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Digital Foundry: Unreal Engine 5.4: Big Performance Improvements, New Features, But What About #StutterStruggle?

of course. he was referring to the PS5 IO discussion we had last week in the PS5 Pro thread where apparently the PS5's IO wasnt getting its due because of some conspiracy. XSX and most modern GPUs are not bottlenecked in that department. UE5 was mostly CPU bound in the Matrix demo on both consoles and high end PCs. Its no longer CPU bound. That's all there is to this. Lets not try and twist this into some secret sauce PS5 issue.

if anything this proves that the cerny io did not help the PS5 CPU/GPU overcome the CPU bottlenecks fixed in UE5.4.
IO was never there to help the cpu the jaguar cores for ps5 which helped with sound could of helped the cpu but the IO was pretty much there to assist the GPU for streaming in textures in New areas etc etc much quicker and load times..
 
And you see why I keep saying the issue with the consoles is not the CPU but the devs and how they utilize the CPU? Just look at this, from better optimization of their engine alone they are netting 60-80% better performance from the CPU.

This is nothing new, devs would sooner use extra hardware headroom to brute force their way through poorly optimized code (which is easier, faster and cheaper) than take the time to optimize (which is slower and harder and in turn more expensive). Dunno why this concept is lost to so many all of a sudden.
Maybe being easy to develop for was a double edged sword?

If you were making games for PS2 and PS3 you had to be competent. Now any idiot who can boot up Unreal can make games.
 

Mr.Phoenix

Member
Maybe being easy to develop for was a double edged sword?

If you were making games for PS2 and PS3 you had to be competent. Now any idiot who can boot up Unreal can make games.
That has to be part of it. Its not a coincidence that the best-performing games are usually the games that are running on their own in-house engines. I believe building out your engine at the very least forces the devs to be competent, not in all cases but it's a usual by-product.

I just feel that the ease of development, the availability of certain game engines, and the prevalence of rendering technologies like temporal reconstruction, have all combined to produce the laziest/most talent-starved pool of devs we have seen in a while. And that is why we have so many games under-performing. The devs are not using these things to push the envelope... no, they are using it to breeze through development. What ends up suffering is the quality of the product.

An example I keep making, people ought to just take a cursory glance at what was possible on the 1.8TF horrible CPU PS4. And tell me how it makes sense that there are AAA games on the current-gen consoles that don't even look as good as most of the best-looking games on the PS4. How can anyone in their right mind look at facts like that and think the problem is the hardware we are using now and not the devs?
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Not in some recent games like Avatar and lords of the fallen. PS5 has like zero traversal stutters in those games compared to XSX.
At launch yes when both games were unoptimized on the XSX. Both have recently received patches on xbox series x where those traversal stutters were fixed. I mean we have to realize that this is an engine issue that developers have been struggling with for years with UE4 and now UE5. Do we really believe that the xsx should drop down to 0-5 fps in LOTF because it lacks the PS5 IO? Or in Avatar's case, drop to 14 fps when running around in a tiny cave? And now that both games have been fixed, are we to assume that the xsx hardware was updated with the cerny IO?

And no, PS5 doesnt have zero traversal stutters. they still have stutters, just reduced compared to the xsx because ps5 is almost always the lead platform. Again, this is an engine specific issue dating back to last gen. The XSX has 556 GBps of memory bandwidth and a 2.4 GBps ssd. The ssd is literally 50x faster than the HDD in the X1. And the memory bandwidth is 5x faster than the peak esram bandwidth. Are we saying that it is not a big enough upgrade to simply load the next section of the level even in last gen UE4 games like Callisto?

Anyway, ive talked about this before so i will just post proof of this traversal stutter being present on PS5 games.

Here is callisto: timestamped.


here is lords of the fallen: timestamped


Suicide Squad: timestamped.


Robocop has the same traversal stutters on PS5 as it does on XSX but DF just mentions it in passing without showing them. I played it on PC and the game has constant traversal stutters.
 

