DF: Inside Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered on PC - the Nixxes tech interview

[ethomaz]

Inside Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered on PC - the Nixxes tech interview

Want to go deep on the porting process for Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered on PC? Digital Foundry talks to developer Nixxes about the conversion.

www.eurogamer.net

The article has all questions and replies… maybe you guys find some interesting and post here… I’m reading yet.

BTW took them 14 months or so to make the port but they got really focused in 11 months from September 2021… that probably gives the ideia for budget speculation.

 

[ethomaz]

About the port.

Digital Foundry: The game is shipping on DX12: were the tools on PC DX11? What was the exact starting core you had there?

Michiel Rosa: They had a fully DX11-based renderer. So, what we did was basically to just rip it out entirely and replace it with a DX12 renderer.

—

The Insommiac tools have a DX11 implementation but it was useless for them… so they had to replace it with a DX12 rendered and that because took so much time to get the first screen of the game.

BTW they choose DX12 over Vulkan because they are specialized in DX12.

 

[ethomaz]

Another issue was the memory management.

Jurjen Katzman: Yeah, we have certainly had situations where it's the fact that it was different memory pools, right. On the performance side, it caused more trouble than we wanted.

Michiel Rosa: I basically halved the cost of our ray tracing jobs by reading from the right memory pool basically.

Jurjen Katzman: We spent a lot more time doing memory management, thinking about what we put in video memory and what we move back and when we do that. You never have to worry about that on console. On PC, that feels like it is always the primary concern, right - to make sure that we can leverage all the memory appropriately. And even then, we have still been dealing with problems related to that up until last week, even right? Yeah, these things come up. The consoles are nice and simple machines. We love working with consoles.

 

[mansoor1980]

man the ps5 is such optimized and efficient hardware , cerny is a genius

 

[Deleted member 13]

That filtering for textures is a big difference. I don't understand why that's so expensive on consoles. The low filtering destroys the image quality.

Reflections look significantly better on the PC but we knew the PC will have the advantage for RT.

 

[mansoor1980]

AF continues to suck on consoles , it will be 4x AF again on next gen consoles i bet

 

[ethomaz]

Another point they made is about the game being made for PS4 CPU and if you have a PS5 game that fully stress all CPU cores you will need a CPU on PC at least with same amount of cores and processing power.

And do talk about the all the CPU overhead and abstraction you have on PC.

Digital Foundry: I think you as a team have proven that you are good at getting a foreign codebase and making magic out of it. So, you mention getting ray tracing on PC and the last push before launch was offering more settings to adjust the load on the CPU with the BVH ray tracing object range. Trying it on the 12900K or recent Alder Lake CPUs, the game flies, but then on a Ryzen 3600, what I consider a mid-range CPU very similar to the PS5: Zen 2, 6 cores/12 threads available for game usage, so on and so forth. And on that CPU at the highest settings it will be drop below 60fps while moving through the city and swinging as it is CPU limited. It has lurches down to the upper 40s. So what exactly is the CPU limitation bottleneck? What work do you want to do there in the future?

Jurjen Katzman: There are a few things going on there that are interesting and we're actually still making some changes to the code right now. So as I think you know, from your early analysis, to achieve 60fps on PS5 with ray tracing it makes other compromises [even beyond ray tracing]. So it turns down crowd density for example, or there's fewer cars around. And so that compensates for some of those CPU things, and we didn't make that very easy for the user to do in the [early review] build you played. So we are actually offering up some more options to make that to allow that to be better balanced [in the retail build].

And in general, the game originally came from the PS4 right? The PS4 CPU cores were not so stellar and the PS5 and the PCs were far more powerful. With the PS5, that gap has certainly gotten smaller. And there's still quite a few things on the PC where there's more overhead, like the APIs have more overhead, we don't have the decompressor for example, we don't have hardware doing decompression for us as we're streaming in content - that gets left to the CPU. So we certainly have more CPU challenges to go around even when we're doing the same things. And then if we don't dial down things that are dialled down on the console, we now have even more work to do on the CPU.

So okay, so if you have a PS5 game that fully loads all the CPU cores, then yeah, PC CPUs that don't have the same core count, for example, or the same processing power, they'll be in a tricky spot, right? And they will have to rely on lower settings of scalability, as well. But I think that's important about PC, right, that we do have that scalability, we do offer all those options. And you can run it in a way that works well for your system, no matter what.

Michiel Rosa:It's even worse for us because we also have the added overhead of the abstraction layer to DX12 and the DXR abstraction layer, which is obviously very lean on the Sony side. So even if you have a more powerful CPU than on the PlayStation 5, you might still end up with a lower frame-rate.

 

[ethomaz]

They hope Shader compilation is not a thing in future APIs like DX13 or DX14.

They really think the shader compilation solution in DX12 and Vulkan it is harming user experience.

I 100% agree.

He said even the ability to split it out found in Vulkan make it a bit better than DX12 but not a lot so it continue being an issue… he calls the actual Vulkan “solution” for shader compilation a bandaid

 

[ethomaz]

They give up on supporting Phenom 2

Seems like that is a recurrent ask in Steam forum… support to Phenom 2.

 

[rofif]

That filtering for textures is a big difference. I don't understand why that's so expensive on consoles. The low filtering destroys the image quality.

