Fallout 4 to feature Nvidia Gameworks

GoogalyMoogaly · 19 Nov 2015 at 15:10

nashathedog said:
I don't mean to sound rude but making up numbers doesn't help make the case for whether God rays needed to have such a huge impact in Fallout 4. God rays never cost 50% in Clear sky. The move from DX10 compared to DX9 had a big impact but that was the whole thing not one specific feature. They did decrease the performance hit but doesn't everything? For example the two main extra's in DX10 that added an additional hit were the Agroprom underground where they used a new way of doing smoke with DX10(new at the time) and the God rays at certain times of the day (morning) but it was DX10 as a whole not one specific feature. Turning those single features down or off as shown in the benches I linked earlier have never had anywhere near that sort of impact. And then stating a 7% loss in Fallout 4 when we were shown a 980ti losing 30fps by moving God rays from low to ultra, That was approximately a 30% performance hit just by changing the settings in one specific feature.

Also the X-ray engine was no different to Fallout 4's in that it was originally a DX9 engine as used in Stalker SOC which then had DX10 bolted on for Clear Sky and then DX11 bolted on for COP, Oversimplified I know but I'm sure you get the idea, It wasn't an engine built to handle and run DX10 that was an addition added as visuals evolved just as they are now doing with Fallouts engine.
I'd blame Bethesda for being too lazy and using over demanding pre built options rather than bolting on there own version.

I didn't make up the numbers, I read them on websites. The STALKER Clear Sky review said that God Rays almost halved the framerate. Nvidia's tweak guide showed a 6.5fps hit going from off to Low (and everyone said there was no real difference beyond that so turning it up seems to be purely for the sake of making the performance hit larger). The Nvidia tweak guide showed the no God Rays score as about 96fps, so that's how I got 7%. That's the lowest hit you need in order to have God Rays 'ON'.

As for the upgrading the engine, not sure how that's connected. Clear Sky had the God Rays effects built into the engine, Fallout 4 doesn't. Apples to Oranges comparison.

I do agree that Bethesda would probably have been better changing the engine to do God Rays natively.
As for Nvidia's solution being over-demanding, without something similar (3rd party generic library) to compare it to I'm not sure we can really say that. I think we can say that it's likely less efficient that an engine specific native solution but to expect otherwise seems ludicrous.

r7slayer · 19 Nov 2015 at 15:15

GoogalyMoogaly said:
I didn't make up the numbers, I read them on websites. The STALKER Clear Sky review said that God Rays almost halved the framerate. Nvidia's tweak guide showed a 6.5fps hit going from off to Low (and everyone said there was no real difference beyond that so turning it up seems to be purely for the sake of making the performance hit larger). The Nvidia tweak guide showed the no God Rays score as about 96fps, so that's how I got 7%. That's the lowest hit you need in order to have God Rays 'ON'.

As for the upgrading the engine, not sure how that's connected. Clear Sky had the God Rays effects built into the engine, Fallout 4 doesn't. Apples to Oranges comparison.

For me i got between 10-15 fps drops with god rays on. obviously because nVidia have better tessellation but i have tessellation in CCC at 6x so still quite a lot i think. Prefer it off tbh, as i don't think the effect is worth it.

uksoldierboy · 19 Nov 2015 at 16:48

GoogalyMoogaly said:
I didn't make up the numbers, I read them on websites. The STALKER Clear Sky review said that God Rays almost halved the framerate. Nvidia's tweak guide showed a 6.5fps hit going from off to Low (and everyone said there was no real difference beyond that so turning it up seems to be purely for the sake of making the performance hit larger). The Nvidia tweak guide showed the no God Rays score as about 96fps, so that's how I got 7%. That's the lowest hit you need in order to have God Rays 'ON'.

As for the upgrading the engine, not sure how that's connected. Clear Sky had the God Rays effects built into the engine, Fallout 4 doesn't. Apples to Oranges comparison.

I do agree that Bethesda would probably have been better changing the engine to do God Rays natively.
As for Nvidia's solution being over-demanding, without something similar (3rd party generic library) to compare it to I'm not sure we can really say that. I think we can say that it's likely less efficient that an engine specific native solution but to expect otherwise seems ludicrous.

For me it's not that it's to demanding though, it's just tessellated rays are not needed, i think godrays are overdone in a lot of games mind, no where near the subtlety of real life.

muziqaz · 19 Nov 2015 at 16:51

humbug said:
The 4K results vs the 980TI are probably the result of Fiji being the more powerful GPU but strangled at lower res by Drivers that make less efficient use of the CPU than Nvidia.

