With no dates for DLSS or Ray-Tracing enabled games, is being worried more than a conspiracy theory?

[drunkenmaster]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBPQMbrpHXM

I mean the game got RTX (though doesn't work yet?), but the new game is a huge downgrade on the last one. IT seems to me as if every time AMD take over a game from Nvidia the quality improves while every time Nvidia takes over a franchise the game quality dips.

Have face textures become so awful because it will make RTX look like a bigger improvement? The scene in the video that you play through early walking through the kinda festival thing with the dark area with weird lighting. It purposefully looks bland as hell, the lighting is dull and strange and not at all natural. This seriously feels like a game graphically crippled to make Nvidia options stand out as a bigger improvement. The developer changed but the answer from them is Crystal Dynamics still worked on the game and they worked with CD on the first two games... which is odd, why change the 'lead' developer from two really very good games and go with one who supposedly worked on the first two but somehow make a significantly worse game.

Camera went to crap with numerous deaths in stupid sideways jumps from the camera being really bad. The actual character movement got worse as well, you can't really make Lara walk except when following someone when you're not really playing anyway so any attempt to make her take a small step looks clunky and awkward. Combat is worse and more clunky, the hand to hand system, the camera being dodgy and the awkward nature of dodging with a bad camera and frankly the lack of combat till pretty deep into the game and then it's dumbed down further than before.

Nvidia working on games to bring better graphics somehow seems to coincide with a game getting worse in so many ways.

 

[Hotwired]

AMD and Nvidia have input on character controls now?

 

[Ayahuasca]

LMAO, I've heard it all now.

 

[drunkenmaster]

AMD and Nvidia have input on character controls now?

No, but the have input on things when they pay for influence, which is what AMD and Nvidia do when they pay millions for game deals. IF the game devs are dedicating resources to adding RTX and DLSS to the game, that's resources being taken away from other things.

Games cost money, coders cost money, designers cost money. If the company is putting resources into one thing then it can absolutely have a knock on effect.

Maybe the reason the game was moved from two incredibly successful games with Crystal Dynamics as the lead for a company who have only ever made Tomb Raider games was Nvidia threw money at the publisher and Crystal Dynamics didn't want to work with Nvidia, so the publisher pushed it to a different development team... and that decision has a knock on effect.

I didn't accuse Nvidia of directly making character controls worse anywhere in that. I started off saying the textures are FAR worse and questioned if that was to make a bigger difference with RTX and that is a fair question. But I highlighted other major things wrong with the game and it seems to me to be a number of games which get worse overall when Nvidia get involved. The reason being, adding computationally expensive effects both taking resources during the development of the game but also taking actual hardware resources which may also have the knock on effect of saving power and cutting back elsewhere in an engine.

When AMD get involved in a game, it seems to be to help the devs make the best game possible, with the best graphics they can achieve for all gamers, AMD and Nvidia hardware users. When Nvidia get involved it seems to be to add fancy effects, often exclusive to Nvidia (but not always) in which the quality of the game often seems compromised.

 

[Dan82]

What the hell are you on about ??? Nvidia worked with Crystal Dynamics on Rise which ran well on most setups, they even helped implement HDR which only ever made it to consoles.

Crystal Dynamics have been moved on to Marvel licensed game which will be huge for Square.

The team that worked on the latest tomb raider created the last 2 Dues Ex games which got good reviews. The quality of shadow of the tombraider has got nothing to do with Nvidia and the PC port was handled by a different team. Do your homework first before talking rubbish.

There has been plenty of AMD sponsored games that have had inital problems on Nvidia hardware on release so it works both ways.

If anything, the technical issues with SOTT is probably more related to direct 12 and the way it's using the hardware. People need rigs with 6 core or more CPUs, plenty if Ram and SSD to run well. From skimming through steam forums plenty people having issues are on 4 core cpus.

 

[tommybhoy]

While I'm still not convinced on RTX at all as I can't help thinking the RT effects aren't going to be equivalent to what they've shown and will be downgraded.

We've also ripped consoles rotten for up-scaling to enable playable fps yet RT is looking like it's going to need up-scaling to be playable(and performance increase over previous gen/cost is that rotten=reliant on up-scaling to make the performance appear greater) but Nv marketing gets involved and (in some peeps minds)DLSS it's suddenly zomg for up-scaling.

However, can be argued @drunkenmaster that original TR title was coded separately from last gen consoles and directly for PC(put the effort in and pushed it) as it didn't release until later for next gen consoles-once they launched, where as following titles were coded with 3 platforms in mind(less cost).

And what happened here then as FC4 has higher quality in more instances than FC5?:

 

[BubbySoup]

From what I've seen so far, people are purchasing the 2080ti for the frames over the features.

