Ghostwire: Tokyo on PC marks the debut of an impressive rival for DLSS technology
– Reviews News
Ghostwire: Tokyo is a game with many surprises in terms of technical presentation. Developer Tango Gameworks has delivered a rather unexpected gameplay concept wrapped in an engine very different from previous titles that manages to deliver an exceptional level of graphical subtlety. Getting away from their idTech-based custom version of Unreal Engine 4 was clearly a big help for the team, but we approached the PC version of the title with some trepidation. Many recent PC ports come with intrusive levels of stutter that have had a major impact on the overall experience, no matter how powerful your hardware. This is especially common in Unreal Engine 4 titles, and unfortunately Ghostwire: Tokyo is no exception either.
And that's really frustrating, because there's so much to enjoy visually, especially in terms of ray-tracing features. On PC and PlayStation 5, ray-traced reflections literally steal the show. RT reflections are freely applied in Ghostwire: Tokyo, especially on highly reflective surfaces, where a perfect mirror effect is achieved. That said, they also apply to more opaque materials, with a soft, distorted look that is computationally expensive but adds great realism to lighting.
Ghostwire: Tokyo Gets PC Tech Review Treatment From Digital Foundry Hosted By Alex Battaglia
Considering the amount of neon lights, LED signs and shiny materials, ray-traced reflections in rainy Tokyo pay off considerably: the only downside is the lack of RT reflections on transparent materials such as glass, where Screen space reflections and cubic maps serve as a fallback. This is a sensible optimization, but we sure would have liked to see a separate option on PC to add transparent RT reflections for future scaling. RT shadows are also selectively applied, to the point where they're so sparse we're not sure it's worth using the feature in Optimized settings.
Even so, the resource cost of using Ray Tracing is substantial whether you're using an RTX or RDNA 2 GPU, but that's where it comes in. very interesting. The good news is that DLSS is well implemented for Nvidia cards, but Tango Gameworks also includes FSR 1.0 and TSR – Temporal Super Resolution. As far as we know, this is a UE5 feature, as seen in The Matrix Awakens, but evidence suggests it was successfully reported in UE4 as well. Based on our tests comparing FSR, DLSS and TSR upscaling to 4K from 1080p, the new technology appears to have the same base cost as DLSS and offers much better quality than FSR 1.0. It doesn't match the quality of DLSS on more complex things like fast-moving objects near the camera (like player's hands, hair, greenery, or particle effects), but it's still an offer impressive.
Tango Gameworks may not be finished yet – according to Twitter user FPS & Tech Testing, FSR 2.0 and Intel XeSS upscaling may also come in due course. TSR technology isn't as fast as FSR 1.0 in Ghostwire: Tokyo, but it's still something to consider for users with an RDNA 2 graphics card.
To find the best optimized settings, we started by looking at how Tango Gameworks scaled the game for PlayStation 5. The global illumination setting uses Epic's SSGI ray tracing software solution on both platforms. forms, but a version of the PlayStation 5 is used on the PlayStation 5. much lower accuracy. Where RT shadows aren't used, the PS5 uses shadow maps similar to those seen in the medium preset on PC. RT reflections have the PC's internal low res setting but the PS5 version seems to have a completely different look for its duller reflections, maybe because it uses different optimizations or a different denoiser, it's hard to tell . When paired with low RT reflections, the PS5 uses the cull setting which reduces the range of objects in the reflection. And finally, there's ray-traced shadows on PS5 which similarly uses the low setting.
While PS5 settings are often in the low/mid range, it's important to distinguish this label from how the game actually looks. On Sony's new console, Ghostwire: Tokyo still looks good. In terms of optimized settings, we'll stick to the closest PS5 equivalents as described here but with some tweaks. The console version uses FSR 1.0 for upscaling but we would be happy to replace it with TSR or DLSS technology. Meanwhile, the PS5 features RT shadows, but we recommend disabling them completely on PC to gain performance while sacrificing very little on in-game visuals.
Optimized settings | PS5 HFR – Quality Mode | |
---|---|---|
Motion blur | User choice | User choice |
SSS quality | Low / High (no difference) | Low / High (no difference) |
Global Illumination | SSGI | SSGI (low precision) |
Shadow Map Quality | Medium | Medium |
Broadcast quality level | 2 | Not applicable |
Continuous texture quality | haute | Not applicable |
Laser trace | Hon | Hon |
RT Shadow Quality | disabled | Little |
Riflessi RT Quality | Little | Lower than PC “Low” preset |
RT quality slaughter | Little | Little |
Image processing | TSR/DLSS | FSR 1.0 Performance |
So far so good but as we mentioned before performance is problematic and that's because, again, we have a triple A title that comes with unpredictable stuttering phenomena, presumably and mostly due to shader compilation. To recap, each GPU's shader code is different, and unlike a console, developers can't provide precompiled code. What happens on the PC version instead is that shaders are compiled and then cached on demand, which negatively impacts the quality of experience.
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The first time you fire, the first time you encounter a new effect, the first time you learn a new mechanic – it all comes with a unique stutter. Every time something new, even slightly different, happens, like interacting with a different floating object shape for example, every new shape of that particular element produces a shader build stutter.
This is a pervasive and annoying phenomenon: no game should be shipped this way as it spoils the first experience. The only way to play smoothly is to have someone else run the game for you first to cache shaders and ensure a smooth experience the second time around. This, of course, is a difficult solution to put into practice, so we'd like Tango Gameworks to fix this, perhaps by precompiling the necessary shaders on load.
It's baffling how many high-profile titles ship with this issue, and in the case of Ghostwire: Tokyo, it's such a shame. This game's RT reflections are well implemented and it's impressive that it offers such scalable options and excellent image quality on non-RTX GPUs thanks to TSR. However, the conspicuous stuttering phenomena prevented us from fully enjoying it. There are workarounds for this issue, so we remain confident that something can be done about it with a future patch.
SOURCE: Reviews News
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