I know. As I said, initially it was just an observation

muziqaz · 19 Nov 2015 at 16:55

Dygaza said:
You misunderstood my post. My point was if that artificial cpu bottleneck on AMD could be eliminated, or brought closer to nvidia level. Fury series would perform better at 1080p resolution than they currently are. Making the actual downfall when upping resolution bigger that it currently is.

But new drivers increased performance on 1080p, yet fury x still only lost 30fps as with old drivers. The initial FPS increased, but percentage changed, which according to some shouldn't as they theorise that if a card has more fps initially, it can lose more fps wise while percentage wise it is the same

And driver overhead is not the only reason fury x is good at 4k

humbug · 19 Nov 2015 at 16:58

Dygaza said:
You misunderstood my post. My point was if that artificial cpu bottleneck on AMD could be eliminated, or brought closer to nvidia level. Fury series would perform better at 1080p resolution than they currently are. Making the actual downfall when upping resolution bigger that it currently is.

That CPU bottleneck is only artificial so far as DX11 goes, Nvidia have managed to work around it, which is a huge kudos for them.

IMO you make a good argument and i think you are right, DX12 should fair a lot better for Fiji.

muziqaz · 19 Nov 2015 at 17:00

uksoldierboy said:
For me it's not that it's to demanding though, it's just tessellated rays are not needed, i think godrays are overdone in a lot of games mind, no where near the subtlety of real life.

Fallout 4 drawing style is not very suited for photo realistic god rays. It just looks weird. At least in my opinion.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 is trying to do sun rays through the trees (I don't know if you can call them god rays or not), and they are too intense and too unrealistic.

humbug · 19 Nov 2015 at 17:03

muziqaz said:
Fallout 4 drawing style is not very suited for photo realistic god rays. It just looks weird. At least in my opinion.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 is trying to do sun rays through the trees (I don't know if you can call them god rays or not), and they are too intense and too unrealistic.

BF4 has it right, you don't even know its there unless you are looking at the sun through a tree, exactly as it should be and actually is in real life.

This God Rays nonsense is just a Billboard for Nvidia. IMO.

muziqaz · 19 Nov 2015 at 17:04

humbug said:
That CPU bottleneck is only artificial so far as DX11 goes, Nvidia have managed to work around it, which is a huge kudos for them.

IMO you make a good argument and i think you are right, DX12 should fair a lot better for Fiji.

But when we look at Ashes bench, fiji is not shining too bright in dx11>dx12 transition. hawaii (grenada?) based cards love dx12.
The more I use Fijis, the more I think that they were just very expensive HBM tech pipe cleaner

ADT · 19 Nov 2015 at 17:05

Finally risked it and got this game. Runs quite well on my system considering it's from the middle ages

Running everything on high except for shadows. Get 50-60 fps outside, 60 fps inside

muziqaz · 19 Nov 2015 at 17:07

humbug said:
BF4 has it right, you don't even know its there unless you are looking at the sun through a tree, exactly as it should be and actually is in real life.

This God Rays nonsense is just a Billboard for Nvidia. IMO.

Yeah, BF4 drawing style suites these kind of effects, and they did look nice, especially in Paracel Storm.

GoogalyMoogaly · 19 Nov 2015 at 17:08

uksoldierboy said:
For me it's not that it's to demanding though, it's just tessellated rays are not needed, i think godrays are overdone in a lot of games mind, no where near the subtlety of real life.

I think I agree with everything you've said, although I don't think tessellation should always be such a problem these days. At a reasonable level obviously. I think if Bethesda had just made it God Rays 'off' or 'on' and use the low preset there probably wouldn't be so much fuss made about it, but because it can be turned up to silly levels people have and then find it's a large performance hit. One of those cases where they shouldn't give people enough rope to hang themselves. I mean there'd still be complaints because it's Nvdia tech but I think a lot is when they go to extremes.

I think the engine seems poor without the Nvidia effects but it's no surprise where people choose to focus their frustrations. I believe there's a bigger performance hit by setting uGrids to 13 than you get from setting God Rays to Ultra, but uGrids isn't Nvidia tech so there'll little or no complaining about that.

From the screenshots I've seen I couldn't tell much difference between God Rays Low and Ultra. Personally I didn't much like them at all, so I'd turn them off, but I guess a lot of people decide to turn them up to Ultra.

muziqaz · 19 Nov 2015 at 17:09

Did anyone looked into performance of faster ram? one of the review sites done some testing with 1333Mhz ram and 2400Mhz ones, and jump in performance was quite noticeable. Cannot remember the site name, though.

Dygaza · 19 Nov 2015 at 17:16

muziqaz said:
Did anyone looked into performance of faster ram? one of the review sites done some testing with 1333Mhz ram and 2400Mhz ones, and jump in performance was quite noticeable. Cannot remember the site name, though.

