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Face-Off: Fallout 4 - Digital Foundry

The frame rate on PS4 is terrible. Gonna power through it and trade it in and buy the PC version when modders are done with it.
 
Half the game is missing in the console version
4gE8HLL.gif

even worse than dying light
 
The frame rate on PS4 is terrible. Gonna power through it and trade it in and buy the PC version when modders are done with it.

Studios will continue to claim day one victims as long as consumers continue to buy their half-finished, half-polished products. The problem is that there are too many Hollywood-tier studios right now in the industry. Creating a game is akin to writing a book or painting or anything that requires talent, vision and ambition. A lot of game developers are just not artists nor creators, they are stockholders' puppets. Which leads to forgettable products.
 
Studios will continue to claim day one victims as long as consumers continue to buy their half-finished, half-polished products. The problem is that there are too many Hollywood-tier studios right now in the industry. Creating a game is akin to writing a book or painting or anything that requires talent, vision and ambition. A lot of game developers are just not artists nor creators, they are stockholders' puppets. Which leads to forgettable products.
What you're assuming is that game devs don't enjoy their jobs. It's pretty offensive to claim that devs aren't artists or creators. Especially when you look at their individual portfolios.
 
The frame rate on PS4 is terrible. Gonna power through it and trade it in and buy the PC version when modders are done with it.

It's the worst performing game I've seen in a long long time. It never feels stable. What I don't understand is how this didn't affect review scores for 99% of them, like I know people will defend it and say "well it didn't affect gameplay" or some nonsense but it is constantly affecting the gameplay. Like, the game is much worse playing because of the framerate, that's just being objective.
 
I hope they're able to fix the low frame-rate soon.

I wouldn't call the difference between exclusives and multiplats massive. Id say it's much smaller than last gen actually since most of the best looking games are multiplats.

Did we have a difference of more than 30% in resolution, usually with better frame-rate and slightly better graphical features in the last generation? Was it as common as it is between the PS4 and Xbox?
 
This is definitely a CPU issue for the consoles. At 1080p with everything high except textures at ultra I never went past 69% GPU, but CPU hit 100% on all 4 cores and forced me below 30fps a few times, but only in town. CPU usage across 4 cores is almost identical.

i5 2400@3200mhz
7870XT(2.8TF)
8GB DDR3
 
Studios will continue to claim day one victims as long as consumers continue to buy their half-finished, half-polished products. The problem is that there are too many Hollywood-tier studios right now in the industry. Creating a game is akin to writing a book or painting or anything that requires talent, vision and ambition. A lot of game developers are just not artists nor creators, they are stockholders' puppets. Which leads to forgettable products.
Seems like you don't really have a clue about making games
 
This is definitely a CPU issue for the consoles. At 1080p with everything high except textures at ultra I never went past 69% GPU, but CPU hit 100% on all 4 cores and forced me below 30fps a few times, but only in town. CPU usage across 4 cores is almost identical.

i5 2400@3200mhz
7870XT(2.8TF)
8GB DDR3

Gonna need more proof than that for your definitive statement. Plenty of better looking open world games run better than this turd.
 
Did we have a difference of more than 30% in resolution, usually with better frame-rate and slightly better graphical features in the last generation? Was it as common as it is between the PS4 and Xbox?
That has nothing to do with what I and the other person were talking about. We were referring to exclusives vs multiplats. Not console wars.
 
That has nothing to do with what I and the other person were talking about. We were referring to exclusives vs multiplats. Not console wars.

My bad. I must have misread your post. And I agree with your statement, some of the best looking games this gen also happen to be multiplatform.
 
Gonna need more proof than that for your definitive statement. Plenty of better looking open world games run better than this turd.

I mean you could go into the PC performance thread too. Also better looking is usually a result of textures and shaders which are GPU limited. Not saying this game couldn't be optimized better, but if my i5(even though it is old) is struggling then surly the AMD parts in the consoles are too. Same thing happened to me in GTA5. I could actually run 50-60fps most of the time, but my CPU was running full throttle.

Ok I take it back kinda... I just started the Freedom Trail quest and when I look at the Freedom Trail Sign I get like 17fps, but CPU and GPU are at 50%...wtf. It makes sense to drop frames when my CPU is maxxed, but this is just weird.
 
I mean you could go into the PC performance thread too. Also better looking is usually a result of textures and shaders which are GPU limited. Not saying this game couldn't be optimized better, but if my i5(even though it is old) is struggling then surly the AMD parts in the consoles are too. Same thing happened to me in GTA5. I could actually run 50-60fps most of the time, but my CPU was running full throttle.

