STALKER 2: DLSS vs. FSR vs. XeSS Comparison

[Vayra86]

Yeah, UE5 still takes a ton of work to look good so even though it can save developers time on lighting and reflections they still need to make a effort especially on the character models and upscaling methods.

Hopefully UE5 5.5 solves some of that.

Yeah right, UE5.5 will solve the problem of having to spend time on your game to make it work properly. UE5 is not the excuse for a lacking game in other aspects, is it?

I'm not saying GSC didn't do jack shit, but they clearly fell into the same cesspit most other UE5 games fall into. Abysmal performance, barely improved visuals, and a weak game underneath the graphics. That last bit is caused by the first two or by UE5? Whatever it is, its there, and its worrying. The only UE5 game that is really a big step up to me is Senua 2, a slow paced story driven single player, very small scope game.

One might wonder if UE5 is good for anything more than tech demos at this point. For all its selling points of 'faster time to market' it sure drops a LOT along the way that was generally considered best practices. That is; if we actually BELIEVE that the engine is the problem, and not just a glaring lack of talented developers; a thing we see all over the industry these days. Better tooling, worse outcomes only means one thing: 'git gud'. I'm starting to believe this is the core of the issue, because you see it in many other lines of commerce/business/government. People are simply failing super hard, lack skills, or oversell themselves. You only need one look at some governments right now to get that proven to you. You should see the discussions in Dutch parliament right now. I believe high school students can discuss topics better, its crazy.

And I even see that in my day to day at work. The amount of young 'professionals' entering and then walking straight into a wall, and the way they reach that point, is remarkably similar, new generations thinking they can set down a new paradigm of how the world works or something, but lacking any solid knowledge to make it work. They can do the job, but not an inch more than that, ask them for their own creative input, and its like there's a bunch of zombies staring at you. Its amazing to see, but very worrying. Its like humanity is rapidly losing its agency, the ability to make something out of nothing all by themselves. They need something to help them or its just not happening. And now... go figure... AI is just getting started... If this is the input, imagine the output.

Thats why is better to buy Nvidia, superior features... it just works..

... as long as Nvidia chooses to keep giving you support. But sure, if you keep buying Nvidia, surely you will keep support. Right? How's GPU PhysX doing at this point?

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Yeah right, UE5.5 will solve the problem of having to spend time on your game to make it work properly. UE5 is not the excuse for a lacking game in other aspects, is it?

I'm not saying GSC didn't do jack shit, but they clearly fell into the same cesspit most other UE5 games fall into. Abysmal performance, barely improved visuals, and a weak game underneath the graphics. That last bit is caused by the first two or by UE5? Whatever it is, its there, and its worrying. The only UE5 game that is really a big step up to me is Senua 2, a slow paced story driven single player, very small scope game.

One might wonder if UE5 is good for anything more than tech demos at this point. For all its selling points of 'faster time to market' it sure drops a LOT along the way that was generally considered best practices. That is; if we actually BELIEVE that the engine is the problem, and not just a glaring lack of talented developers; a thing we see all over the industry these days. Better tooling, worse outcomes only means one thing: 'git gud'. I'm starting to believe this is the core of the issue, because you see it in many other lines of commerce/business/government. People are simply failing super hard, lack skills, or oversell themselves. You only need one look at some governments right now to get that proven to you. You should see the discussions in Dutch parliament right now. I believe high school students can discuss topics better, its crazy.

And I even see that in my day to day at work. The amount of young 'professionals' entering and then walking straight into a wall, and the way they reach that point, is remarkably similar, new generations thinking they can set down a new paradigm of how the world works or something, but lacking any solid knowledge to make it work. They can do the job, but not an inch more than that, ask them for their own creative input, and its like there's a bunch of zombies staring at you. Its amazing to see, but very worrying. Its like humanity is rapidly losing its agency, the ability to make something out of nothing all by themselves. They need something to help them or its just not happening. And now... go figure... AI is just getting started... If this is the input, imagine the output.


... as long as Nvidia chooses to keep giving you support. But sure, if you keep buying Nvidia, surely you will keep support. Right? How's GPU PhysX doing at this point?

-Competency collapse is real and it feels like its happening everywhere.

Either people are understaffed and overworked so take every shortcut they can, or there is experience and doctrinal knowledge leaving fields and its leaving behind newbies who are... understaffed and overworked and never have an opportunity to really properly tackle complex problems and grow into the older experienced role .

AI is only going to make this worse. No one will actually know how to do anything, they'll only know how to ask an AI how to do something. If AI is not doing it right, no one will know how to do it themselves and will just be forced to work with the result.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

Yeah right, UE5.5 will solve the problem of having to spend time on your game to make it work properly. UE5 is not the excuse for a lacking game in other aspects, is it?