DigitalFoundry atleast. Yes there's quite decent scaling on memory. Then again it's cpu bound game mostly, and having faster memory helps your cpu to work "faster".

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-the-best-pc-hardware-for-fallout-4-4023

muziqaz · 19 Nov 2015 at 17:36

Dygaza said:
DigitalFoundry atleast. Yes there's quite decent scaling on memory. Then again it's cpu bound game mostly, and having faster memory helps your cpu to work "faster".

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-the-best-pc-hardware-for-fallout-4-4023

That explains why AMD cpu did not get that much of an uplift. Though again, maybe Bethesda is using x87 instructions as with Skyrim

nashathedog · 19 Nov 2015 at 18:12

GoogalyMoogaly said:
I think if Bethesda had just made it God Rays 'off' or 'on' and use the low preset there probably wouldn't be so much fuss made about it,

I imagine there would have been no fuss made. They could have also made it it look virtually visually identical without half the performance hit as well. The issue is with how big a performance hit ultra shows compared to low yet the difference is not immediately obvious until you've really focused in and know what to look for.
The performance hit is bad when it doesn't need to be.

uksoldierboy · 19 Nov 2015 at 19:36

Thanks Googaly,

I'm all for taking a huge performance hit if the given effect is worth it, don't care if it AMD tech or nvidia, with the new cards coming out reasonable soon I'm hoping for another benchmark game like the original Crysis, even today that game can hang with almost any other graphically.

Fingers crossed

nashathedog · 19 Nov 2015 at 20:10

GoogalyMoogaly said:
I believe there's a bigger performance hit by setting uGrids to 13 than you get from setting God Rays to Ultra, but uGrids isn't Nvidia tech so there'll little or no complaining about that.

Out of interest what is that?
It sounds like something you need to mod or do via a console command not a menu setting.

Personally I didn't much like them at all, so I'd turn them off, but I guess a lot of people decide to turn them up to Ultra.

I think it's more that people expect 4 or 5 hundred pound graphics card to be able to run something like that on it's highest settings a lot better than it does.

How much better does Fallout 4 really look on PC over console?
We are told that the PC's we spend 3 or 4 times more on are that many times more powerful than consoles but we get a negligible visual improvement that put's performance in the gutter.

I look at games like Alien Isolation and see these effects running while my fps is sitting close to triple figures.

http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com...quel-Ideas-Won-t-Focus-on-Action-467332-4.jpg

http://www.psmania.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/15103768993_64e1e8dae7_k.jpg
Even modded to max it out the hit is smaller than what we are getting given by AAA dev's lately.

pete910 · 19 Nov 2015 at 20:22

lol, website is getting some stick, keep getting a 502 error

Insanties_birth · 19 Nov 2015 at 20:41

nashathedog said:
Out of interest what is that?
It sounds like something you need to mod or do via a console command not a menu setting.

I think it's more that people expect 4 or 5 hundred pound graphics card to be able to run something like that on it's highest settings a lot better than it does.

How much better does Fallout 4 really look on PC over console?
We are told that the PC's we spend 3 or 4 times more on are that many times more powerful than consoles but we get a negligible visual improvement that put's performance in the gutter.

I look at games like Alien Isolation and see these effects running while my fps is sitting close to triple figures.

http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com...quel-Ideas-Won-t-Focus-on-Action-467332-4.jpg

http://www.psmania.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/15103768993_64e1e8dae7_k.jpg
Even modded to max it out the hit is smaller than what we are getting given by AAA dev's lately.

^this, also when we have effects from specific developers we can expect it to be somewhat hit and miss as they are targeting resolving an entire game and we never expect every aspect of a game to be perfect in all regards. When Nvidia comes in and has one job and it's to get a particular effect or two to look nice then of course there's a bit more judgement on this one aspect. Same as I don't expect indie devs to have graphics like AAA studios, I have different expectations for different companies but yeah I think Nvidia in particular (lead graphics card company and the ones clearly charging premium) are the ones who if they are then interfering in game development obviously have to impress us.

Like you pointed out, some games just don't look that much better, MGS5 for example can have higher resolution and a bit more lighting but would that make the textures magically improve or the character models? I'm gonna be re-energised with PC gaming thanks to gsynch and stuff but I think Nvidia need to push things a bit more if they want to impress, the odd effect here and there that has little real impact on the overall experience isn't really cutting the grain (although I'm not knocking it, it's still better than nothing but they can do more with these effects tbh). If they ever manage to keep the performance hits minimal we might be able to see more than just one effect showcased at a time