with camera though, just thought it was microstutter/framepacing getting hit.
Was hoping you'd have been able to dig around though regarding your lighting being broken on that court scene, after seeing myself and others on PC without the same issue (I know, I know, "Works on MY Machine™").
Also amazing to hear the loading speed is just that good and not THAT reliant on DirectStorage.
It would be interesting to see what settings the console is running
I wonder how many times Alex had to re-record as he accidentally called it Sporfoken ;-)
The DF team would make a great QA team !
Very soon... Square Enix: we are disappointed by sales figures.
I hope they do.
Money its the only language management understands.
VRS 1.0, like AMD Chill, only takes effect when input is detected. So you have to be moving at the very least to see the blurry difference
You know you messed up when Alex "The Ray Tracing Connoisseur" Battaglia recommends keeping all RT effects off.
Also - 7:27 - what is up with the leaking grass?
Meanwhile at the Square Enix Quality Control and Performance Optimization Office: *wind rustles softly as a tumbleweed drifts by - emptiness, void, barren*
Settings shown in ,my video seem to run file on 8gb card
Even with high textures vram usage is around 7gb
You should try testing loading times and performance on much slower SATA SSDs and HDDs, loading time in demo on a SATA was a second compared to HDD's 2 minutes.
The game could have instant load times and it would still be garbage.
@@TheRedRaven_ I has instant loading times if you use ram cache. I have absolutely 0 second load times on my nVME with 120 GB ram cache. It's still rubbish because the textures are just so bad with 8 GB of VRAM. I'd prefer if I could just disable texture streaming and choose the texture option myself.
If you had told me Forspoken was made by Ubisoft, I'd 100% have believe you.
Thats why hes named after a beer no eyes at all
correction sporfoken*
In the Forspoken Demo, the frame limit does not work properly. RTSS also doesn't work well. Set your monitor to 60Hz and turn on vsync and it's smooth camera.
as far as i can tell there is no way to run the game at 60hz exclusive fullscreen if you have high refresh rate monitor in this game... which is baffling
@@AlmondPOP You set the desktop to 60Hz, turn on the game and the borderless window.
@@El_Maveric yes, i just prefer exclusive fullscreen b/c vsync tend to be more stable and freesync is a bit less wobbly with my monitor
@UnrealStutterEngine RDR2 has a similar problem and when you rotate the camera there are minor stutters even with fps locked and Gsync. This solves disabling Gsync entirely in NVCP and relying on normal in-game vsync. In Forspoken you just need to rely on vsync because the game engine doesn't like the fps limiter but you don't need to disable Gsync in NVCP. Conclusions. Forpoken doesn't like the fps limiter. RDR2 has a problem with overwritten vsync when using Gsync so you need to disable it and rely on vsync in game.
@UnrealStutterEngine it all depends on preferences and individual tolerances but freesync and gsync-compatible are not super stable. the monitor refresh rate goes up and down even if the framerate is locked solid (check out battle nonsense's video on the topic). i personally don't like using freesync below 80fps and prefer vsync at 60 if they are working correctly (with freesync as a backup). also you should consider using rtss to lock the framerate because they are much more stable and do better job at locking frame rate than nvcp.
My question is still the same: Are these issues due more so to the dev time (which was extensive) or management issues or is the engine the biggest bottleneck here? I just can’t understand how they put out a game that’s very visually unattractive AND incredibly heavy to run when SE typically at least puts out games that LOOK visually pleasing.
Not really true besides remakes recently. Stranger of paradise was very poor visually as well. Let's hope it doesn't become a trend
I mean we're never gonna hear it straight from the source but considering it's Square, management issues look the most likely to me. The game screams "let's build out that tech demo into a full game because money" while not giving it the proper resources and attention an A-tier project would theoretically get. Again, it's Square. Their history speaks for itself honestly. Even their A-tier projects scream mismanagement in many cases. It's a miracle (miracle is too positive a word) that they even get games out.
@@brinewind8732 Which is funny because Rage 1 also had texture streaming. So this game isn't first with that. Only with directstorage, which I could be without if I got better textures.
11:11 I have this stutter in most games. Unless I turn on g-sync, turn on v-sync and turn off frame rate limiters. Yes fps limiters, such as in nvidia control panel or in Riva Tuner Statistics Server, make my variable refresh rate stop working. And it's very noticeable on 60 Hz screen with not super high fps. But it seems like some multiplayer games don't have that issue. Stutter happens even if I set fps limit to 60 and the frame times graph is flat line. My amateur guess is that it's periodically skipping a frame. Because the timing isn't perfect. With just g-sync and v-sync, the frame times go all over the place. But no stutters.
