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Digital Foundry: Project CARS Performance Analysis (PS4/XB1)

BONKERS

Member
There isn't going to be an fps lock on the consoles - they just answered the question on twitch. Apparently it would cause tearing and would be worse. And it runs at 60 the majority of the time he added.

They also don't discuss these tests from random sites, apparently.

It would cause tearing? How fucking hard is it to add a permanent vsync lock with a proper 30FPS cap without pacing problems?
If you have a stable 30FPS without drops, which all evidence suggests is possible. How is permanent vsync a problem? The odd dropped frame down to 20? Which shouldn't be a problem with PCars seeing as it would hit 30 stable with no issue.

This is possible on PC from the USER END. How is NOT from the developers side on consoles?
 

Three

Member
Though I don't understand how you can claim that the ghosting is "absolutely non-existent in motion", especially in a racing game where objects can often travel many pixels across the screen between two frames. When it gets to be this bad (credit to Covfan for the video), to the point where it is headache-inducing in many shots, it should be made aware of so that the developers can address it by giving people options, rather than denying that it exists.

That's a share button video isn't it? That's a 30fps I assume. There is nothing heasache inducing about the 60fps gamersyde videos I've seen. If anything they look smoother because of it.

http://www.gamersyde.com/hqstream_project_cars_nordschleife_ps4-34604_en.html
 

AU Tiger

Member
zero surprise here regarding the weather performance.

970's in SLI with rain + AI couldn't maintain a steady 1080/60... never a doubt in my mind that the consoles could cope with it.
 

BONKERS

Member
That's a share button video isn't it? That's a 30fps I assume. There is nothing heasache inducing about the 60fps gamersyde videos I've seen. If anything they look smoother because of it.

http://www.gamersyde.com/hqstream_project_cars_nordschleife_ps4-34604_en.html

I can see double images and ghosting almost immediately in that video.

There is still a ton of temporal aliasing left over too, especially in the driver seat view. Easily visible temporal aliasing on shadow maps, fine specular details, shaders, fences, and even moire,etc.

On any given turn on the track where motion should be pixel perfect clear on a low persistence display it's blurry instead. Pausing the frame shows the exact problem too. It lies with the frame blending.

Just because one or a few individuals can't notice it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
PCARSPS4Nordschleife.png


I've watched this on both an LCD and a CRT PC monitor, same problem.

With a 60FPS target, this should be blur free

Bottom line IMO is that if a stable 60FPS is at all possible from dialing the graphics down any further, the users who want that should be given the option considering the already large wealth of options available. And that includes disabling the temporalAA.

After all, this is a sim game and stable performance is far more important.
 

hesido

Member
I can see double images and ghosting almost immediately in that video.

There is still a ton of temporal aliasing left over too, especially in the driver seat view. Just because one or a few individuals can't notice it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
PCARSPS4Nordschleife.png


I've watched this on both an LCD and a CRT PC monitor, same problem.

With a 60FPS target, this should be blur free (especially since it's not using motion blur)

It turns out, there's motion blur applied but with such a low setting on the PS4 that in practice, it doesn't make a dent on anything other than the road when the camera is close to the ground
and you have to have access to raw buffers to notice the quality of the implementation, as there's no single frame that's clean.

Unfortunately a great majority of gamers do not even notice it, and the developer thinks this is an image quality enhancement. It's almost as if I'm suddenly transferred to an alternate universe where destroying the IQ can be considered beneficial.

For the record, I've noticed this while viewing actual 60fps videos and then began taking screenshots of said videos, not the other way around.
 

le.phat

Member
These consoles are so underpowered it's getting irritating. At least I have enough sense to build a PC. Honestly I'll be surprised if this gen lasts 5 years due to the consoles already being juiced for every drop of power, before they turn 2 years old. This is absolutely inexcusable, especially because as a console gamer I used to have the peace of mind that acceptable performance was guaranteed. Evidently that's a thing of the past.
this video shows the most extreme setup possible in the game and the console versions never drop below 30. This is unacceptable to you?

I sometimes truly feel sorry for pc gamer elitists. All that money spent and all you get for it is a sandy vagina and some slightly upgraded console games.
 