My old i7 930 has no probs with GTA 5.

I've seen similar posts to yours claiming 100% CPU usage on sandy ivy bridge on AC Unity. Again my old i7 had no issue, sat around 30-60% and many other sandy bridge users also posted they weren't seeing 100% usage. Turns out each time it's just a handful of people who see their sandy/ivy CPU pegged back, could be OS related or some other game bug or false reading.

gamegpu website tests seem to show it's very good on desktop CPUs much worse than yours and scales very well across the cores. I'm not saying the consoles CPU aren't weak, they are indeed very weak notebook CPUs.
 
My old i7 930 has no probs with GTA 5.

I've seen similar posts to yours claiming 100% CPU usage on sandy ivy bridge on AC Unity. Again my old i7 had no issue, sat around 30-60% and many other sandy bridge users also posted they weren't seeing 100% usage. Turns out each time it's just a handful of people who see their sandy/ivy CPU pegged back, could be OS related or some other game bug or false reading.

gamegpu website tests seem to show it's very good on desktop CPUs much worse than yours and scales very well across the cores. I'm not saying the consoles CPU aren't weak, they are indeed very weak notebook CPUs.

Might be the curse of an AMD GPU. I have a clean install of Windows atm so no other reason for the CPU usage. I've tracked it with MSI After Burner on several games and open world games hit the hardest naturally. Also your 930 has 4 cores and 8 threads vs my i5 4 cores 4 threads so that might explain it.

Although I think my 17fps problem in Fallout currently is because I started a file transfer to another computer on my home network. Waiting for it to complete to verify.
 
Might be the curse of an AMD GPU. I have a clean install of Windows atm so no other reason for the CPU usage. I've tracked it with MSI After Burner on several games and open world games hit the hardest naturally. Also your 930 has 4 cores and 8 threads vs my i5 4 cores 4 threads so that might explain it.

Although I think my 17fps problem in Fallout currently is because I started a file transfer to another computer on my home network. Waiting for it to complete to verify.

I use Nvidia.

Yes I have 8 threads but anytime I've seen 100% usage posted in the pc forums on newer i5 there's 30x more people posting with the same i5 saying they don't see 100% either so no, 8 threads doesn't explain it. I've also turned HT off and still no issue.

Of course if many i5 users are reporting their CPUs being pegged back in FO4 then yeah but each time before it's a rare random occurrence that never amounts to anything.
 
The thing that really stuns me is that prerelease I wasn't too hard on the graphics of this game because I figured Bethesda went for less ambitious visuals so that they could get performance in order. It's really sad that they couldn't even pull that off.

Put me in that camp, Fallout 4 seemed to be in the "good enough" camp as I just only expected it to look better than Fallout 3 and Skyrim and hopefully it runs well, not this doo-doo butter of a framerate. :(
 
17 hours in on Ps4 and massively enjoying it. As is most people seem to be doing.

That's why Bethesda gets away with it, because there is nothing else like it and it is still an amazing game despite the flaws.
 
I use Nvidia.

Yes I have 8 threads but anytime I've seen 100% usage posted in the pc forums on newer i5 there's 30x more people posting with the same i5 saying they don't see 100% either so no, 8 threads doesn't explain it. I've also turned HT off and still no issue.

Of course if many i5 users are reporting their CPUs being pegged back in FO4 then yeah but each time before it's a rare random occurrence that never amounts to anything.

You seem to be implying that I'm lying or that my system is somehow impaired. All I can say is my results are in my opinion verifiable. Claiming that shadows in FO4 are resource intensive isn't a lofty claim. Please link to 30 people with opposite claims I would be glad to see it.

Also my i5 from 2011...not new.
 
Bethesda should have dropped something else in favor of shadow rendering distances. Overall the game looks good, but man some of the views you get are unbelievably shitty.

Look at this:
Screenshot-Original.png

The LOD and draw distance on most games this console gen has been pretty pathetic. Seems like they've been favoring having as much detail as possible within a small radius of the player over distance detail. If you get to the right spot in some of these open world games where you can see for a far distance, the views can be pretty horrific.

The truly awful part is that the above image is being rendered at 30fps. If it looks like that, we should be getting 60fps at least.
 
And stuff like that can be taken advantage of on the GPGPU, however this is Bethesda. Minimal effort to get it running compared to other developers.

