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Digital Foundry: Silent Hill 2 Remake - PS5 Tech Review - An Authentic UE5 Recreation... But What About Performance?

Kangx

Member from Brazile
Did any of the reviewers mention performance issue especially on the performance mode? If not then, I think it's ok for the average gamers but not us here on these forum.

So one thing I noticed beside all the bad stuff is the performance mode, the image clarity look pretty OK unlike most UE5 where is look blurry plus all these artifacts from low plus FSR.

Full play through. I rather play at 60fps on this one.
 

Kangx

Member from Brazile
Graphically speaking Quality Mode really does look remarkable. And Performance Mode, while actually in the city, seems to deliver a 60fps experience when not fighting multiple enemies.

Not really sure what a Pro mode could deliver, but I hope for the best as that's where I'm going to play it.
I can see the pro with 1080p to 4k PSSR with all the fidelity setting and stable frame rate. This is more logical because of time. This will end up looking way better than that trash FSR upscaling at lower resolution.

Given more time, I can see they may use hardware lumen?
 

Ronin_7

Member
- This video is specific to PS5 version, a PC video featuring Alex is coming soon
- Unreal Engine 5
- Remixed OST by Akira Yamaoka
- Some world events are also mixed up to keep old fans on their toes
- 30fps Quality and 60fps Performance modes

- 23 year gap between SH2 and remake, and results are as transformative as you'd expect
- Facial animations, lighting, cloths, details etc all incredibly enhanced over PS2's CGI scenes
- Some deliberate changes made to aesthetics
- Full performance capture for all real time scenes used now
- Seamless traversal, no loading screens
- Gritty grimy aesthetic of the original lessened by comparison

- Both Quality and Performance use Lumen technology
- The main difference is the quality pre-set for Lumen tech
- Both use Lumen reflections with SSR as fall back
- Shadow resolution, texture quality is the same between both

Quality:
- DRS 1220p to 1512p
- Motion banding and artifacts notable but less so than Performance

Performance:
- DRS 864p to 1152p
- More notable visual artifacts
- Performance drops SDF lighting in Lumen and lesser shading
- Lumen reflection sees a notable fallback and reflections look temporally unstable



- Camera logic struggles during combat indoors with tight thin corridors
- Other visual bugs like white halos and color banding on frosted windows


Performance:

- Quality mode runs at 30fps with V-Sync, has one-off drops and abrupt GPU loads triggering DRS can cause drops to mid 20s
- Not a 100% locked way to play the game, but this is how DF played most of it

- Performance mode: 60fps is a stretch for PS5, initial woodland route drops to mid 40s and one tested area even drops to high 30s.
- After the initial area, the indoor apartment areas and empty town streets can reach 60 for stretches
Uh seems like another UE5 title.

Tim 🧁 is more focused on trash talking Apple & Google than to fix this mess of an engine.
 

Parazels

Member
dbbd328.jpeg
In God Sony we trust!
 

Vick

Member
I can see the pro with 1080p to 4k PSSR with all the fidelity setting and stable frame rate. This is more logical because of time. This will end up looking way better than that trash FSR upscaling at lower resolution.

Given more time, I can see they may use hardware lumen?
This would be like a dream scenario. PSSR, 60fps, all Fidelity Settings plus Hardware Lumen reflections? I'd recon that would sell lots of Pro.

But would also be the biggest difference seen so far. Would be fun to see from a nostalgic point of view given SH2 PS history (SH2 was also my first ever PS2 game and experience with that gen's graphics), and it's something I would push for hard in the shoes of PS marketing, but at the moment I see it as very unlikely.
Afterall, for the time being we're not even 100% sure a Pro support will be in place to begin with.
 

Kangx

Member from Brazile


Whenever I see this comment, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Oh yes, this comment still come up more often.

so are you guys ready for more UE5 games? Have not seen performance mode on Metal Gear remake yet, but I reckon it will fall into the same category as Silent Hill but be more blurry. What about phantom blade Zero? The good new is it seem to be a solid 60fps. The bad new is it look extremely blurry and grainy.
 