My screen is FreeSync BTW. Using as g-sync compatible.
Yesterday you guys mentioned a second Dead Space in depth look coming today, but I assume this was delayed due to the hotfix that came in yesterday afternoon correcting the VRS issues. Appreciate you being able to swap in a new topic.
Pretty sure Oliver's video already went live to Patreon supporters yesterday. They might make an updated video but that could mean waiting another 2 days for everyone else in order to give Patreon members early access.
@@dannonyogurt98 oh maybe that was it
Since this is a Square release it would be safe to assume that none of these problems will ever be fixed.
That outro... Great summary!
Based on the texture comments in the video, I'm left wondering if they are using some kind of bad compression/storage algorithm that is adversely affecting the engines ability to provide quality outputs when increasing texture quality.
So... @15:22 where Direct Storage allows the GPU to access main memory over the system bus, does this indicate that:
1) the CPU bottleneck has been removed (it appears to have been)
2) having 3D cache on the processor would present 0 advantage (this seems like the take-away in this instance)
3) having the maximum DDR5 RAM speed and fastest system bus possible would be the best setup? (DDR5 8000 currently?)
Seems like there's a LOT to dig in here on after the 7950/7800 X3D parts come out testing those against max ram Intel setup.
Or it may be better not to wait on X3D parts and just get higher clocked 7700X/7900X
Why include options if they don't even work?
19:12 I think the labels were meant to say shadows instead of reflections
RTAO seems based on the proximity of the protagonist head (one or two feet). Very clever programming - if it were VR :D
Great DS testing!! thank you Alex
Yess, finally!
I watch this channel for years and this is the first time that’s I see one game don’t have an “optimized settings” because is a dogs***. Thanks for saving money for a lot of people.
That sparkle at 3:22 might go away with DLSS 2.5.1 as that totally disables sharpening which often causes that kind of effect.
Jep. Looks better with 2.5.1
This game needed another good 6 months MINIMUM. Great review again, thanks for saving me money. 😅
Luminous could've been a great competitor to Unreal 4/5, and Square Enix's version of EA's Frostbyte.
Instead it's still woefully underperforming, and by all accounts inferior to UE5.. as is anything else due to Lumen and Nanite.. especially Nanite (still poor LoD transitions so close to the camera in this footage). I thought a DX12 upgrade to FFXV would drastically help its performance because the game gets CPU bottlenecked (especially with model LoD on 'high'), but now.. I just see tradeoffs. Though, not like SE would 'waste' the money anyway.
Really sad state of the gaming industry, and Square Enix in general.
Yeah its really sad. And its not like they cant do it either. FF7 looks pretty great at Times. It does have some Issues with Textures as well on PS4 at least, funny enough. But... it was WAY better than Forspoken here. So whatever Issue SE has with Games these Days... it seems its not just an Engine Problem (but i do think their Luminous Engine is kinda bad) but has something to do with how they programm in Generell.
Its like... this is really just a Feeling but for me it seems they are so close to have awesome Games but they arent.
UE5 is so far out of reach for Luminous. Even some UE4 titles looks much better than this. The main problem of Luminous is that it ask too much (in terms of system performance) yet gives so little in return.
@@bltzcstrnx Still better than the atrocity of the engine Team Ninja has been using. Stranger of Paradise is unmatched in terms of abysmal performance, but that's mostly due to the developers just not optimizing the game.. at all, ever. It looks 10 years out of date, yet even an RTX 4090 can't even keep 120FPS with DLSS on at 4K, it's horrific.
Plus they have FPS issues and lock cutscenes (in-engine) to 30, and in previous versions of the engine (older games like Nioh and Dissidia NT), max out gameplay at 60. Nioh2/SoP increased that to 120, but still kept the 30FPS cutscene lock (and actually patched it into SoP, was uncapped).
Now I haven't played Nioh 2 to see how it performs by comparison, but from their work on SoP, I wish they were using Luminous instead.
I also wish they were given time to develop the damn game and not shove it out blatantly unfinished..
@@AceStrife Team Ninja is Koei Tecmo right? Most of their games indeed have abysmal performance. Just look at the latest Dynasty Warriors for example. Though Japanese developers often have problems in their games performance. This includes FromSoftware even with Elden Ring. One notable exception is Capcom using their RE Engine.