 

[IT Troll]

According to Gamers Nexus, the game devs had just 70 hours with the new RTX cards before the launch event. So it’s perhaps not surprising that there are no firm dates yet. It does make you wonder why they rushed the cards out now. Why not just wait for the Christmas market when there might be an RTX game they could bundle in?

 

[drunkenmaster]

What the hell are you on about ??? Nvidia worked with Crystal Dynamics on Rise which ran well on most setups, they even helped implement HDR which only ever made it to consoles.

Crystal Dynamics have been moved on to Marvel licensed game which will be huge for Square.

The team that worked on the latest tomb raider created the last 2 Dues Ex games which got good reviews. The quality of shadow of the tombraider has got nothing to do with Nvidia and the PC port was handled by a different team. Do your homework first before talking rubbish.

There has been plenty of AMD sponsored games that have had inital problems on Nvidia hardware on release so it works both ways.

If anything, the technical issues with SOTT is probably more related to direct 12 and the way it's using the hardware. People need rigs with 6 core or more CPUs, plenty if Ram and SSD to run well. From skimming through steam forums plenty people having issues are on 4 core cpus.

The problems with Shadow of the tomb raider are to do with DX12 and needing 6 cores or more? Really, no walking on the character is because of DX12, drastically downgraded textures are because of DX12? Really?

While I quite liked Deus Ex games, they were both AMD sponsored and they were pretty limited games. They had I felt pretty low top end graphics and had very small maps in general. There were certainly plus points but they also felt fairly limited.

In terms of the decision to move CD away from Tomb Raider in which they'd made two excellent games and move Eidos Montreal onto it so CD could move on to a different IP is... still odd. Again CD before now had never worked on a non Tomb Raider game, it's somewhat like if some random developer does GTA 6 and Rockstar do some new IP instead... then if GTA 6 is a huge downgrade on 5, you don't think people will question how a successful IP that was working fantastically for the developer got moved to someone else and the game got worse?


I also agree on the DLSS thing and marketing is suddenly making upscaling brilliant when the big deal only what 2-3 years ago was Nvidia have superscaling and AMD don't do it, then AMD got it in drivers to. Downscaling 4k to a 1080p screen increases graphical fidelity, upscaling regardless of how many buzzwords you use to do it... is upscaling and 4k upscaled can certainly look close to 4k but it won't be as crisp or as good as straight up rendering in 4k, if you're guessing detail, no matter how good the guess it's not as good as actual. It's funny because Ray tracing "it's better because it's more accurate" and DLSS, "it's better because it's less accurate".... seem at odds but people eat up whatever Nvidia feed them.

 

[Panos]

Gents dont forget the first Tomb Raider was ported to PC by a third party company (who took Nvidia money to strap gameworks) and not the original makers of the console version... Hence all the issues with ryzen and AMD cards which took Crystal almost 8 months of heavy patching to improve it.

The second was much better because it was done by them, and the third if anyone watched the XboneX HDR 4K version could say to hell the PCs

 

[Paladine]

How would you sell RTX cards? You would probably make sure there is at least a high profile game which supports Ray-Tracing and another one supporting DLSS from day one.

But then something happens and you realize software won't be ready. You manage to get FFXV's demo readily available to showcase DLSS and a few other things (I guess the infiltrator demo is available).

You couldn't even produce a tiny interactive demo to showcase Ray-Tracing capabilities, letting us play with lights and shadows. Why? The performance isn't good enough?

What would be next to sell those cards? Let's find out when we can actually provide DLSS and Ray-Tracing support, let's give our customers a solid date.

But where are the dates? I guess they're still unsure. Yes, it's up to the developers, but Nvidia must have their own people working with them on a few high-profile games. But they still can't provide us with dates.

Why did I write this? I might buy a 2080 soon, but I think we should all be much more skeptical about DLSS, just the same way we already are about Ray-Tracing. If we don't have a single date it means DLSS patches might be far away. And the fact Nvidia is completely silent is even worst.

Ray Tracing is out of their hands - it requires fall update from Microsoft for Windows - having worked with Microsoft in the past I can tell you that the wheels of change move *incredibly* slowly - for the project I was working on we had to submit change requests a good 6 months in advance of deployment to have any chance of meeting our deadline.

As for DLSS - Nvidia have already stated to developers that if they send them their games they will code in DLSS support for free - so this is down to the developers not Nvidia. Nvidia is already working with many titles to bring DLSS support but the longer it takes developers to send them their code, the longer it will take to have DLSS support added to their games. If developers have decided to write the code themselves, that is of course up to them but I would suspect a slower route than Nvidia doing it for them.

