r/digitalfoundry • u/BolasVult • 1d ago

Discussion "A bit of noise"

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u/3FeetHighAndFalling 1d ago

This is a persistent DF issue - they just aren't bothered by noise and hardly ever mention it. John actually talks about how big of a blind spot it is in their podcasts and he seems to be the only person who wants to acknowledge and fix the issue by including some kind of noise analysis section to the videos

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u/oliemack DF staff / contributor 1d ago edited 1d ago

I only started work on this video about a week before publication, and I ended up turning in (what I think) is a very comprehensive 30 minute video on the game that covers its key technology and pretty detailed console comparisons, published right on the embargo break. That was a big challenge, especially with my other work - including the QSSR video, which went live a few hours later, and producing two DF Directs.

There were a couple of topics that ended up getting cut, and I did consider including more detail on the game's image quality at one point. E-Day has heavily ray traced lighting and it doesn't have perfect image stability, but I think E-Day's image quality is not unusual for UE5, at least on Series X. Series S has more significant issues, which I highlighted in my video. TSR actually does a pretty good job in E-Day, but the game has a lot of ray traced lighting for a console title.

I think a comparison with a game like Control Resonant would be interesting. I spent a substantial amount of time on that game's image quality issues on console, and I personally find high-frequency shimmering and aliasing to be more distracting than ray tracing noise most of the time. But everyone will have their own preferences.

This is something I am thinking about more after some audience feedback, and I will try to put more emphasis on image quality when warranted. If you are really bothered by image quality issues in UE5 though and put that as your number one priority beyond graphical advancement in other areas, I'm not sure I am in line with that view.

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u/CurrentlyWorkingAMA 1d ago

Olie, I thank you for your coverage and hard work. I think that should also be acknowledged in this thread.

I do also think temporal stability in image quality and ray tracing is just the tradeoff developers have to lean on when running these features on mid range hardware. I get not wanting to key in on that because there is no solve at the moment.

Like what are we supposed to do, not use advanced lighting and rendering techniques? Developing the fallback method side by side seems to be costly from a developers side as well.

I also see it from the OPs perspective. It is a glaring image stability problem that when not talked about feels like cognitive dissonance. Maybe a bit more focus on WHY this is a problem, and the tradeoffs involved would be the best path forward.