Mr.Phoenix

Member
At launch yes when both games were unoptimized on the XSX. Both have recently received patches on xbox series x where those traversal stutters were fixed. I mean we have to realize that this is an engine issue that developers have been struggling with for years with UE4 and now UE5. Do we really believe that the xsx should drop down to 0-5 fps in LOTF because it lacks the PS5 IO? Or in Avatar's case, drop to 14 fps when running around in a tiny cave? And now that both games have been fixed, are we to assume that the xsx hardware was updated with the cerny IO?

And no, PS5 doesnt have zero traversal stutters. they still have stutters, just reduced compared to the xsx because ps5 is almost always the lead platform. Again, this is an engine specific issue dating back to last gen. The XSX has 556 GBps of memory bandwidth and a 2.4 GBps ssd. The ssd is literally 50x faster than the HDD in the X1. And the memory bandwidth is 5x faster than the peak esram bandwidth. Are we saying that it is not a big enough upgrade to simply load the next section of the level even in last gen UE4 games like Callisto?

Anyway, ive talked about this before so i will just post proof of this traversal stutter being present on PS5 games.

Here is callisto: timestamped.


here is lords of the fallen: timestamped


Suicide Squad: timestamped.


Robocop has the same traversal stutters on PS5 as it does on XSX but DF just mentions it in passing without showing them. I played it on PC and the game has constant traversal stutters.

I think the difference is that for every 1 traversal stutter, you will find on consoles (or PS5 in particular) you will see 10 on PC. Basically, it happens infrequently enough on the PS5 to not be considered a problem. And the games that do have it as a stand-out obvious problem, are the exception, not the rule. And you won't be making some sort of blanket statement or conclusion based on an exception.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
I think the difference is that for every 1 traversal stutter, you will find on consoles (or PS5 in particular) you will see 10 on PC. Basically, it happens infrequently enough on the PS5 to not be considered a problem. And the games that do have it as a stand-out obvious problem, are the exception, not the rule. And you won't be making some sort of blanket statement or conclusion based on an exception.
i listed virtually every single ue5 game released in the last year after i was told latest games don’t have this issue on ps5. And yet you still say that’s a blanket statement. And then in the same breath make a blanket statement about how pcs are 10x more likely to get traversal stutters once again conflating or confusing it with shader stutters. Traversal stutters occur on every platform and most of the time they are ironed out on PCs and xsx after some patches but even then, some of them remain because it’s an engine issue that devs can attempt to mask but never truly eliminate on both consoles and PC.

Anyway this is the last time i bother posting links and providing proof. Just a gigantic waste of my time if people continue to ignore facts.

Its funny that I’m on the wrong side of this debate when i had specifically criticized Alex for using the speeding car test in the matrix demo to compare Xsx and ps5 gpus. I knew it was a cpu bottleneck back then because removing traffic and npcs removed the fps drops. 2 years later, we have the confirmation but now people are acting like nx gamer who thought it was io related because his stupid PC couldn’t run it well. Nah it’s just the stupid cpu all along.
 

Allandor

Member
I knew that these console CPUs were weak, but I'm still impressed on how weak it is. I mean, a R5 3600 getting about 40%+ performance over it is just embarrassing.
Cache + higher boost clocks can make a big difference in such tests as the most important single thread performance should be much higher.
 
At launch yes when both games were unoptimized on the XSX. Both have recently received patches on xbox series x where those traversal stutters were fixed. I mean we have to realize that this is an engine issue that developers have been struggling with for years with UE4 and now UE5. Do we really believe that the xsx should drop down to 0-5 fps in LOTF because it lacks the PS5 IO? Or in Avatar's case, drop to 14 fps when running around in a tiny cave? And now that both games have been fixed, are we to assume that the xsx hardware was updated with the cerny IO?

And no, PS5 doesnt have zero traversal stutters. they still have stutters, just reduced compared to the xsx because ps5 is almost always the lead platform. Again, this is an engine specific issue dating back to last gen. The XSX has 556 GBps of memory bandwidth and a 2.4 GBps ssd. The ssd is literally 50x faster than the HDD in the X1. And the memory bandwidth is 5x faster than the peak esram bandwidth. Are we saying that it is not a big enough upgrade to simply load the next section of the level even in last gen UE4 games like Callisto?

Anyway, ive talked about this before so i will just post proof of this traversal stutter being present on PS5 games.