I'm not saying GSC didn't do jack shit, but they clearly fell into the same cesspit most other UE5 games fall into. Abysmal performance, barely improved visuals, and a weak game underneath the graphics. That last bit is caused by the first two or by UE5? Whatever it is, its there, and its worrying. The only UE5 game that is really a big step up to me is Senua 2, a slow paced story driven single player, very small scope game.

One might wonder if UE5 is good for anything more than tech demos at this point. For all its selling points of 'faster time to market' it sure drops a LOT along the way that was generally considered best practices. That is; if we actually BELIEVE that the engine is the problem, and not just a glaring lack of talented developers; a thing we see all over the industry these days. Better tooling, worse outcomes only means one thing: 'git gud'. I'm starting to believe this is the core of the issue, because you see it in many other lines of commerce/business/government. People are simply failing super hard, lack skills, or oversell themselves. You only need one look at some governments right now to get that proven to you. You should see the discussions in Dutch parliament right now. I believe high school students can discuss topics better, its crazy.

And I even see that in my day to day at work. The amount of young 'professionals' entering and then walking straight into a wall, and the way they reach that point, is remarkably similar, new generations thinking they can set down a new paradigm of how the world works or something, but lacking any solid knowledge to make it work. They can do the job, but not an inch more than that, ask them for their own creative input, and its like there's a bunch of zombies staring at you. Its amazing to see, but very worrying. Its like humanity is rapidly losing its agency, the ability to make something out of nothing all by themselves. They need something to help them or its just not happening. And now... go figure... AI is just getting started... If this is the input, imagine the output.


... as long as Nvidia chooses to keep giving you support. But sure, if you keep buying Nvidia, surely you will keep support. Right? How's GPU PhysX doing at this point?

At the end of the day it's will always come down to the talent of the developers and the creative team on how good a game will be or not regardless of engine used.

Also somthing that's good or bad is very subjective to the person. Cod runs well on almost everything sells a billion copies every year but the internet keyboard warriors hate it regardless.

I think we are just in a weird transition with UE5 basicslly being in early access most games still don't use it's full feature set due to them not running the more recent versions of it. Personally I'm not a fan of how the majority of developers are switching to it but that has nothing to do with the quality of the games and more to do with just liking unique engines like the Red Engine, Source, Cod, Frostbyte, unity etc more for diversity sake vs will the games that ship on them be somthing I like.

Stalker has nearly an 8/10 on metacritic user reviews and a 7/10 for steam user reviews my guess is if it didn't have the technical issues that would be a bit higher it isn't a game I would like, I didn't like the originals either, but in general people seem to be enjoying it despite it's flaws.

-Competency collapse is real and it feels like its happening everywhere.

Either people are understaffed and overworked so take every shortcut they can, or there is experience and doctrinal knowledge leaving fields and its leaving behind newbies who are... understaffed and overworked and never have an opportunity to really properly tackle complex problems.

AI is only going to make this worse. No one will actually know how to do anything, they'll only know how to ask an AI how to do something. If AI is not doing it right, no one will know how to do it themselves and will just be forced to work with the result.

I think this developers been dealing with the war so honestly I'd give them a pass. Also none of their games have been technical marvels to begin with at least I don't remember them being super optimized at the very least.

‘At this point it’s not just a game’: the making of Ukrainian RPG Stalker 2 – during wartime

Based in Kyiv until the Russian invasion – and still mourning colleagues who went to the frontline – the makers of long-awaited apocalyptic survival game Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl describe how their lives began imitating their art

www.theguardian.com

I guess dealing with your coworkers fighting on the front lines maybe ex coworkers at this point isnt a big deal to most gamers but that would be hard in my mind to deal with while trying to make a video game.

Personally I think its a miracle it even exist and might pick it up out of support regardless of not having any intentions of playing it.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

I think this developers been dealing with the war so honestly I'd give them a pass. Also none of their games have been technical marvels to begin with at least I don't remember them being super optimized at the very least.

‘At this point it’s not just a game’: the making of Ukrainian RPG Stalker 2 – during wartime

Based in Kyiv until the Russian invasion – and still mourning colleagues who went to the frontline – the makers of long-awaited apocalyptic survival game Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl describe how their lives began imitating their art

www.theguardian.com

I guess dealing with your coworkers fighting on the front lines maybe ex coworkers at this point isnt a big deal to most gamers but that would be hard in my mind to deal with while trying to make a video game.

Personally I think its a miracle it even exist and might pick it up out of support regardless of not having any intentions of playing it.

- I mean... that is kinda competency collapse but for completely different reasons...

