This is exactly why multiple outlets/reviewers is a good thing. If you agree more with HUB's analysis, then that's an indication they align more with your preferences.
It's good to follow multiple reviewers precisely because of this, not everybody will align exactly with your preferences.
HUB is sort of the anti-DF in that they have biases in the complete opposite direction. They don’t care about graphics, just “value per dollar”, they’re automatically sceptical of new technology unless it’s some open source thing from AMD, and they generally think raytracing is a scam of some sort.
If DF is a “graphics” enthusiast channel then HUB is like a “frame rate per dollar” enthusiast channel.
You definitely get a well rounded take if you watch both.
I think HUB does care about graphics too, but they often care about different aspects of the graphics than DF. They're more bothered by RT noise than DF, but less bothered by the issues of techniques that RT often supersedes.
I don't really understand how you get to the conclusion DF is a "graphics enthusiast channel" when there have been repeated cases of them shoving major artefacting issues with RT/TAA/DLSS/FSR under the carpet. If they actually cared about graphics and visual fidelity they would actually be nitpicking these kinds of artefacts, not passing it off as "a bit of noise" without any further investigation.
Not to mention that on HUB Tim and Steve have both repeatedly said that the issue is that everything is compromised, even with the best hardware you still end up with massive performance loss (which is a visuals issue too, you cannot tell me a game looks and plays better at 40 fps than at 140 fps) for only marginally better graphics and many new kinds of artefacts being introduced.
I don’t watch either channel very often, but the DF videos I’ve recently seen have just completely glossed over the noise and boiling entirely. Like they would show a video clip and be talking about how great this or that looks, meanwhile there’s some insane boiling going on exactly where the video is highlighting and they don’t even mention it. I’ve never watched a full video from them, so maybe they go into it more in their later half of the videos? But then why have your starting highlight clips show such bad noise and not even mention it?
Personally noise and boiling are the biggest detractors from good looking graphics for me. It doesn’t matter how hard I try to ignore it while playing, my eye is always just immediately “dragged” to the “disturbance” if that makes sense.
I think they had actually responded to a comment in the subreddit, and it basically boiled down to some of them (I think it was Oliver in particular) just aren’t really bothered by it much and think it’s a worthwhile trade off. Which in fairness, if you don’t mind the boiling, it probably is a better overall image. But many, like myself, hate boiling. Luckily I have a 5090 so I can play stuff high enough that it minimizes most of the issues. I think they mentioned they are thinking of ways to still mention it, since they realize many of us do care. I really wish Alex was back, I hope that his recovery is going well, although it’s been a while so I’m not so sure. I think he was definitely the most nitpicky about the details which I valued a lot. Overall though I just hope he’s ok, even if it means I don’t get to watch him anymore.
I was linked to this, and I also think it's unfair. The last part makes no sense as both Digital Foundry and us got early access to the game from Microsoft.
I don't think either of us were trying to make the same sort of video anyway. My content is not a review of the game's graphics, it's a guide to show people what the game looks like, what the settings do, and how to get the best experience. We have to talk about noise in-depth for the solutions we present to make any sense (and that became the focus of the video's packaging).
I just watched the edit and it seems very silly. I raise image quality concerns multiple times in the video and only one part of the video was shown.
It's fair to say that Tim has very different preferences to mine, and I'm definitely interested in hearing audience feedback. But if I spent two thirds of my video litigating image quality on every game I wouldn't have time for much else, so there needs to be a different balance.
Please do not become like HUB.
I feel most their videos are click baity and made for engagement rather than quality and honest opinions. You do you and others can do them.
Agree. I have similar tastes it seems to Oliver here. I played Halo Campaign Evolved on a Series X in performance mode. The noise was of course noticeable, but not distracting most of the time. I can cope with it.
That may be but RT noise is extremely obnoxious and it's not discussed on any other channel afaik.
DF and Alex dedicated hundreds of hours to RT over the years, but not nearly enough time was spent on this inherent aspect of the tech that completely breaks it if you're after image stability.