Sipheren

Banned
People need to remember this was made with the smallest of budgets by a small team with community help (of which I was a small part of - Team Member).

The test that DF has done is pushing the game to the absolute limits, for pretty much all of you, the game will run at 55-60fps on either system and you will never have any issues.

If I add 40 cars and turn on rain on High settings @ 1080P my PC doesn't hold perfect 60fps either (Xeon 1231 v2 GTX970 12GB RAM).

The game looks stunning, drives really well and it's just awesome to have a game like this come to the consoles as well as the PC and keep the experience pretty well intact.
 
It would cause tearing? How fucking hard is it to add a permanent vsync lock with a proper 30FPS cap without pacing problems?
If you have a stable 30FPS without drops, which all evidence suggests is possible. How is permanent vsync a problem? The odd dropped frame down to 20? Which shouldn't be a problem with PCars seeing as it would hit 30 stable with no issue.

This is possible on PC from the USER END. How is NOT from the developers side on consoles?

Yep,

And with that, SMS have lost a sale.
 

Tainted

Member
Ugh ... so much for the touted 60fps racing experience for the PS4. Why didnt they just cap and aim for 30fps as Evolution did for Driveclub if the FPS was going to be all over the place ?

I'll be passing on this
 

Fredrik

Member
this video shows the most extreme setup possible in the game and the console versions never drop below 30. This is unacceptable to you?

I sometimes truly feel sorry for pc gamer elitists. All that money spent and all you get for it is a sandy vagina and some slightly upgraded console games.
In a game that is supposed to run at 60fps it is definitely unacceptable to have drops close to 30, or 40 or 50. Why not just scale back the graphics/effects/weather/resolution/whatever until a locked 60fps is reached? Why this kind of sloppiness in optimization isn't criticised even more is something I'll never understand. Not talking about PCars here but generally speaking, to me it's just weird that the games with the best optimization is usually found on WiiU this geneneration, the least powerful console of the bunch. :/
 

ST3K3LLY

Banned
I'd really like to see someone trial the amount of cars and different weather effects to work out what is the optimal settings for both ps4 and xbox one. I'm interested in this game but not like this.
 

strata8

Member
The test that DF has done is pushing the game to the absolute limits, for pretty much all of you, the game will run at 55-60fps on either system and you will never have any issues.

That's not really true for the XB1. The career mode has 20 cars max (hardly pushing the game to its limits), and only runs at 60 fps in the very best conditions. Most of the time it's reaching 50-55 fps and when any sort of weather hits it drops to 40-45 fps. Even the PS4 struggles with rain with the frame rate hovering between 45-55 fps.

It doesn't even perform during normal, structured gameplay, and that's the real problem, not the stress test.
 
because less is more.

on topic, probably a combination of:
- some of those extra CPU-cycles are needed to balance GPU-shortcomings
- it needs more CPU-cycles for X compared to cycles needed on the PS4 for X (various kinds of OS and/or Networking overhead)
- the extra CPU-power doesnt amount to much in reality.

No. It's because of gpu, pure and simple. Rain effects transparencies make the framerate fall, cpu has nothing to do with it.

SMS should probably just patch the entire rain spray effect out just to shut people up. Seriously.
 

kitch9

Banned
It turns out, there's motion blur applied but with such a low setting on the PS4 that in practice, it doesn't make a dent on anything other than the road when the camera is close to the ground
and you have to have access to raw buffers to notice the quality of the implementation, as there's no single frame that's clean.

Unfortunately a great majority of gamers do not even notice it, and the developer thinks this is an image quality enhancement. It's almost as if I'm suddenly transferred to an alternate universe where destroying the IQ can be considered beneficial.

For the record, I've noticed this while viewing actual 60fps videos and then began taking screenshots of said videos, not the other way around.

You haven't played the game then?
 

kitch9

Banned
These consoles are so underpowered it's getting irritating. At least I have enough sense to build a PC. Honestly I'll be surprised if this gen lasts 5 years due to the consoles already being juiced for every drop of power, before they turn 2 years old. This is absolutely inexcusable, especially because as a console gamer I used to have the peace of mind that acceptable performance was guaranteed. Evidently that's a thing of the past.

