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Prey patch adds major stuttering to PS4 version, "worst ever" frame pacing

G

Gestault

Member
I can't understand from an engineering perspective why a Pro patch along these lines would introduce this. I hope they get the corrected patch out there soon.
 
D

Dipper145

Member
I watched the video, but got a little confused, I didn't notice much stuttering during any of the periods the guy was talking about it. I saw the frame counter go to 26 once from 30 in the corner. I did see it stutter once while he was playing though and talking about it. Maybe I just don't have as good of an eye for these kinds of things though.
 
K

Krusenstern

Banned
The youtube comment section... How the fuck can a youtube channel that provides such high quality output of technical analsis and commentary have such an incredibly vile and uninformed fanbase.

It's like these people think this channel is a battle ground for platform wars. Only immature dumbfucks form PC and console alike being petty and clueless.

God it's incredible people this retarded exist.
 
Bl@de

Bl@de

Member
WTF is wrong with consoles and framepacing? This is a non-issue for PC gamers. FPS lock with Afterburner, vsync via driver (in-game off) and done. But on consoles it's often a mess. What is the reason for this?
 
G

Gbraga

Member
Bl@de said:
WTF is wrong with consoles and framepacing? This is a non-issue for PC gamers. FPS lock with Afterburner, vsync via driver (in-game off) and done. But on consoles it's often a mess. What is the reason for this?
Click to expand...

I mean, it's not like you can use Afterburner and change your driver vsync on PS4. If you only compare in-game fps locks, they're usually shitty for 30fps on PC. Even more commonly shitty than PS4.

It's just that we can fix it ourselves on PC.
 
Bl@de

Bl@de

Member
Zojirushi said:
That's not true and another recent Bethesda game is actually a really bad offender...
Click to expand...

Never had framepacing issues with games since I use Afterburner. I notice bad frame-pacing right away and have an OSD running when testing in-game settings. Bethesda games are no exceptions. Solid 16.6ms in Fallout 4/Skyrim/Skyrim SE.
 
Bl@de

Bl@de

Member
Gbraga said:
I mean, it's not like you can use Afterburner and change your driver vsync on PS4. If you only compare in-game fps locks, they're usually shitty for 30fps on PC. Even more commonly shitty than PS4.

It's just that we can fix it ourselves on PC.
Click to expand...

Well but if they have a closed system Sony could provide low-level support for framerate locks and vsync. Not a programmer so maybe I'm totally wrong. I know that in-game frame-pacing is an issue on PC. But it's an easy fix and it should be no problem for developers working on a game for so long.
 
F

FlyinJ

Douchebag. Yes, me.
This is really bizarre... I found the felt awful at release because of the input lag, then after 1.02 it became infinitely more playable but frame rate problems and tearing were introduced.

After playing an hour on the Pro patch, the frame rate is smoothed out and the tearing is gone. It feels really good now... I guess I'm not seeing these new issues?
 
PLASTICA-MAN

PLASTICA-MAN

Member
Can we expect more patches to solve those problems.

LiK said:
FYI, Doom runs at 60fps on PS4 and is smooth as butter.
Click to expand...

Doom is a marvel whatever the platform is. A shame that it didn't get PS4 PRO support. The game already runs at 1080p with 60 FPS on base PS4 and increasing the resolution and improving the graphical details on PS4 PRO would be so easily for them

Brandon F said:
Same engine?
Click to expand...

Doom: Id Tech 6
Prey : Cryengine 3.0+

Id Tech 5 had some issues on PS3 (streaming textures etc...) but now it works well on PS4. I didn't know that Cryengine had some issues on PS4. The only engines that aren't very optimized for PS4 are UE3 and Unity.
 
P

Pandora012

Member
Honestly, if they can't fix the input lag without breaking the game, I'd rather they just leave the lag. Before this Prey apparently had a pretty stable 30 fps.

LiK said:
FYI, Doom runs at 60fps on PS4 and is smooth as butter.
Click to expand...


Did they use the same engine?
 
B

Belker

Member
cakely said:
Yeah, "own goal" is pretty common parlance here in the US.

Sadly, it's probably because of this incident:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9s_Escobar
Click to expand...

We've been using 'own goal' in the U.K. for years, well before that chap was murdered.

As for the game, I rented it at launch but haven't played it yet. I wasn't too excited about the input delay problems I'd read about, but this seems far worse. Might as well said the bugger back.
 
F

FHIZ

Member
Gestault said:
I can't understand from an engineering perspective why a Pro patch along these lines would introduce this. I hope they get the corrected patch out there soon.
Click to expand...
The pro patch didn't. These were introduced in a previous patch but DF is just getting around to highlighting them.
 
S

Stranya

Member
Is this an engine or dev problem? On PS4, games like Far Cry 4, Watch Dogs 2, and Horizon all perform brilliantly without frame pricing or input lag issues, and to my eyes they are all more graphically demanding than Prey, particularly as open world games.

I'm not a techie so very happy to be corrected, but I don't understand why it's apparently so hard to get 30fps and decent input in a game like this.
 