Three

Member


Whenever I see this comment, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Oh yes, this comment still come up more often.

The funny part is that when a low power next gen machine comes just barely as powerful as last gen and gets mainly crossgen releases for 2-3years they're all over it.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Fuck, not even quality mode is stable :(
It's pretty stable. there are very rare drops. he had to trigger the drs by looking up at the sky or turning around really fast to get frames to drop.

99% of the time, your framerate will be fine.

these guys need to do some actual framerate benchmarks instead of finding worst case scenarios which convince people that games perform poorly.

He wants them to drop the dynamic resolution base lower than 1296p just to account for his idiotictesting steps. no thank you. let people play this game the way it was intended instead of turning the camera around like an ADHD freak. this way everyone gets the same high resolutions.
 

Caio

Member
BUT THE PS5 HASN'T EVEN HIT ITS LIMIT YET

Mocking Spongebob Squarepants GIF
It's like you read my mind! And honestly, it's almost too obvious to look back and remember that infamous thread where so many people were shouting, 'Who needs a PS5 Pro? The PS5 hasn’t even hit its limits yet!' Well, guess what? Those limits are very real, and if you want to play in 'quality mode' at 60fps, with better lighting and image quality, you’re gonna need that PS5 Pro that some folks were so against. Oh, the sweet, sweet irony.
 

sachos

Member
I really hope there is a Pro patch at launch.
Those resolution targets and performance seem like a perfect match for a 4K PSSR Balanced 60 FPS mode no? I wonder how much performance overhead there is in the Quality mode. To get a locked 60 it needs to run at 68 FPS at ~1200p taking into account upsclaing cost.
 

RPCGamer

Neophyte


Whenever I see this comment, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Oh yes, this comment still come up more often.

so are you guys ready for more UE5 games? Have not seen performance mode on Metal Gear remake yet, but I reckon it will fall into the same category as Silent Hill but be more blurry. What about phantom blade Zero? The good new is it seem to be a solid 60fps. The bad new is it look extremely blurry and grainy.

Tbh, I think it's just unreal and optimisation. I'm not complaining because the game looks and seems to run quite well regardless of said issues, but far too often we see people blame the hardware.
 
People over here are overreacting (surprise, surprise…). The game runs fine enough. It skips one frame from time to time in quality and stays in VRR window 99% of the time in performance.
And how many people have TV's with vrr and how many people not on gaming forums like neogaf even have any clue at all what vrr even is?
It's not a crutch for technically incompetent developers and it shouldn't be used as such.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Uh seems like another UE5 title.

Tim 🧁 is more focused on trash talking Apple & Google than to fix this mess of an engine.
What are you talking about lol

The game looks phenomenal. It runs at 30 fps with only minor drops on rare occasions when tom was fucking around with the camera trying to get it to break.

it runs at a relatively high resolution of 1512p most of the time reconstructed to 4k. it will look great on your 4k tv.

the only issue is with the performance mode which has nothing to do with tim sweeney and everything to do with Sony cheapening out and trying to get a $399 console out in 2020. they dont have the gpu grunt to get the games running at 60 fps at higher resolutions. get a decent pc or the ps5 pro and you will see this game and every other UE5 game running at higher resolutions and way better IQ.

I feel like gaf has lost its mind recently. the game looks amazing. one of the best looking games of the year. made by a D tier studio and clearly UE5 allowed them to achieve an insane level of fidelity only a few A tier devs could previously achieve. some of them still havent.

We get threads about how no one is pushing graphics. we now finally get UE5 graphics they promised 4 years ago and we still complain over 30 fps.
 

Killer8

Member


Whenever I see this comment, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Oh yes, this comment still come up more often.

so are you guys ready for more UE5 games? Have not seen performance mode on Metal Gear remake yet, but I reckon it will fall into the same category as Silent Hill but be more blurry. What about phantom blade Zero? The good new is it seem to be a solid 60fps. The bad new is it look extremely blurry and grainy.