Uhm, Wat?
 

Tainted

Member
These consoles are so underpowered it's getting irritating. At least I have enough sense to build a PC. Honestly I'll be surprised if this gen lasts 5 years due to the consoles already being juiced for every drop of power, before they turn 2 years old. This is absolutely inexcusable, especially because as a console gamer I used to have the peace of mind that acceptable performance was guaranteed. Evidently that's a thing of the past.

Uhm, Wat?

Slight exaggeration...but there is an element of truth in what he/she is saying here.
 

Sipheren

Banned
That's not really true for the XB1. The career mode has 20 cars max (hardly pushing the game to its limits), and only runs at 60 fps in the very best conditions. Most of the time it's reaching 50-55 fps and when any sort of weather hits it drops to 40-45 fps. Even the PS4 struggles with rain with the frame rate hovering between 45-55 fps.

It doesn't even perform during normal, structured gameplay, and that's the real problem, not the stress test.

When I get home tonight I am going to fire up the Xbox version (only had PC up until today) and see how it goes, will record it and put it up on YouTube.

As long as I can race with up to 10 people online in all weather conditions and between 55-60fps I will be happy.
 

kitch9

Banned
Slight exaggeration...but there is an element of truth in what he/she is saying here.

The PS4 in particular is not even close to being run by using the hardware as it was designed to be yet.

I wish people would stop with that bollocks. The machine isn't ever going to run 4k at 60fps of course but it still has plenty of capabilities to be explored which will move future games forward from what we have now.
 
In a game that is supposed to run at 60fps it is definitely unacceptable to have drops close to 30, or 40 or 50. Why not just scale back the graphics/effects/weather/resolution/whatever until a locked 60fps is reached? Why this kind of sloppiness in optimization isn't criticised even more is something I'll never understand. Not talking about PCars here but generally speaking, to me it's just weird that the games with the best optimization is usually found on WiiU this geneneration, the least powerful console of the bunch. :/

The WiiU games you are talking about have small levels and enemy count. Comparing it with a game like Project CARS shows your lack of technical understanding.
 

hesido

Member
You haven't played the game then?

No. Why does it matter? I'm not talking about the handling of cars. I'm not talking about the fun factor. I'm talking about the evident image quality issues seen in all videos and images relating to the PS4 version. If I hold a DS4 in my hand, will it fix the issue?
 

GRaider81

Member
I'm not Blessed/cursed with seeing frame rate dips (unless crazy) but the ghosting is definately noticeable.

Hopefully it gets sorted to some extent but it certainly isn't a game breaker. The racing is fantastic, loving it so far. That aspect of the game trounces Forza, GT and others imo.
 

Durante

Member
Oh hey look another game that entirely proves my point on how current temporalAA is complete and utter garbage. The only thing it ever works remotely well with is to reduce the flickering of low precision buffers.

You should just give people the option to disable it. Ghosting and frame blending are never an acceptable solution to Anti-Alias an image with IMO. And the more variable the framerate is, the worse it looks. The lower the framerate, the worse it gets. And based on all the footage i've seen it doesn't even do all that great of a job. Decent for a console game at best minus the artifacts.

Not like SMS can be blamed if the consoles are woefully underpowered. Real HQ AA is costly.
(Advertising it as 60FPS however is something I have a problem with. Because it's not a 60FPS game. Mario Kart 8 is a 60FPS game.)

Sony and MSFT really are insane if they think this hardware will be acceptable for so long. Especially when so many developers struggle to even hit native resolution at 60FPS all the while Sony is pushing 4k TVs.

And this is EXACTLY the kind of thing we don't want in games. Impression of motion blur vs actual motion blur are different things, but beside the point that display persistence is a real problem. A low persistence display at 60FPS produces next to no motion blur. Why would you want to add more persistence?
I agreee with most of what you say here, but not all temporal AA implementations are crap. Have you tried UE4 on PC?
 

Tainted

Member
The PS4 in particular is not even close to being run by using the hardware as it was designed to be yet.