@@AceStrife let me tell you nioh 2 is poorly optimized as well. i'm running on a rtx 580 so my system is on the low end but there are plenty of moments in nioh 2 where framerate just dips into unplayable range for no apparent reason. it's as if the game is rendering parts that are outside of view. like i'll face a wall in a certain direction and performance will tank despite that singular wall being the only object in view
Couldn't wait for more coverage of my favorite game Sporfoken
Did I just click on this video with my mind...DID I JUST CLICK ON THIS VIDEO WITH MY MIND
You just watch shit...with your eyes
Did I just do that? Did I just like the video?
I just liked the video, with my hand. I just liked the video, with my freaking hand!
I'll probably subscribe next
Excellent video aside, couldn't help laughing at the 41 clown/jester awards given to the developer post @ 17:09 🤣😂
Well deserved. All devs who worked on this game are literal clowns.
These reviews just help me make good informed purchasing decisions. I should have waited for the Dead Space deep dive, I unfortunately had to refund as my i7-9700k/2080 super could not get the game playable at all.
Oddly enough, the game never crashed for me (18 hours played), nor did I have missing textures/objects. (on a 7900XT). But the fps drop for camera movement is there.
7900XT has 20GB of VRAM so it should be fine if 12GB was designed for High settings
I have an RX 6700 XT + Ryzen 9 3900XT + 32GB 3600C16 with S.A.M enabled and so far, no texture issues nor crashing. Game still most DEF needs optimization patches. Areas with high foliage will tank fps. Aside from that, it's been generally playable (for me) at 60fps.
On my RTX 3080 I also get the bug with textures not loading even when dropping it down to standard. Really shameful launch this game. The eye opener is the SSD usage figures, I can't see that as being healthy for an SSD
Those are SSD reads and don't hurt the SSD in any way. Either way, I'm not buying this mediocre game.
Sporfoken! Brew on the go and Alex on the Telly :)
Dev got 41 🤡 awards on that Steam post. Definitely users are not happy with this poor showing.
I thought one of the goals of DS is during gameplay to have data streaming directly from the NVMe to GPU. Wouldn't this be texture streaming, along with other data to create an image?
If the NVMe is constantly moving data for a time period is it possible that this is still info for the current map/area and play starts without all information that needs to be loaded in DRAM just isn't there yet?
THANKS for the great break down on what you see, this is one of my favorite parts with this channel, such detailed info about these new games.
12:28 500GB/s ? That's one fast SATA SSD
Rip Square's last own inhouse engine.
Looking forward to your Dead Space Remake video. I finished it today and it has so many technical problems on PC, the stuttering is wild, and the last boss is borderline broken as it has some of the worst frame rate drops and stutters I've ever experienced, so I hope you can make it to the last boss (or borrow a save file).
Oh damn, thanks for the heads up. I've been very tempted to pick it up, but I'll definitely wait if there are major issues like that. Callisto Protocol ran extremely well for me when I bought it on a bit of a sale a few weeks ago, with no or very little shader compilation stutter, but evidently the stutter struggle is an ongoing one... And sadly not something _just_ regulated to shader management.
@@reNINTENDO I would 100% wait. The hardware doesn't exist to brute force the traversal stutter so it has to be fixed with a patch. And even though DSR does precompile shaders on the menu, I'm not convinced it works correctly, as I definitely suffered from compilation stutter many times during my playthrough, with the last boss being completely ruined by it (I ran the fight a second time to confirm and it was perfect, so at the very least the last boss is not being precached).
Overall it's a very uneven, disappointing experience from a technical POV, but the actual remake itself is glorious, and I wish I had waited to play it. I will be doing a NG+ run once it has been fixed.
How often are you seeing stutters? I've been playing it without much issue, I've seen a couple stutters but they have been few (literally 2 of them 3 hours in) and far between. Running at 4k Ultra w/ DLSS Quality on a 3080ti, it runs at a solid 60fps
Found a workaround for the texture popping in and out and not loading correctly for all nNidia 3070 Ti 8GB (maybe others?) users: set the texture memory to ultra-high. While not perfect, you'll see some the majority of issues disappear.
Does the sparkling come from forced sharpness if they included a DLSS dll earler than 2.5.1 which force-disables sharpening? It sounds like DLSS godawful motion sharpen in case it only happens during movement.
No it happens in 2.5.1 as well.
@@DigitalFoundry damn weird then, don't think I've ever seen that effect from DLSS when it wasn't tied to sharpening such as the shore sand in God of War for example, etc.