 

[Paladine]

Gents dont forget the first Tomb Raider was ported to PC by a third party company (who took Nvidia money to strap gameworks) and not the original makers of the console version... Hence all the issues with ryzen and AMD cards which took Crystal almost 8 months of heavy patching to improve it.

The second was much better because it was done by them, and the third if anyone watched the XboneX HDR 4K version could say to hell the PCs

The first Tomb Raider - you are sadly mistaken. The first Tomb Raider was a PC title a looooong time ago (1996) and was ported to console in 1997

 

[Paladine]

Usually it's something locked away tight and only a few people have full access to. There is a risk it could be hacked via Nvidia, or a dodgy employee decides to copy some of it. You never know.

It's something worth many millions on large projects and many will not want to risk it.

Jesus - you do realise that If Nvidia do something dodgy with the code or one of their employees leaks it, they will be sued to hell and back right? You know what and NDA is right? Nvidia will be under a strict NDA from developers on that source code. Seems this forum has devolved into a playground where kids just constantly make completely baseless accusations against Nvidia - it is becoming tedious.

 

[Paladine]

Because most games are designed and developed with consoles in mind. I mean may be nVidia can pay to have RTX added to every other game, buy it isn't going to be cheap and doesn't seem to be very cost effective in the long term. Also at £550 for the cheapest offering how many GPUs are there going to be in 24 months time with RTX functionally, less than 5 percent is my guess.

Despite the fact that developers on public record saying that implementing Raytracing is not difficult...

 

[Panos]

The first Tomb Raider - you are sadly mistaken. The first Tomb Raider was a PC title a looooong time ago (1996) and was ported to console in 1997

lol. I mean the firs of the new trilogy..

 

[Smffy]

Despite the fact that developers on public record saying that implementing Raytracing is not difficult...

Once they implement it’s actually less work I believe because there is a hell of a lot less touching up scene by scene because it ‘just works’ as in the way it defines light is a lot less open to strange anomalies.

The first Tomb Raider - you are sadly mistaken. The first Tomb Raider was a PC title a looooong time ago (1996) and was ported to console in 1997

I remember the camera angles fondly, inside Lara’s armpit wishing you could see the tiger about to eat your legs.

 

[Paladine]

Once they implement it’s actually less work I believe because there is a hell of a lot less touching up scene by scene because it ‘just works’ as in the way it defines light is a lot less open to strange anomalies.



I remember the camera angles fondly, inside Lara’s armpit wishing you could see the tiger about to eat your legs.

I remember playing it on my friends 3k GBP PC (because he bought a pre-made one instead of letting me build it for him - he later defaulted on his payments...) it was fun. I did some work with Eidos a few years later (2000) interesting company.

 

[Dan82]

The problems with Shadow of the tomb raider are to do with DX12 and needing 6 cores or more? Really, no walking on the character is because of DX12, drastically downgraded textures are because of DX12? Really?

While I quite liked Deus Ex games, they were both AMD sponsored and they were pretty limited games. They had I felt pretty low top end graphics and had very small maps in general. There were certainly plus points but they also felt fairly limited.

In terms of the decision to move CD away from Tomb Raider in which they'd made two excellent games and move Eidos Montreal onto it so CD could move on to a different IP is... still odd. Again CD before now had never worked on a non Tomb Raider game, it's somewhat like if some random developer does GTA 6 and Rockstar do some new IP instead... then if GTA 6 is a huge downgrade on 5, you don't think people will question how a successful IP that was working fantastically for the developer got moved to someone else and the game got worse?

No what I'm saying is performance issues reported is likey the cause of the engine relying more on dx12 as in requires a more beefy cpu, you need a good all round system and not a system that has a good gfx card paired with old CPUs and slow memory.

Regarding textures, the game now has much larger maps than the previous 2 games so maybe that was a factor in slightly downgraded textures.

It's also not strange that what is probably Squares best developer outside of their own Japanese talent that the higher ups wanted Crystal Dynamics working on the Marvel license, you know that huge money making license that Disney are milking and proving to carry in being a big hit with Spiderman on ps4.
There was many leaked reports saying how unhappy square were with tomb raider sales (even though realistically there pretty good on paper).
I'd imagine Square decided to offload this game to get it out quickly so they can close off this trilogy and shelve it for awhile.

I can see their western studios all working on Marvel games for the next few years especially if CD game does well.

 

[HRL]

From what I've seen so far, people are purchasing the 2080ti for the frames over the features.

Exactly this for me. I doubt I’ll even bother enabling RT TBH. Just want the sheer grunt of the card, not fancy reflections or shadows.

 

[pandem0nium]

How many games used True Audio in the end? There was dedicated hardware for it in every AMD gpu but it just didn't catch on.