I wish people would stop with that bollocks. The machine isn't ever going to run 4k at 60fps of course but it still has plenty of capabilities to be explored which will move future games forward from what we have now.

The point he is trying to make is that we are now almost 18mths into the life cycle of the 'new' consoles and we are already seeing alot of games bringing these machines to their knees (Not just in terms of performance but gfx quality).

Sure there is always more time for optimisation, but this long after launch we should be starting to see these machines bear their fruits by now, but this just isn't the case. We are already seeing the new consoles being easily outperformed by modest PCs.

I just don't feel these new consoles are having the same impact the PS360 had at this point in their life cycles.

I cant help but think this E3 is a make or break for these machines to really rejuvenate interest after countless remasters and delays. I'm also a PS4 owner btw....a rather frustrated one it has to be said
 

_machine

Member
I agreee with most of what you say here, but not all temporal AA implementations are crap. Have you tried UE4 on PC?
Yeah, UE4 TXAA can be pretty good, though it too can have some major smearing and ghosting issues. We eventually had to go with FXAA as TXAA simply didn't work well with some material animations and foliage and had some similar ghosting issues at times with our lighting setup. Post-Process Blendables weren't enough for doing it in case-by-case basis so we at the moment we have either no AA or FXAA, though we are looking into implementing Downsampling through resolution scaling, but it's very performance heavy for our game. There's also a problem that parts of the reflection pipeline is done inside the TXAA so not going with TXAA can be problem too, but that's only for UE4 and in most cases you shouldn't get any major issues with ghosting on UE4. But yeah, going a bit off-topic with this :)
 
The PS4 in particular is not even close to being run by using the hardware as it was designed to be yet.

I wish people would stop with that bollocks. The machine isn't ever going to run 4k at 60fps of course but it still has plenty of capabilities to be explored which will move future games forward from what we have now.

The PS4 is far behind even a mid range gaming PC these days and as time goes on that will just get worse.

The real problem is that devs / publishers are imo wrongly trying to give the impression that consoles can hold their own against the PC like settings. All this is doing is resulting in poorly optimised games that run at sub resolutions and framerates.

It's understandably a pickle for them but console games are trying to punch above their weight this gen and are suffering for it.

Ultimately it's Microsoft and Sony's fault for creating such weak machines. They should have gone with a ~3tf GPU and a half decent cpu, taking a $100 hit on the hardware like previous generations.
 

Noobcraft

Member
Ultimately it's Microsoft and Sony's fault for creating such weak machines. They should have gone with a ~3tf GPU and a half decent cpu, taking a $100 hit on the hardware like previous generations.
I actually agree with this. I don't know if it's because they prioritized APUs to a more traditional setup, but this console generation is much less powerful than any previous ones in comparison to PC hardware. At launch the PS4 and Xbox One were already midrange.
 

Caayn

Member
Ultimately it's Microsoft and Sony's fault for creating such weak machines. They should have gone with a ~3tf GPU and a half decent cpu, taking a $100 hit on the hardware like previous generations.
Just imagine what could've been. I would've gladly payed €600 for such a system.
 

leeh

Member
We'll see though if FM6 aims for more than 16 cars on track and has weather/night.
You could cap the number of opponents to fm5 level and always race in the sun and you'd have similarly locked performances
Dropping frames is similar performance? FM is king of 60fps on consoles. It never drops. That's not similar performance, it's what is needed in a sim game.

I was looking forward to this game, but after the car list and the constant drops from 60, they've lost a sale. I'm waiting for FM6.
 

danowat

Banned
Dropping frames is similar performance? FM is king of 60fps on consoles. It never drops. That's not similar performance, it's what is needed in a sim game.

I was looking forward to this game, but after the car list and the constant drops from 60, they've lost a sale. I'm waiting for FM6.

Coming from someone who LOVES the Forza series, and loves FM5........

Man, you're missing out.........
 

kitch9

Banned
The PS4 is far behind even a mid range gaming PC these days and as time goes on that will just get worse.

The real problem is that devs / publishers are imo wrongly trying to give the impression that consoles can hold their own against the PC like settings. All this is doing is resulting in poorly optimised games that run at sub resolutions and framerates.