G

GameAddict411

Member
From unplayable state to another. If any of you guys played the game with it's insane input latency before the patch, I seriously feel bad for you. The demo I tried was unplayable IMO and now they fix it by destroying the game's frame rate. I think that's somehow related to the type of Vsync they are using. Vsync could introduce input latency issue and it's pretty noticeable. You can test this out if you have a PC. I remember that Tomb Raider had the same issue. It might be a problem developers could experience if they don't time everything right on the PS4. I am glad it's not common though!
 
P

Pandora012

Member
LiK said:
No idea but I had to mention that since it's the same pub and it's on PS4 for the guys who were shitting on consoles.
Click to expand...

But it's different developers tho. From what I'm reading it looks like the engine Arkane used does not do well with ps4.

Lionheart1827 said:
So does this affect only the PS4 pro or the vanilla PS4?

I dont have the game yet so just curious as I only have a vanilla PS4.
Click to expand...

If they are just highlighting the issues that were there from 1.02, then you should be fine. Was able to beat it last week on 1.03 and only had 2 brief instances were frames were noticeably low. I imagine it's only a concern if you are sensitive to dips. Luckily for me it has to be severe for me to notice/care.
 
S

SirMossyBloke

Member
Bl@de said:
WTF is wrong with consoles and framepacing? This is a non-issue for PC gamers. FPS lock with Afterburner, vsync via driver (in-game off) and done. But on consoles it's often a mess. What is the reason for this?
Click to expand...

A non-issue with PC gaming? You have got to be kidding me.

RTSS isn't some magical tool that fixes everything you know. Example, Ghost Recon Wildlands.
 
xrnzaaas

xrnzaaas

Member
This is turning into another Just Cause 3. I'm happy I wasn't close to the end of the game when the previous (or was it 1.02?) patch was released so I didn't have to deal with the worse PS4 performance for that long.
 
A

Akronis

Member
SirMossyBloke said:
A non-issue with PC gaming? You have got to be kidding me.

RTSS isn't some magical tool that fixes everything you know. Example, Ghost Recon Wildlands.
Click to expand...

Ubisoft is kind of a special exception. Every single one of their engines have frame pacing issues above 30FPS.
 
Z

Zojirushi

Member
Bl@de said:
Never had framepacing issues with games since I use Afterburner. I notice bad frame-pacing right away and have an OSD running when testing in-game settings. Bethesda games are no exceptions. Solid 16.6ms in Fallout 4/Skyrim/Skyrim SE.
Click to expand...

Weird. I can't think of single game on PC where I didn't at least think, eh, it's mostly fine but these frame time spikes from time to time are kinda bad.
 
B

burgerdog

Member
dark10x said:
Shame about these issues as the game itself is one of my favorites of the year. It's really really good. It's just that...it's only REALLY good on PC.


It's a battle with input latency to a degree, I'd imagine. On PC you can adjust the number of frames pre-rendered by the CPU before sending to the GPU. If you lower this too much, you get jittery performance but if you raise it too far, input becomes very laggy.

I'm not sure what the comparable commands would be on PS4 but the PC situation demonstrates how easily it could happen. If they were trying to solve input latency, this is the kind of issue that might pop-up as a result.

It should be possible to get both a responsive game and a stable frame-rate (most games do this) but CryEngine games all seem to have lag issues on PS4 for some reason (aside from Robinson on PSVR).
Click to expand...

Such a shame, too. The game just looks so damn good on PC and runs like an absolute dream. I was shocked at how "middling" the game looked when I played the demo on my pro.
 
S

stan423321

Member
Belker said:
We've been using 'own goal' in the U.K. for years, well before that chap was murdered.
Click to expand...

Well, very good that poster you quoted replied to my post which was specifically asking about non-British usage then, don't you think?

Gestault said:
I can't understand from an engineering perspective why a Pro patch along these lines would introduce this. I hope they get the corrected patch out there soon.
Click to expand...

The simple yet unfortunate truth about software is that chain reactions are a thing. I remember Dolphin emulator developer blog, in particular, being full of stories of form "this was completely wrong before, but it worked because something else was also somewhat wrong or somewhat forgiving and no one saw the difference". Emulators are incredibly prone to this, but "regular" games aren't immune either.

Orrrr they could just deploy a new algorithm for something common on both codepaths where old one was terrible on Pro and didn't test it thoroughly. Who knows. It's not shocking, at any rate.
 
S

SirMossyBloke

Member
Akronis said:
Ubisoft is kind of a special exception. Every single one of their engines have frame pacing issues above 30FPS.
Click to expand...

Apart from the seemingly out of this world Snowdrop engine. Still amazes me.

Anyway, frame pacing has always been an issue on PC hence the need for RTSS in the first place (not saying every game of course). Only difference between consoles is they don't have a way to fix it themselves.
 
Kssio_Aug

Kssio_Aug

Member
So the patch added performance issues?

giphy.gif


Edit:
Just watched DF video. When they say this is a problem that occurred, almost in the same way, for both Rise of the Tomb Raider and Prey, I wonder if we may expect more titles to suffer this issue. It seems to add some suuport for PS4 Pro but affecting the regular PS4 version in a negative way... this is not good. I hope we don't see much of that.
 
S

Sad Affleck

Member
Can a developer explain how something like this happens? I can see how it could happen on an open platform with various configurations like PC. How do you release such a patch for a platform running on fixed hardware?
 
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