This engine has been doing the same object calculations since Oblivion, hell, even Morrowind. Power is not the issue. Optimization is.

It is not a graphical powerhouse at all, lol. Regardless of "scale", that they did with FO3. All it is, is a slight fresh coat of paint, they know their modding community will do the rest they failed to do.

Actually Morrowind do not have a lot of stuff implemented to AI as in Oblivion and Skyrim actually expanded on it.
And CPUs in current gen consoles arent more powerful in comparison to previous gen, they are slightly better in terms of performance and definitely better in generic handling of tasks, because of they are x86 with OOT, but they arent that much powerful.
 

Ah ah perfect (I went with the giant douche).

The lack of content discussion really bothers me if on PS4 just because of less power we have less content. I mean real content like house we could go in or areas... not things you could see far away and not access (this would still be a bad things but less important imo).
 
That's like..
I mean, wow. I don't even have to spell it out, just look at that.
I do think they actually did make subtle improvements to PS4 in Dying Light but, even still, it's not THAT noticeable during actual gameplay. Dying Light actually looks really good on consoles.

The LOD issues in Fallout 4 are infinitely more severe.
 
I do think they actually did make subtle improvements to PS4 in Dying Light but, even still, it's not THAT noticeable during actual gameplay. Dying Light actually looks really good on consoles.

You know, I still tbh am not convinced that was an all around increase in LOD distance on PS4. The evidentiary examples of that post-patch are not too clear IMO.

AF though definitely got way better.
 
Studios will continue to claim day one victims as long as consumers continue to buy their half-finished, half-polished products. The problem is that there are too many Hollywood-tier studios right now in the industry. Creating a game is akin to writing a book or painting or anything that requires talent, vision and ambition. A lot of game developers are just not artists nor creators, they are stockholders' puppets. Which leads to forgettable products.

I think a lot of people are over reacting to your statement. Probably the part about them not being artists or creators. If you're saying that artists or creators require control over the product and corporate interests override that control, it's pretty clear to me that you're right. Developers may be creators as individuals, but they cannot actually be one in modern studios. That's fair.
 
Disappointing frame rates on consoles.

How is it possible that the Xbox One and PS4 perform the same when the PS4 is a lot more powerful. It sucks.
I'm not going to support a dev that does this.

This. People are still going to buy the game in droves because Bethesda games have a unique combination of mechanics and will ignore the shitty graphics and performance issues.
 
I'm getting a solid 60 with my 760 on medium/high settings and injected SMAA, really happy with the performance. Shame about the consoles.
 
I find it amusing how people are unwilling to think the console just cannot handle the game. The PS4 is an x86 platform now so the coding is almost the same as PC. Could it be optimized more of course and that is 100% on Bethesda.

Considering the PS4 GPU does not even meet PC low end I see why it has issues.
 
I find it amusing how people are unwilling to think the console just cannot handle the game. The PS4 is an x86 platform now so the coding is almost the same as PC. Could it be optimized more of course and that is 100% on Bethesda.

Considering the PS4 GPU does not even meet PC low end I see why it has issues.

A2hLzrZ.gif


Just saying that the PS4 can do pretty nice things in the right hands. Bethesda's engine is terrible.
 
Just saying that the PS4 can do pretty nice things in the right hands. Bethesda's engine is terrible.

This, The Order, KZSF, Infamous and even a few Multiplat games all look and run much better than this. Not going to say lazy devs but I will say its a shit port. Hell Batman, Cod and Dying light look much better graphically and perform at a much higher level.
 
A2hLzrZ.gif


Just saying that the PS4 can do pretty nice things in the right hands. Bethesda's engine is terrible.

Clearly, a .gif response of a sequence of minimal player interactivity in a highly choreographed TPS is a way to prove a point about performance and graphics in a highly non-choreographed open world game.

I think that is not the best example, rather, post some thing from TW3.
 
i'm gonna go ahead and assume thats draw distance and not "half the game is missing"
Yep, that's the case. I forgot to mention in the video that the time of day is exactly matched for all platforms (5.30pm).

From a distance like that, obviously, a lot is cut away on PS4 - but it's all there on the ground level. That's just the most extreme case of LODs at play.

The question is, do you miss it, without the PC version being shown as well?

Personally, I think it's pretty passable. In fact, given PS4 frame-rates take such a nosedive, maybe they should have introduced an even lower LOD setting for this spot, with less complex meshes below. Assuming that is indeed the bottleneck.
 
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