It's understandably a pickle for them but console games are trying to punch above their weight this gen and are suffering for it.

Ultimately it's Microsoft and Sony's fault for creating such weak machines. They should have gone with a ~3tf GPU and a half decent cpu, taking a $100 hit on the hardware like previous generations.

Like the previous generations that cost them billions? This game is even bringing high end PCs to their knees at 1080p.
 
Like the previous generations that cost them billions? This game is even bringing high end PCs to their knees at 1080p.

No, a well designed system that costs them $100 at launch and improves over time. Not a PS3 situation that costs them several hundred or an Xbox 360 with faulty hardware.

Also the fact that PC's are struggling doesn't negate or justify the consoles performance. PC has scalable hardware and settings, console games are supposed to work properly off the bat.
 

Noobcraft

Member
Like the previous generations that cost them billions? This game is even bringing high end PCs to their knees at 1080p.
I don't care if a company loses money (initially) to sell me a compelling product that I intend to use for multiple years. I do care if a company launches a product that isn't powerful enough to keep up with midrange PC hardware not long after launch.
 

nib95

Banned
That's not really true for the XB1. The career mode has 20 cars max (hardly pushing the game to its limits), and only runs at 60 fps in the very best conditions. Most of the time it's reaching 50-55 fps and when any sort of weather hits it drops to 40-45 fps. Even the PS4 struggles with rain with the frame rate hovering between 45-55 fps.

It doesn't even perform during normal, structured gameplay, and that's the real problem, not the stress test.

With 20 cars on screen in heavy rain, the only time the PS4 version drops below 50 is when the pit stop stands and stadiums are in view according to DF, otherwise it holds high 50's the majority of the time. It doesn't hover between 45-55 at all. In fact, in the first video, the lowest it ever drops to is 54fps.
 

leeh

Member
Coming from someone who LOVES the Forza series, and loves FM5........

Man, you're missing out.........
I'm going to trust you here, since I've always been excited for this and love sims. I'm buying it.

Well I'm not hard to convince.
 

bombshell

Member
Dropping frames is similar performance? FM is king of 60fps on consoles. It never drops. That's not similar performance, it's what is needed in a sim game.

I was looking forward to this game, but after the car list and the constant drops from 60, they've lost a sale. I'm waiting for FM6.

I don't think you understood what you replied to.

He was saying that if you only do races in Project CARS with same car count and in dry weather as in F5, then you'll see a completely locked 60 fps, at least on PS4. And it looks better than F5.

It's when you push the game to its limits with 45 cars on track and heavy rain and night racing that the framerate goes to shit, and again less so on PS4.
 

danowat

Banned
It's when you push the game to its limits with 45 cars on track and heavy rain and night racing that the framerate goes to shit, and again less so on PS4.

I guess the question is, why would the developers allow users to select options that make the game struggle to such an extent?.

I personally, have yet to notice any frame drops.
 

leeh

Member
I don't think you understood what you replied to.

He was saying that if you only do races in Project CARS with same car count and in dry weather as in F5, then you'll see a completely locked 60 fps, at least on PS4. And it looks better than F5.

It's when you push the game to its limits with 45 cars on track and heavy rain and night racing that the framerate goes to shit, and again less so on PS4.
I'll be picking this up on the X1, so it still does drop below 60 in the dry, as DF have said. Still not in the same league. I've never seen a drop of frames in FM since I've been playing it from the start.
 
We'll see though if FM6 aims for more than 16 cars on track and has weather/night.
You could cap the number of opponents to fm5 level and always race in the sun and you'd have similarly locked performances
I really just need forza 6 to have rain and night conditions. I was gonna get PC but I shoot other games coming out i may not get to it until when F6 comes out.
 

nib95

Banned
I guess the question is, why would the developers allow users to select options that make the game struggle to such an extent?.

I personally, have yet to notice any frame drops.

Because some like myself aren't so bothered by the frame drops, and would rather the carnage and fun of 40+ car races. I do think they should have offered a 30fps lock option though, especially for these more strenuous cases.
 
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