Naughty Dog, emulating the PS5 hardware is not the way

[Lince_SPAIN]

I mean, you guys are copying the full VRAM buffer to system RAM and forcing the CPU to unpack and move textures around at all times bottlenecking the whole system, there's no amount of "patching" that can salvage this mess, the Windows PC platform has proper APIs the likes of DirectStorage that can free the CPU from said burden since it actually transfers textures from the storage device directly into VRAM faster than the PS5 ASIC co-processor (Kraken) with little to no CPU usage. I guess someone decided against it just to hurry the release and keep it cheap.

Also, before 1.0.4, you even had VRAM usage metrics that were reported the same as a PS5 system instead of the way a Windows PC actually presents said data, a month later you guys got it right, mindblowing. I mean, it's incredible that you thought the cheapest way to do this was simply emulating the PS5 on a CPU and call it a day? really?

That said I can brute-force the game with a 4000 series GPU and a X3D CPU but it's still obnoxious that a PC with at least 3x the raw power of a current gen console should be stressed like this.

[Sledge Hammer!]

I said in an earlier thread that the game's weird performance was almost like taking a PS5 game, slapping keyboard and mouse controls on it, and just shipping it out to run on PC's as is. The game seemed to have no scalability for different levels of hardware.

[Lince_SPAIN]

Originally posted by Sledge Hammer!:

I said in an earlier thread that the game's weird performance was almost like taking a PS5 game, slapping keyboard and mouse controls on it, and just shipping it out to run on PC's as is. The game seemed to have no scalability for different levels of hardware.

well, remember ND initially shipped the game with unpacking libraries directly taken from a PS5 development kit instead of using traditional PC platform DLLs such as gzip. On top of that they were bugged and some users had to point them in the right direction. It's almost unbelievable the game is actually running on PC all things considered.

[GamerGate Valkyrie]

lazy job, incompetence, stole your money with no sweat.

[episoder]

stop bullsh!tting? you ever programmed any piece of code? direct storage is not the magic solution. it still uses ram as a so called staging buffer to load from "disk". you also require staging buffers on the gpu where the compressed data is moved in before decompressing into an output buffer and moved to it's final memory location.

the dma, if that's what microsoft uses, does not write directly to your gpu vram. also gpu decompression can introduce a bit of a gpu performance penalty while loading aswell. you have to render the graphics and decompress at the same time. this can lead to stutter aswell, cause it's gotta switch from rendering to decompression tasks. this is not optimal in a high thruput demanding scenario. the cpu decompression is as balanced as it can be without hampering the gpu performance to actually just render frames.

also... the decompression on the cpu is not as bad as you think. i play it on a 6 core laptop with nvme. and have no stutter while loading. and i'm playing on high texture balance.

just a couple minutes ago i to scroll thru the collectibles list in the game ui. i see loading delays there, but that fine to me, cause it's temporary data that is only loaded for the moment i view it and is discarded when it dissappears again or remains in the ram cache until it's discarded later. the way the system is managed is totally fine. especially on my rig. it mostly decompresses into shared video memory and whether uploads it to the gpu or keeps it available. that's what the ram cache is good for.

[Lince_SPAIN]

Originally posted by episoder:

WALL OF TEXT

Man, ND are not your friends, you don't need to defend them. They're here to get your money in good faith in exchange for an enjoyable piece of software. It's a bit weird reading you say that no effort is better than an actual effort with regard to game coding, it's like I lost the train of thought you're trying to ride there.

In other words, whatever performance penalty DirectStorage might introduce is LEAGUES BETTER than a complete system bottleneck as the one this port is showcasing and leaving unattended.

[DDimitrescu]

The problem is indeed, that they did't port everything, more likely making it work on a windows pc. It's not emulation, it's more a kind of warping and/or redirecting ps5 systemcalls that does not exsits in the windows world. Like wine/proton does, to run windows applications under linux.

Direct-storage would't help. The problem is: PS5 RAM and VRAM is the same. If you want to move data from ram to vram, it is just a metter of telling the system "this area of memory is now vram", what is amasing fast. That's one of the tricks why a PS5 with mid/low-end hardware can run games create, when done right.
On pc-side, you have to copy all the stuff, all the time around. Load from RAM into CPU, from CPU to the io-controller, from the controller to the BUS, from the BUS into the GPU, from the GPU into the GPU-memory-controller, into the VRAM.

[Moderator Abuse]

LOL, arguing over a bad release nothing has changed in 20 years of this garbage, scrambling up the heaping posts like an ant climbing a rhino with diarrhoea, This is all pointless

What we know

Game performs badly on hardware that can handle much more which indicates the wrong way, Sony when they were making PC games would not optimise for multi-threaded and forced everything onto 1 core all their titles stuttered and nothing you did could fix them
Sony have always believed their way is right until that was they were attacked and their services went done for a few months so they sold up and now those games still exist but they started doing development that was not specific for a super Playstation 2.

[Lince_SPAIN]

Originally posted by DDimitrescu:

The problem is indeed, that they did't port everything, more likely making it work on a windows pc. It's not emulation, it's more a kind of warping and/or redirecting ps5 systemcalls that does not exsits in the windows world. Like wine/proton does, to run windows applications under linux.