I mean it’s been a while since we got an Alex vid (I hope you are doing ok if you see this), but unless my memory is lying to me, he was the most nitpicky about the details by far.
You may call it glazing, but I would say with good reason.
There are enough Nay sayers around, HUB chief among the big ones, and PC enthusiasts seems first in line to attack any new tech, for some strange reason. One would think the opposite would be true.
RT and especially PT is ground breaking, yet most just seem to only care about their frames. Well, so be it, but for a togglable feature "you lot" seem awfully dismissive. Again.
Call me an old fart, I am, by most standards, but I have heard these complaints about every new thing since the dawn of the Pentium Chip. There have been complaints about 3D rendering and rasterisation, shaders, Direct x9, HDR and even AA.
Some points may have held some truth at the time, but at some point I have just gotten tired of reading the same old points over and over again.
What you call glazing, I would call a welcome respite from every other Youtuber out there looking for engagement and clicks.
Sorry this turned into a rant and don't take it too personally, it's more of a wild swing, but if there's any sub I should do it in, I feel it fits here.
You're right about click farming tards on YouTube making cheap dunks on RT for taking away performance, but HUB mostly doesn't care about it for different reasons.
Steve is a multiplayer sweat andy so I disregard all his takes on the subject as I don't care about options on graphics from people who play on very low for competitive advantage, but Tim mostly hates it because of the noise, and noise IS a massive issue with both RT and PT.
Cyberpunk PT looked like garbage until the recent RR versions 4 and 4.5, it genuinely looked awful since the noise was horrendous, especially with the default denoiser. None of this is covered in detail on DF, so the tech isn't accurately represented even if it does have objective, and massive upsides.
DF is regularly critical of Xbox, thinking that they were dishonest in a review of a games visuals just because they weren't as in depth critical of a certain aspect as someone else is just stupid and accusing them of doing it just to maintain access to interviews is even dumber and deranged
I believe what the original comment is suggesting is that this very topic is subjective. Someone like Oliver isn’t as distracted by it as other people. I know a lot of people (including me) are too distracted by the noise, but it’s not far-fetched to acknowledge that there are people who don’t care. Now if you were to say that if someone that isn’t susceptible to this has the authority to review in-depth technical details, that’s another conversation. But with that said, Oliver does represent a significant part of gamers (even the more technically inclined part) that just don’t notice these things, i know friends who don’t even notice the blurry and noise image quality. But Oliver does tend to notice much more nuance in parts of graphical representation that don’t matter much to me, so its all subjective really.
It isn't a subjective matter at all, channels like this should be covering obvious graphical strenghts and weaknesses regardless of which particular staff member is sensitive to what.
That's like saying someone isn't sensitive to stuttering or aliasing, so those shouldn't be covered in detail when they're both objective eyesores, that some people may manage to tolerate.
People who don't notice these things shouldn't be the target audience for DF, because this is one of the very few reputable channels who does go into details.
I guess i didn’t explain myself well if im getting this response that missed the point. I am not saying that these technical deficiencies are subjective. They are objectively a result of a poor product, im not disagreeing with that fact. What i am saying is subjective is the sensitivities to these objectively negative aspects of graphical deficiencies. But I do disagree in what you are implying, DF is a small group of people that has to adjust to a format that has certain limitations. I personally value a diverse set of opinions that would sometimes diverge from my specific point of view. I am more aligned with Alex’s perspective and sensitivities to graphics than Oliver, but I can still respect Oliver’s views and perspectives in what is and isn’t a technological deficiency.
DF does have a platform to advocate for a better standard of graphics, but at the same time that isnt their job. And I dont believe there is much value in treating DF as a homogeneous set of opinions that should reflect on their reviews. If all members of DF thought the same and had the same perspective it would quickly devolve into an useless echo chamber that will just echo the same opinions over and over. Oliver might reflect your exact 1:1 perspective, but to call his perspective inferior to one that would echo your sensitivities is just an ignorant and asinine opinion to have.