What M.2 SSD is being used here at 12:37 ? What is the model name?
I tend to buy a very high end PC every 4 years or so. My ageing NVidia 2080 Ti equipped machine is now due a replacement. But looking at the current state of PC gaming, I think I will stick with my current PC, coupled with my PS5 and XBSX for at least another year.
I am also interested in whether or not system RAM makes any difference as this game lists 24gb for the recommended settings...
Another incredible analysis Alex! this developers shoud be put to shame. The 8gb textures are just terrible.
The RT implementation is a joke. Stop wasting money on DENUVO and pay people to actually care about the work being done.
- - content idea: HALF ASSED PC port ranking for 2023
Minor mistake: at 12:36, i'm fairly certain the ssd is at 500MB/s, and not 500GB/s :)
Very detailed analysis, as always!
Does the DirectStorage implementation of Forspoken on PC actually contribute to more efficient texture VRAM utilization? I've noticed that the most recent lineup of GPUs from Nvidia and AMD have quite a lot of VRAM, often more than the usual 16GB of regular RAM.
I've noticed that a lot of games recently have become very VRAM hungry. I was hoping this would somewhat mitigate this issue.
GPU VRAM doesn't just sit doing nothing because the game process registers below whatever your GPUs VRAM is. Take a 3080, if you're playing Forspoken and filling up 8GB, there is 2GB more unaccounted for in Windows that is used as a cache for other data the game frequently calls.
So in terms of efficiency there is not anything to gain because the game will either use more VRAM than you have, or use less and fill the rest as a cache. The only performance increase you might see is when a certain range of settings would require more VRAM than your card has as a "baseline", then you get I/O issues from fetching data off your drive frequently. In that instance, DirectStorage /should/ produce better frametimes, but whether it actually does in practice for Forspoken remains to be seen.
@@Spellzy Not true...
@@MarceloTezza You can go and look up VRAM benchmarks for games on the same preset with different GPUs. They'll run the same settings and yet Windows will report different VRAM usage. Or you could go read the DirectX documentation, it's done automatically by DX.
When data is read into the GPU, your GPU will hang onto that data in VRAM. If you come up against a wall, your GPU will free that cached data and replace it with what it needs for the next frame. It's why my RTX 3080 has higher usage in Hi-Fi Rush the longer I play, because more assets have been loaded into VRAM without the need to discard.
Windows does the same thing, it will cache frequently/recently opened program data ready for when you click it. If you have 32GB of RAM, and Windows reports 10GB usage, the other 22GB will be cached data used to speed up general use.
@@MarceloTezza Just think of it like this:
Why would your GPU read in data, and then discard it when it has spare memory to store it? Otherwise, every time it needs that data, even if it's only a few times, it has to go through the CPU (not DirectStorage) to get the asset from RAM. It makes sense to hold onto it and reduce the amount of time spent requesting and transferring data between RAM and the GPU itself.
This is even MORE obvious when you consider that GPUs don't have an equivalent of L1-L3 cache, so it's even more important that VRAM is utilised in a way to maximise asset search times and reduce the amount of calls to other parts of the system that are off the PCB.
@@Spellzy Not true, dx will not cache any data unless the dev has said the game to do it. Some games will use your gpu excess vram as cache, others wont, the difference of vram usage on different cards has more about the memory bus and how those memories are distributed than a directx memory management behaviour. You are mix matching facts with your guesses.
If what you were talking about was true, every game would always be maxing out vram.
So no, not true.
Windows manages ram differently than manages vram. Anyway...
Was that a commander keen theme song i hear at the end?
SE mastered the way of underwhelming people with their pc ports.
Looking good in your review! Thanks for the info.
Really sad to see how it turned out for the engine. Its probably it's end here. The last piece of this crazy mid 2000 dream Square had is falling apart. May be for the better. But still, it's sad. There is a timeline where there is a lot to love in this game.
how does the camera add stutter while rotating the camera around 11:15, and yet having stable frames? very intriguing, you should investigate that further, is it a bad implementation of the ingame camera? how? or is the game somehow cheating on the stable frames?
i tried the demo on my 2080 on LOW settings and still only got 20 to 30 fps.
What cpu are you using?
@@i3l4ckskillzz79 Ryzen 5 5500. Cyberpunk runs like a dream on Ultra, but this demo wrecked my pc
@@shiftymcgearjam wait to get this clear you have a desktop or a laptop ?
@@i3l4ckskillzz79 desktop. 2080, ryzen 5 5500, 32gb ram
I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS