Digital Foundry: Hands-on with DriveClub
Some snippets.
Gamescom footage frame rate analysis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csWu0sxhzrU
Some snippets.
It's a classic trade-off; one in favour of visual integrity over performance, putting the PS4's horsepower to use in different ways. Systems for depth-of-field, the lighting model and reflections have all been upgraded, alongside the eventual arrival of a weather system (coming after launch). But a drive through an overcast Scotland track in a Mercedes SLS screams aloud the team's proudest achievement.
"It's the whole dynamic nature of the game. Nothing's baked, nothing's faked. We run everything real-time, and some of the demonstrations I've done you can speed the time-of-day to up to 500 times and see all the clouds roll by," Perkins continues. "We've got a fully volumetric cloud system. You play the same track 20 times in a row and you'll get a different sunset every time. It all feeds back, and because of the atmospherics and the draw distances it's all mixed in - from the cars to the roads to the mountains to the skies."
Gamescom footage frame rate analysis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csWu0sxhzrU
From a direct digital feed of Sony's live Gamescom demo, it's a convincing, constant 30fps for the Scotland and Norway stages. And thankfully there are no frame-pacing issues to speak of, nor tearing during the PS4-driven gameplay. Save for the introduction of tearing during a debug 'orbital' mode towards the demo's end, it's a perfectly locked experience during regular gameplay.
To achieve DriveClub's consistency in lighting, reflections and effects across the world, a materials-based system is in place across all cars and tracks. Every surface is built to reflect light according to real-life values;
"We developed our own system for actually capturing surface data. You find that around the cars and throughout the world as well," Perkins explains. "And then, of course, we've got highly detailed information on the manufacturers. Wherever we can we've used the data actually used to build the cars. So CAD data in particular, [it's as] as good as the engineers have."
"We'll be adding things like screen-space effects to actually get all the water droplets on the screen. We'll get the wind-screen wipers working [too], that'll have a full simulation pass so that you get proper droplets," Perkins explains, using his own, private debug build to demonstrate. "It's all modelled. Because of the atmospherics system, everything has to be modelled. It all sits in and writes at the same level. It's one of those things that's really subtle and helps tie it all in."
The game's 1080p resolution is put to effective use too, producing one of the cleanest grades of image quality on PS4. And yet Evolution isn't content to leave it there, backing this full HD setup with an excess of techniques to tackle aliasing from every angle. Asked what anti-aliasing is fit for purpose in this case, DriveClub takes a no-compromise approach.
"It's a mixture. There's a pixel-based system that we're using, there's a temporal-based system, there's FXAA and there's actually a material-based system as well. We've only got four systems in place and we've got another for the key points that we don't quite hit. We obsess about the small details, so we're getting another one to go on top of that, to get on top of the very final image quality issues."
Asked if all these added passes for anti-aliasing add to the game's overall controller latency, Perkins quells the concern: "Everything needs to be immediate and direct for the player. We do everything as quickly as we can, because we want to get that across at 30 frames a second."