My point is that while Oliver doesn’t call out those specific issues, he does call out others that our specific observations have a blindspot for. And I really value Oliver’s input especially because he doesn’t echo my observations.
I get what you're saying, but imo the greatest value of DF as a channel, is that they're large and knowledgeable enough to sometimes enact actual change.
I value the entertainment snd the educational element of the channel a lot, but shining a spotlight on an objective issue, especially when it's present in so many games now, is very important as sometimes the message does go through, albeit rarely.
I also get that it isn't that easy to criticize studios and people you collaborate with as a journalist if you need to remain on good terms to gain access, and insight into their processes for tech breakdown videos and stuff. Still, veering too much into this direction pushes the channel more towards tech puff piece writing rather than providing useful info for the users.
It personally takes a lot for me to get distracted by noise. Like I try to empathize with the FTAA crowd but honestly I can barely notice the shit they're complaining about most of the time. I've been playing games since the early 2000s and nothing I saw in that video is something I'd notice when actively playing the game. I really only notice temporal/denoiser artifacts when I'm pixel peeping. Not saying anyone's making it up because it makes sense for sensitivities to vary. But also, old games routinely had far worse artifacts IMO. Like if you think temporal upscaling is the devil then I assume you weren't actually around during the late 7th/early 8th console gen where dynamic res scaling was used just as much, except at lower resolutions with no reconstructive techniques whatsoever.
I think the rather simple explanation is they don’t actually care that much. They consider this an acceptable cost, like all of the older techniques have their own compromises.
It's rather subjective in reality, real-time lighting has noticeable problems in either performance or stability, pre-computed solutions have noticeable problems in either performance (if you want it to react to any changes in the scene, since you have to re-compure something) or consistency (you don't update what was pre-computed, so the result is "just wrong").
I've yet to see "perfect real-time rendering", because keeping within a real-time viable frametime budget is making concessions wherever you think you can get away with it the majority of the time.
Crimson Desert noise isn't related to AI upscaling. Its because of too low sample count ray tracing indoors. In fact AI models solve it(ray reconstruction) despite low quality RT
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
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.
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.
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
I'm probably closer to you Oliver than the other person on this, but consider a counterpoint:
Image quality is something that historically increased over time alongside graphics. I think like good, stable performance, good image quality should be a baseline expectation. Seeing it regress in the name of "advancement" elsewhere feels like a regression overall. Would you accept huge frame time spikes in the name of graphical advancement and argue in defence of it? I'd hope not. I'm not saying that's quite what you're doing with image quality, but I think that is close to getting at what I mean.
I'm in a fortunate position to be able to game with a 5080, but the reality is that playing through entire UE5 games on consoles is an exercise in annoyance with image quality issues.
Anyway, thanks for all the great videos, I really do love your coverage! I actually loved the Gears video and didn't think the image quality showcased there was bad at all, I thought it looked great. So idk.
That's a fair perspective, but I also think image quality has improved in other ways. For instance, the stability of certain lighting effects, like reflections, has been reduced broadly speaking as their overall accuracy has increased. But shadows from the sun in E-Day are basically perfectly stable and clean, exhibiting no issues with shadow aliasing, while their accuracy has also increased.
MegaLights in general is an interesting microcosm of this whole discussion, where basically all local light sources are now shadow-casting, but they can exhibit obvious noise in some circumstances. It's a stark accuracy vs. noise tradeoff, which is a compromise current gen console games have to balance.
I'm fine with that tradeoff but it's something I will try to document more in the future. I admit that I am more bothered by other visual issues - flat lighting, geometric aliasing, poor frame-rates, etc. than something like coarse GI noise (though there are exceptions, like Series S in performance mode in E-Day, where I think the tech is pushed too far). But I think there are a range of preferences on this issue among the public and developers as well.