Here is callisto: timestamped.


here is lords of the fallen: timestamped


Suicide Squad: timestamped.


Robocop has the same traversal stutters on PS5 as it does on XSX but DF just mentions it in passing without showing them. I played it on PC and the game has constant traversal stutters.

That Lords of the fallen video is 6 months old. In the lastest patch there are not traversal stutters in the areas Xbox is famously impacted, according to the latest DF video. if there still stutters in others areas on PS5 they didn't show.

In avatar PS5 has zero traversal stutters according to DF. Usually PS5 has less traversal stutters in many games, not zero, so what's happening in Avatar is quite new. But Avator is also the most modern engine out there so, using all hardware RT and mesh shaders on consoles, so I dunno, you can make your own guesses on why there wouldn't be no traversal stutters on PS5, not recorded at least.

Lead platform you say? PS5 has less traversal stutters in Fallout 4 native patch. Is PS5 lead platform in Fallout 4?
 
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SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
That Lords of the fallen video is 6 months old. In the lastest patch there are not traversal stutters in the areas Xbox is famously impacted, according to the latest DF video. if there still stutters in others areas on PS5 they didn't show.

In avatar PS5 has zero traversal stutters according to DF. Usually PS5 has less traversal stutters in many games, not zero, so what's happening in Avatar is quite new. But Avator is also the most modern engine out there so, using all hardware RT and mesh shaders on consoles, so I dunno, you can make your own guesses on why there wouldn't be no traversal stutters on PS5, not recorded at least.

Lead platform you say? PS5 has less traversal stutters in Fallout 4 native patch. Is PS5 lead platform in Fallout 4?
The video you linked on avatar didnt show traversal stutters though.

RJ0OPct.gif


He's in the same area, not going from one invisible level to the next which is where we typically see traversal stutters. The game just randomly decides to drop frames to 24 fps from a locked 40 before going back to a locked 40.

This is not a traversal stutter. like you said, avatar doesnt have many even on PC. This is your classic frametime spike stutter that used to plague PC games back in the day. just a sign of poor optimization thats all.

the lords of the fallen traversal stutters can be replicated because they happen during those invisible level transitions. thats why you saw it in the DF video even on PS5's 30 fps mode because it would happen at a very specific point in the map every time. its a Unreal engine feature. shader stutters would only happen once on the very first run and these random drops you see in avatar's xsx version are neither traversal nor shader stutters.

Epic has already told DF that the nanite vram usage is like 300 MBps. thats it. XSX has 2.4 GBps. it shouldnt struggle with that. Epic just needs to do a better job at hiding those invisible stutters and somehow bake in streaming that happens before you enter that area. devs have gone back and fix these things in the past so its clearly something that can be resolved with some optimization.
 

StereoVsn

Member
I just want stutter gone. It’s exhausting to see time and time again on new AAA games running on top of the line PC hardware.

Developers just can’t be arsed to optimize basically so it’s up to engine makers and GPU drivers I guess.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Lead platform you say? PS5 has less traversal stutters in Fallout 4 native patch. Is PS5 lead platform in Fallout 4?
Fallout 4 on PS5 has the same stutters in the same spot according to DF. If the Cerny IO was so magical, there would be zero stutters on PS5.

timestamped:


PS5's performance on its 60fps mode is mostly stable, but just like on Series X it is prone to sudden lurches in unlikely spots - the top of the Corvega factor again sees us go down into the 50s while looking directly down, and there's hitching while running full=pelt through complex environments.
 

Bojji

Member
Fallout 4 on PS5 has the same stutters in the same spot according to DF. If the Cerny IO was so magical, there would be zero stutters on PS5.

timestamped:


I think very few devs actually utilize decompression hardware and apis on PS5, most games just load on CPU and stutters are the same on PS5, Xbox and PCs with 10GB/s SSDs.

Cerny envisioned switching to streaming data from SSD using this tech, that's why SSD part os PS5 is so advanced and "overdesigned". Stutters should be gone with that and some PS5 exclusives are super smooth and have incredible short load times. UE games in comparison look like unoptimized crap.

Same is true with mesh/primitive shaders, tech is there since 2018 but only ~3 games are using and all of them were released just few months ago. Transition is super slow.
 
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