 

[Dawora]

Yeah right, UE5.5 will solve the problem of having to spend time on your game to make it work properly. UE5 is not the excuse for a lacking game in other aspects, is it?

I'm not saying GSC didn't do jack shit, but they clearly fell into the same cesspit most other UE5 games fall into. Abysmal performance, barely improved visuals, and a weak game underneath the graphics. That last bit is caused by the first two or by UE5? Whatever it is, its there, and its worrying. The only UE5 game that is really a big step up to me is Senua 2, a slow paced story driven single player, very small scope game.

One might wonder if UE5 is good for anything more than tech demos at this point. For all its selling points of 'faster time to market' it sure drops a LOT along the way that was generally considered best practices. That is; if we actually BELIEVE that the engine is the problem, and not just a glaring lack of talented developers; a thing we see all over the industry these days. Better tooling, worse outcomes only means one thing: 'git gud'. I'm starting to believe this is the core of the issue, because you see it in many other lines of commerce/business/government. People are simply failing super hard, lack skills, or oversell themselves. You only need one look at some governments right now to get that proven to you. You should see the discussions in Dutch parliament right now. I believe high school students can discuss topics better, its crazy.

And I even see that in my day to day at work. The amount of young 'professionals' entering and then walking straight into a wall, and the way they reach that point, is remarkably similar, new generations thinking they can set down a new paradigm of how the world works or something, but lacking any solid knowledge to make it work. They can do the job, but not an inch more than that, ask them for their own creative input, and its like there's a bunch of zombies staring at you. Its amazing to see, but very worrying. Its like humanity is rapidly losing its agency, the ability to make something out of nothing all by themselves. They need something to help them or its just not happening. And now... go figure... AI is just getting started... If this is the input, imagine the output.


... as long as Nvidia chooses to keep giving you support. But sure, if you keep buying Nvidia, surely you will keep support. Right? How's GPU PhysX doing at this point?

No need to be hurt when Nvidia doing great job and it just works better, its better buy for hasle free gaming.

And there is now over 910 games that support PhysX
its not allways ON/Off feature

How about Mantle? Nvidia killer, Nvidia cant compete, AMD is future of gaming? So how did it go?

 

[Zubasa]

And there is now over 910 games that support PhysX
its not allways ON/Off feature

How about Mantle? Nvidia killer, Nvidia cant compete, AMD is future of gaming? So how did it go?

Pretty sure 900 of those game just runs Physx on the CPU. Also UE has its own Chaos physics engine.
As for Mantle, it is the basis of Vulkan if you have been living under a rock.

 

[Super XP]

dlss quality looks great until you start moving, then it falls apart
better to play with dlaa on and to lower the settings a bit to hit 60+ fps

overall the game looks fantastic, but the cpu performance is extremely poor

UE5 is the reason the CPU performance is poor.

Thats why is better to buy Nvidia, superior features... it just works..

That is subjective. I've used Radeon GPUs and haven't had an in-game issue with PQ or performance to date.

No need to be hurt when Nvidia doing great job and it just works better, its better buy for hasle free gaming.

Once again, this is your own opinion, no basis of facts. Everybody has individual experiences.
Vulkan is a descendant of AMDs Mantle, the genius powerful low-overhead architecture that gives software devs complete access to the performance, capabilities and efficiency of Radeon and multi-core CPUs. Yes AMD started that, and everybody else including Microsoft followed.

 

[Vayra86]

No need to be hurt when Nvidia doing great job and it just works better, its better buy for hasle free gaming.

And there is now over 910 games that support PhysX
its not allways ON/Off feature

How about Mantle? Nvidia killer, Nvidia cant compete, AMD is future of gaming? So how did it go?

Nobody is hurt, I'm just an observer of the markets and the companies.

Mantle > Vulkan
AMD also fed the DX12 development heavily, it happened in tandem with that move. Nvidia was also involved, but clearly not conclusively. It also connects directly to AMD's success in the console market. As a result, AMD has fantastic base performance on DX12, and lower CPU utilization, basically turning the tables compared to the DX11 era, where Nvidia was faster.

So how did it go? What happened is that AMD floats its custom APU business off console volume, and also keeps its GPU sales alive in that way, feeding RDNA development. AMD is (was, and soon will be again) literally moving as many gaming GPUs as Nvidia YoY just on console sales, even if those have slowed down now. Discrete PC GPU sales could just live under its shadow for three generations, and soon a fourth, even with market share dropping like a stone. AMD's capitulation to go RDNA4 just midrange, is also pointing in the direction that it just serves to keep their APU business in tune - parts of RDNA4 are appearing in the newest consoles and RDNA is of course also their IGP. They have a lot of wiggle room, because they're still competitive with anything Nvidia up to the 4080; it will take multiple generations for console demands to land at that level.