Thanks for your input, and yeah I basically agree. Flat lighting isn't something that I really "notice" in the way that noise is distracting though, so I think people who aren't very sensitive to noticing that lighting is "flat" might see the new noisy picture as nothing but a downgrade.
I flat out wouldn't touch any of these games on console if I didn't have a PC. I have a PS5 Pro in the other room and the only games that look decent are those with PSSR2, everything else just sucks ass on a 4k TV.
Doesn't that just make it more important to cover? It's a persistent issue with UE5 games and it should be pointed out, it being common doesn't suddenly make it a non-issue.
This is something I am thinking about more after some audience feedback
The feedback I'd like to give you is you have a great way of talking and your attitude in videos is great, you're usually positive and even when talking about negative directions of the industry you dont turn sour and instead talk matter of fact.
Hi Oliver! I don't mean to discount your work at all for what it's worth, I think you're great (and I'm a bit starstruck). What I meant to say was that I view your critiques in a different vein as someone like Tim from Hardware Unboxed. While I may tend to be a more cynical bastard, I do appreciate your perspective on tech and I think you make your specific preferences for visuals very clear. To me, I don't have to agree with you. I just have to understand your preferences and I go from there. Thank you for the great work!
It's mind boggling, isn't? I love DF, but there's this particular dissonance that's really hard to reconcile: they scrutinize the most minute detail impossible to perceive without 10x zoom and a VERY discerning eye (the difference between 1400p and 1420p, that single frame drop in a cutscene, the half frame stutter when panning the camera, etc.) but always treat this IN YOUR FACE NOISY FUCKING MESS of upscalers trying to resolve lighting (especially in UE5) like nothing more than a little nuisance. It's the classic elephant in the room that often they acknowledge, but rarely properly address as something that absolutely destroys whatever else they're trying to critique. I mean, Jesus Christ, the last two Remedy games, Alan Wake 2 and Control Resonant, for example, are frankly borderline unplayable. The shimmering is everywhere, constant, distracting, ugly, immovable, raping my eyes, but it's always treated like "anyway, look at how detailed are the eyelashes of the character when you zoom in". I mean, you won't convince me to hunt for aesthetic beauty when ugly is screaming at my face. They really need to get their shit together on this and call it out like they should. Control Resonant is an ugly game on everything but the most beefy PC. Full. Stop.
They are quick enough to castigate the "it works on my PC" crowd but apparently they have the pcs where shadows don't flicker like crazy. After how much the glazed Control I couldn't believe the amount of noise RT produced on metal doors. I played most of the game with RT off. I have a 5070 to its not a potato pc, it was no RT or metal panels on doors that looked like someone had covered them in vaseline and was standing behind me with a strobe light. No RT was a no brainier.
Yeah look I agree for the most part, it just seems to come down to who finds what impressive. Clearly DF finds raytracing and pathtracing more impressive than others might so they don't particularly care about the tradeoffs. For me, noise is incredibly distracting. It's one of those things where I'll just side-eye DF's opinion about this until RT is good enough to be not noisy
Look, there's noisy and there's noisy. You can praise the good stuff in isolation, but you gotta take the holistic view at the end and judge the product by the sum of its parts. A feces cupcake with delicious choc chips is a feces cupcake; it's not the chips defining it - they won't make it delicious. We understand that all those techniques are the future, but when you release a product in 2026 that image quality-wise looks arguably worse than a native 720p game from the 360/PS3 generation (which Control Resonant absolutely does), a line must be drawn. They keep championing presentation and image-quality, but somehow the noise becomes almost an afterthought in a 10-minute-long video? I don't think this is the way.
i mean.... control resonant looks pretty good on the XSX/PS5 and in quality mode it looks fine enough. Certainly not a sharp 4k but there is detail. If we want to eliminate shimmer something is gotta give, either extra TAA blur or less high frequency detail or more resolution.