The problem is that this was a sentiment parroted by even Digital Foundry themselves over a year ago:



They seem(ed?) to think that we're back in the days of exotic PS2 / PS3 hardware which needed a lot of expertise and trickery to really maximize the hardware. We are in different times now where development is easier than ever due to better tools, lower level hardware access and more predictable performance from what amounts to custom PC parts in a box. There isn't much mythical untapped potential left on the table.

They also said this with a straight face when so many games already relied on reconstruction techniques (and continue to rely on them even on the Pro) just to perform adequately. The difference with Pro is that PSSR actually provides a very good solution to the issue which requires new hardware.
 

Kangx

Member from Brazile
Tbh, I think it's just unreal and optimisation. I'm not complaining because the game looks and seems to run quite well regardless of said issues, but far too often we see people blame the hardware.
No, it's not just unreal. Snowdrop from ubisoft is also have issue on consoles. outlaws share the same bad characteristics as this game.

I think it is the real time GI and many advance pc tech that port over from pc that give these base consoles trouble. Until they develop their own bake lighting and tech tailor to consoles like sony first party I don't see any improvement what so ever. The base consoles is not build to handle these new tech from pc mostly.

Games like Dragon Age already run at very low res in fidelity mode. I heard DF mention 1080p in DF video. Now imagine they have to go lower on performance mode.

Now, the pro will fair much better because of AI upscaling and enhanced raytracing. Look at F1 for example, the devs were able to port most of the RT tech from pc. Also, GT7 was able to implemented RT reflections on cars at 1440p where the base consoles couldn't.
 
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Go_Ly_Dow

Member
The more ue5 games I see the more I think the engine isn't it.
Feels like an extended beta test but the potential is there for it to be a top game engine. With each iteration it improves.

I think the current hardware just isn't quite strong enough to make the most of its full feature set without making cutbacks. So you can equally fault the hardware for it. Come PS6 so in like 3-5 years you'll see it really shine on consoles.
 

Kangx

Member from Brazile
Feels like an extended beta test but the potential is there for it to be a top game engine. With each iteration it improves.

I think the current hardware just isn't quite strong enough to make the most of its full feature set without making cutbacks. So you can equally fault the hardware for it. Come PS6 so in like 3-5 years you'll see it really shine on consoles.
Yea. The ps6 will be able to enjoy what most high pc user now having. I am guessing comparable to a GTX4080 most features except Ray tracing not at the same level maybe can come close.
 
The problem is that this was a sentiment parroted by even Digital Foundry themselves over a year ago:



They seem(ed?) to think that we're back in the days of exotic PS2 / PS3 hardware which needed a lot of expertise and trickery to really maximize the hardware. We are in different times now where development is easier than ever due to better tools, lower level hardware access and more predictable performance from what amounts to custom PC parts in a box. There isn't much mythical untapped potential left on the table.

They also said this with a straight face when so many games already relied on reconstruction techniques (and continue to rely on them even on the Pro) just to perform adequately. The difference with Pro is that PSSR actually provides a very good solution to the issue which requires new hardware.

Can't compare a Oct 24' comment with a March 23' one, back then, as crazy as it sound, we still were in the cross gen era, differences between fidelity and performance modes were small, you can check in many of these games, the internal resolution was higher and since it was just about upgraded old gen versions, sure, games looked worse overall, but image quality was much cleaner.

Problems started last 12 months specially, with next-gen games and UE5 ones, lower resolution even in fidelity modes, lots of artifacts, flickering, shimmering.. and the performance modes suffering a lot, in many cases with a very dirty image quality, in many others not reaching solid 60 FPS

Also agree with them when they said no upcoming tech from AMD was looking that good to make the Pro really worth, but it's Playstation's upscaler what's moving the needle, which now AMD might have or not, we'll see, but it definitely wasn't known back then.
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
" we need a pro version "

That has to be the dumbest thing I see uttered in these threads. No... what we need is developers who stick to the limits of the engine / hardware. If it can't hold a decent solid frame rate then lower some settings and optimize better next time. There is absolutely no reason that every game should not run at a solid 60 fps.
 
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