Direct-storage would't help. The problem is: PS5 RAM and VRAM is the same. If you want to move data from ram to vram, it is just a metter of telling the system "this area of memory is now vram", what is amasing fast. That's one of the tricks why a PS5 with mid/low-end hardware can run games create, when done right.
On pc-side, you have to copy all the stuff, all the time around. Load from RAM into CPU, from CPU to the io-controller, from the controller to the BUS, from the BUS into the GPU, from the GPU into the GPU-memory-controller, into the VRAM.

Explain to me why RE4 remake runs much better on PC than console with comparable hardware, it also loads the game at the same insane (and faster) speed as the PS5 without destroying the CPU the way this game does.

You're saying there's a distinct architecture advantage, how is it that said advantage doesn't show in every single game? Could it be that you can indeed make use of the traditional PC architecture and get decent performance by using proper tools and APIs?

Also, why wouldn't DirectStorage work when it's been tested and proved to load assets much faster with 1% CPU usage as opposed to what ND are doing with the PS5 decompression libraries that murder every CPU cycle.

Uncharted PC had similar issues, including the lengthy shader compilation, I bet it's just the Iron Galaxy way of emulating the PS5 without having to dedicate time and money to code a proper PC port. ND borrowed the Iron Galaxy philosophy when approaching a PS5 to PC port and the results are a complete disaster.

[Sledge Hammer!]

Even if we disagree on the reasons, there is no argument that TLOU1 was incompetently ported from PS5 to PC. For such a highly anticipated and promoted game to still not have a Recommended rating on Steam a month after release is a badge of shame Naughty Dog will be wearing for awhile.

[Razin_Shah]

Originally posted by Sledge Hammer!:

Even if we disagree on the reasons, there is no argument that TLOU1 was incompetently ported from PS5 to PC. For such a highly anticipated and promoted game to still not have a Recommended rating on Steam a month after release is a badge of shame Naughty Dog will be wearing for awhile.

Horizon Zero Dawn PC launch was like this too. It only started to get positively received after about a year or so.

[Lince_SPAIN]

Originally posted by Razin_Shah:

Horizon Zero Dawn PC launch was like this too. It only started to get positively received after about a year or so.

Horizon was also broken at launch with similar performance issues as TLOU, they had to resort to Nixxes in order to fix it, the game now runs with zero hiccups even if you walk from a corner of the vast open world to the opposite side of the map. It really shows that it's not a matter of hardware architectures but just a lack of talent from ND, it is what it is, they are clueless when it comes to PC development to the point they shipped the game with data unpacking libraries straight up from a PS5 dev kit.

I'm willing to believe TLOU is never going to get "fixed" as long as they don't change the way in which they're using the CPU to emulate the PS5 data flow. As time and years go by there will be 5090 users with nice 14900K or 8800X3D CPUs and suddenly they will all feel like TLOU is not that bad "why were people complaining back then?". Cheap, lazy port job with zero PC platform specific optimizations that will be brute forced eventually.

Naughty Dog dropped the ball here, one of the worst PC releases in ages, it's just hilarious that 8GB cards can't compete with PS4 texture quality here when the PS4 can't even use 8GB of VRAM, it looks like they did run the native assets through some AI and got their low/medium textures done, absolutely hideous but to me it looks plausible.

[Lince_SPAIN]

Originally posted by Sledge Hammer!:

is a badge of shame Naughty Dog will be wearing for awhile.

ND were my absolutely fav developers during the PS3 era, as a kid I remember everything they did was like magic to me, they were so far ahead everyone else with their technical expertise.

[DDimitrescu]

Originally posted by Lince_SPAIN:

Originally posted by DDimitrescu:

The problem is indeed, that they did't port
Explain to me why RE4 remake runs much better on PC than console with comparable hardware, it also loads the game at the same insane (and faster) speed as the PS5 without destroying the CPU the way this game does.

Because Capcom has make a real pc port, and they design and optimize in an old fashion way. So pc hardware can benfits from there advantages. If your pc got the ram and vram, RE4 could use all the power your gpu got. No BUS bottelneck, after everything is loaded once. On PS5, only 16GB for both (RAM, VRAM). So performance is more like 8gb RAM and 8GB VRAM Pc.

And you can't compare PS5 with Pc hardware, just because it is on the first look only an x86_x64 APU.

[flitzpiepe0815]

Originally posted by Lince_SPAIN:

Originally posted by Sledge Hammer!:

is a badge of shame Naughty Dog will be wearing for awhile.

ND were my absolutely fav developers during the PS3 era, as a kid I remember everything they did was like magic to me, they were so far ahead everyone else with their technical expertise.

People used to love Blizzard or even EA.

[Lince_SPAIN]

Originally posted by DDimitrescu:

Because Capcom has make a real pc port, and they design and optimize in an old fashion way. So pc hardware can benfits from there advantages. If your pc got the ram and vram, RE4 could use all the power your gpu got. No BUS bottelneck, after everything is loaded once. On PS5, only 16GB for both (RAM, VRAM). So performance is more like 8gb RAM and 8GB VRAM Pc.

And you can't compare PS5 with Pc hardware, just because it is on the first look only an x86_x64 APU.

After getting 100% in RE4 remake I know by heart the parts of the map where the game loads the assets for the next area in a split second. Those small hiccups are also in the PS5 and Xbox versions. They used to be hidden behind certain animations such as opening a door or slowly squeezing through some narrow place. On the other hand, TLOU is constantly loading stuff in the background and murdering CPU performance in the process.