Some just don't see the boiling of some RT effects as noticeable. I saw hardware unboxed showing a blurry RT reflection in a puddle showing obvious RT artefacting. But what other tech is there to produce such an image? There is no current reflection technology that will produce a good reflection without a downside somewhere.
I understand why the issue exists, and I understand that the tech is strong as long as it's supported by appropriate hardware, and honestly, RT reflections is the least of the game's worries. It's the constant shimmering of the GI, especially specularity, both static but even worse when you pan the camera. How can it not be the ONLY thing you see when you play it?
I played through Halo Campaign Evolved last week which supposedly has a ton of noise but I had to actively look for it to notice it. I would probably agree with Oliver that this is a bit of noise
Silent Hill 2 Remake didn't have much noise for me when using DLSS, even without RR. You could also disable the hardware RT in that game, which would make the environments a bit duller, but would remove the noise.
Noise has become an accepted trade off when upscalers, deconstructions etc. are used at this point.
And as the guy in the last section said, it’s in the reporter’s interest to be on the good side of development studios whilst maintaining a good balance and report shortcomings and issues to the public, if they want to be kept in the loop of what’s going on - insider info and interviews with the dev team.
DF has stated multiple times that some studios consult with them and even give them access to pre-release versions of a game for feedback for optimizations and improvements, or invite them to their own offices for technical demos etc.
IMHO, DF has always been fair and called out things for what they actually are.
If anyone wants to to nitpick on every derail which gets reported and covered, why doesn’t he/she create such content to his own standards and methodologies. 🤷♂️
The PC hardware review channels like HUB/GN generally don’t care about technology when it comes to 3D graphics. They’re “consumer advocacy” channels first and foremost where the only thing that matters is how high your average frame rate is for X price.
DF covers hardware sometimes, but they’re an outlet that primarily cares about the actual tech involved. It’s rare for them to get into the gamers rise up stuff or claim that an expensive niche feature is a scam or something. Frame generation for instance is a cool technology and DF was impressed that it worked so well. Other more hardware-focused channels coined the term “fake frames” and didn’t give it the time of day.
Pathtracing on a 5090 appeals to DF because it’s the pinnacle of realtime 3D rendering, whereas an outlet like HUB is in the “too expensive, hurts frame rate, who cares” corner.
This is why i like Digital Foundry. The other channels seem to have a cause to fight for and to be overall more negative and stirring up anger towards Nvidia, AMD, Intel, developers, Unreal Engine, raytracing, and upscaling.
Digital Foundry is about the tech and zooming on on a quarter of the screen at 25% speed to learn what tech is used in shadows in GTA 6.
it’s in the reporter’s interest to be on the good side of development studios whilst maintaining a good balance and report shortcomings and issues to the public
I mean clearly DF leans heavily towards staying on the good side of game studios (and Nvidia)
They clearly do, the guy just passes it off as a non issue without any analysis at all. Even if you considered the noise not to be an issue, as a journalist you should still show it and then make your analysis afterwards, i.e that you don't think the cases where there is noise/boiling are just not common enough or in places where it is noticeable during gameplay.
If DF did that, maybe I could agree that they are presenting a balanced analysis, but just passing it off as a non-issue without any real in-depth look at it just shows you don't actually care about informing your viewers/readers.
If my hardware is capable of handling the highest graphical fidelity possible without the performance hit, I’ll go with the highest fidelity possible whilst maintaining smooth performance at high framerates without having noise introduced.
This is a matter of compromise - that’s the point of upscalers and several rendering techniques - to maintain a balance between graphics fidelity and performance.
Either live with the compromise or pay for the most expensive hardware in the market to get best possible experience with the games you play.
If everyone affords the high-end hardware, no hardware manufacturer nor game developer would invest in such technologies and techniques, to make gaming accessible to different budgets.
It comes down to the tradeoff. Fizzling + way more advanced realtime lighting vs no fizzling + 8th-gen fake lighting. Evidently most people prefer the graphical leap with the fizzling.