So if you look back and see what's here at present, AMD simply executed its strategy, and apparently did it well enough - they're still doing what they intended to do, despite bad reception of RDNA3.

Once again, this is your own opinion, no basis of facts. Everybody has individual experiences.
Vulkan is a descendant of AMDs Mantle, the genius powerful low-overhead architecture that gives software devs complete access to the performance, capabilities and efficiency of Radeon and multi-core CPUs. Yes AMD started that, and everybody else including Microsoft followed.

I doubt AMD 'just started that' and Microsoft followed. Usually this is a plan devised together, and that is also exactly what happened. It wasn't Mantle that triggered Microsoft to continue developing DX12 - they needed that too for their console business - perhaps Mantle was used as a selling point for their custom chip deal. After all, consoles NEED the close to metal access to get the most out of the hardware, and more unified access is also great if you have ideas for cross compatibility (look at what's happening today with ports from Sony etc.). All of this was just preparation for today's world where platform exclusive content is rapidly dwindling.

 

[EsliteMoby]

TSR looks the best. DLSS/DLAA is way oversharpened.

 

[Vayra86]

At the end of the day it's will always come down to the talent of the developers and the creative team on how good a game will be or not regardless of engine used.

Also somthing that's good or bad is very subjective to the person. Cod runs well on almost everything sells a billion copies every year but the internet keyboard warriors hate it regardless.

I think we are just in a weird transition with UE5 basicslly being in early access most games still don't use it's full feature set due to them not running the more recent versions of it. Personally I'm not a fan of how the majority of developers are switching to it but that has nothing to do with the quality of the games and more to do with just liking unique engines like the Red Engine, Source, Cod, Frostbyte, unity etc more for diversity sake vs will the games that ship on them be somthing I like.

Stalker has nearly an 8/10 on metacritic user reviews and a 7/10 for steam user reviews my guess is if it didn't have the technical issues that would be a bit higher it isn't a game I would like, I didn't like the originals either, but in general people seem to be enjoying it despite it's flaws.



I think this developers been dealing with the war so honestly I'd give them a pass. Also none of their games have been technical marvels to begin with at least I don't remember them being super optimized at the very least.

‘At this point it’s not just a game’: the making of Ukrainian RPG Stalker 2 – during wartime

Based in Kyiv until the Russian invasion – and still mourning colleagues who went to the frontline – the makers of long-awaited apocalyptic survival game Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl describe how their lives began imitating their art

www.theguardian.com

I guess dealing with your coworkers fighting on the front lines maybe ex coworkers at this point isnt a big deal to most gamers but that would be hard in my mind to deal with while trying to make a video game.

Personally I think its a miracle it even exist and might pick it up out of support regardless of not having any intentions of playing it.

Yeah the engine in use really is of impact to the game in so many little ways. Back in the UE3 days you could literally just feel you were playing in UE3 engine. All assets had a peculiar, similar 'quality' to them, its hard to describe, but it was like there was always some slight disconnect between your character and the environments you walked around in, as if it was scenery, a backdrop, kind of. Similarly, most CryEngine games felt far more visceral, but interactivity in the environment was brutally low, which is strange considering what Crysis showed us. So that last example really speaks for your statement that it really matters what developer is working with the engine, too. Sometimes in UE3, similarly, it all just clicked. I think the engine that impressed me most after Crysis got released, was Frostbite, but also mostly because the Battlefield releases were so on point for a while; the whole atmosphere, lighting, the punchiness of weapons, it was perfect, until it got screwed up somewhere after BF1. And even there: look at how differently Bioware dealt with that engine on Mass Effect Andromeda: severely static assets and environments, all interactivity through a use button and no real connection to it at all. Plastic faces and mocap...

Overall the most impressive engines are those where you really feel like you're in a sandbox, with a full blown physics engine that enables gameplay; something CryEngine and Frostbite can accentuate heavily. I've not seen a UE game do that yet, though I might have glossed over one. A really, really big plus is destructible environments, and materials responding naturally - its staggering that even today something simple as water physics are still so hit and miss everywhere. Really silly also to consider how much effort and money goes into materials/texturing and making things look better, but so little in making things act better... in a friggin GAME that needs to be played.

/end of slightly offtopic rambling

 

[harm9963]

TSR looks the best. DLSS/DLAA is way oversharpened.

DLSS/DLAA has a slider , DLAA Looks the best and only cost about 1 or 2 fps lost vs TAA , TSR is an upscaler !

 

[harm9963]

I use DLAA and FG at 4k epic, have no issues with FG , or any issues at all, must be lucky , hopefully next update , the game will address most of the the issues.

Two updates since first day, never had issues ,was lucky, some parts of the game look awesome ,some dated .