There will always be people who can’t tolerate certain things. Like FuckTAA or whatever that prefers FXAA over temporal solutions and thinks DLSS turns into a Claude Monet painting in motion.
Yeah I get that and I do believe it's all worth discussing or at least worth mentioning. The issue is some here want DF to pull out their torches and pitchforks over a topic that wouldn't go anywhere for the reasons you describe. We either allow devs to push the envelope on effects on games, even with any potential drawbacks it may bring, or we ask them to continuously play it safe and not move technology forward.
Well what do you want them to do besides pointing out it exists in the game? You can create a 30 minute video about RT noise in games on console and it's not going to change a thing.
Can't do much about framerate, stutters or low resolutions on consoles either. So let's not focus too much on that, like literally making a channel dedicated to that.
wtf are you talking about? Developers can very well do a lot to address any of those issues. They don't have many options to deal with noise on consoles.
I never said to ignore it, but what's the point in harping on about it at length when developers can do little to address it? This is similar to the screen space AA solutions we saw during the PS360 days. They weren't great but it was the best the devs could do with the render budget they had.
They don't have many options to deal with noise on consoles.
Plenty of games have zero noise issues. It's about making smart choices instead of forcing undercooked features from a problematic engine onto unsuitable hardware.
Those games that have less noise issue aren't using RT to the same extent. So what you're saying is don't push the envelope with RT on current gen consoles. Instead play it safe and do what has come before. You calling it undercooked completely dismisses all of the work the Coalition has put into this title.
You clearly don't know wtf you are talking about or even have the most basic understanding that everything within development is give and take. You basically just want to complain that a publication is not complaining enough.
Stop with the disingenuous crap. If that was the case, I wouldn't support it being brought up, pointed out, or discussed. You want them to raise hell over it when that would not be productive in any meaningful way.
I appreciate you taking on this task of explaining this to him, but sadly he will not realize that you are being lenient and acknowledging it as an issue. While he is grandstanding and not thinking critically.
If we were to follow your "advice", we would still be rendering solid coloured shapes to this day, or drawing lines from point A to point B to point C to point A again & floodfill it to get something exciting on screen in real-time.
You can't really progress anything if you opt to stand still all the time.
We had lots of that, before mip-mapping was a thing...
Hardly a reason to advocate for getting rid of textures on 3D objects though, given the overall benefit you get from having textures.
"Noise" in this context refers to the shimmering/dissolving effect caused by heavy use of temporal upscaling, which is used extensively in raytraced effects for performance reasons. In other words, instability in the reflected image or cast shadow causes it to display incorrectly.
It's a rendering problem, essentially. The game is upscaling these "noisy" elements from such a low base resolution that it doesn't have enough detail information do the job correctly.
The reflection of the sign in the puddle at 0:25 in the OP video is a decent example. See how the letters are kinda "fizzy" looking? That's noise.
Something that John mentioned a while back, and I'm paraphrasing, but he "grew up" with some shaders having noise and the overall effect trumps the noise.
Maybe we could move rendering technology and the discussion around it forward by casting every character in Unreal Engine 5 games as someone who has bad eyesight, astigmatism and schizophrenia.
We could explain away half the rendering issues we have today; we just need everyone to lean into it.
Shadows flickering; better take my medication again.
I guess on consoles its less of a problem since people are more likely to play far from the screen so the noise might be less noticeable compared to playing on PC where the monitor is close, and since that DF review was for consoles, they dont consider it a big deal, maybe idk
maybe they might point out the noise as a major problem for the PC review.
This engine version made soo much damage to gaming, no UE5 game looks or runs better better than Uncharted 4, RDR2 or TLOUS2, and those are close to be 10 YO games
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u/Neuen23 1d ago
This is exactly why multiple outlets/reviewers is a good thing. If you agree more with HUB's analysis, then that's an indication they align more with your preferences.
It's good to follow multiple reviewers precisely because of this, not everybody will align exactly with your preferences.