Reflections look significantly better on the PC but we knew the PC will have the advantage for RT.

it's probably an oversight on consoles surely?
I don't care in games with a lot of vegetation but you got big flat city panes here

 

[ethomaz]

Just to point… AF is not free even more in the bandwidth side… whatever you increase AF you increase proportional the bandwidth it will use and consoles are limited in bandwidth compared with mid to high end GPUs.

So increasing AF in consoles takes a hit in performance due bandwidth constrains… after all the bandwidth is shared between CPU and GPU so you can’t stress it with AF alone.

BTW PC in that case has a better setup for AF because it has separately memory pools with it own bandwidth… so while AF is using part of the GPU bandwidth the CPU bandwidth is not being affected like happens in consoles. Plus GPU bandwidth in PC is higher than consoles.

While it is old that user post in GAF was really good:

why is anisotropic filtering in many next gen titles missing?

It is missing (or at least low level) on Watch Dogs PC too unless you force it at the drive level on nVidia GPUs. So I guess it is a dev issue... you need to talk with them ;)

www.neogaf.com

Nothing changed from PS4 to PS5 in that regard. Said that I hope console devs reaches at least 8x AF in the games.

 

[Deleted member 13]

it's probably an oversight on consoles surely?

No oversight. It's expensive for consoles with several texture lookups for a single texel.

I don't care in games with a lot of vegetation but you got big flat city panes here

True.

 

[Bernd Lauert]

I still don't get how AF can be so expensive on consoles. I have been using 16x AF since 2008 on PC without any problems. Like wtf.

 

[DynamiteCop]

I still don't get how AF can be so expensive on consoles. I have been using 16x AF since 2008 on PC without any problems. Like wtf.

It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen, on PC there's virtually no performance impact and yet for consoles they basically have it at the lowest setting possible. It has never made any sense.

 

[ethomaz]

It is not hard to calculate the bandwidth used by AF.

4x uses 32 textures samples
16x uses 128 textures samples

In a 1920x1080p scenario you have for each pixels the load of 32 textures samples in 4x or 128 texture samples in 16x.
That means:

4x: 8294400 textures samples loaded per frame
16x 265420800 textures samples loaded per frame

Normally you have 4 bytes of data per texel.

4x: 33,177,600 bytes per frame
16x: 1,061,683,200 bytes per frame

Or in a 60fps game:

4x: 1,990,656,000 bytes per second = ~2GB/s
16x: 63,700,992,000 bytes per second = ~64GB/s

Of course these are raw bandwidth numbers.... texture compression and cache reduce it some time or other but the bandwidth needed for 16x AF is way bigger than 4x... plus I give you a 1080p scenario... 4k 60fps is another talk:

4x: 64GB/s
16x 255GB/s

That is the biggest issue on consoles because you don't have two pools of RAM.
The use of AF in PC doesn't harm the CPU bandwidth use... so you do AF while doing others things on CPU.
But on console the more the AF eats the bandwidth the more the CPU is harmed and can't do things due not having enough bandwidth.

In 4k 60fps the 16xAF, disconsidering the texture compression, will eat almost half of consoles bandwidth.

I truly understand why they set the base on 4xAF... even in the worst case it will just take 64GB/s of the bandwidth in 4k 60fps games.

Edit - I forgot to point that PC CPU + GPU bandwidth is way higher than actual consoles unified bandwidth when you look at similar GPUs... plus low and mid-end GPU users usually set their games to low resolution and framerates that makes AF bandwidth use smaller... just these with big GPUs running 1440p/4k at 120/144fps will have a big use of bandwidth by AF but theses GPUs have enough bandwidth to do everything.

 

[Deleted member 13]

You been doing your homework @ethomaz. Good job!

 

[azertydu91]

It is not hard to calculate the bandwidth used by AF.

4x uses 32 textures samples
16x uses 128 textures samples

In a 1920x1080p scenario you have for each pixels the load of 32 textures samples in 4x or 128 texture samples in 16x.
That means:

4x: 8294400 textures samples loaded per frame
16x 265420800 textures samples loaded per frame

Normally you have 4 bytes of data per texel.

4x: 33,177,600 bytes per frame
16x: 1,061,683,200 bytes per frame

Or in a 60fps game:

4x: 1,990,656,000 bytes per second = ~2GB/s
16x: 63,700,992,000 bytes per frame = ~64GB/s

Of course these are raw bandwidth numbers.... texture compression and cache reduce it some time or other but the bandwidth needed for 16x AF is way bigger than 4x... plus I give you a 1080p scenario... 4k 60fps is another talk:

4x: 64GB/s
16x 255GB/s

That is the biggest issue on consoles because you don't have two pools of RAM.
The use of AF in PC doesn't harm the CPU bandwidth use... so you do AF while doing others things on CPU.
But on console the more the AF eats the bandwidth the more the CPU is harmed and can't do things due not having enough bandwidth.

In 4k 60fps the 16xAF, disconsidering the texture compression, will eat almost half of consoles bandwidth.

I truly understand whey they set the base on 4xAF... even in the worst case it will just take 64GB/s of the bandwidth in 4k 60fps games.

Edit - I forgot to point that PC CPU + GPU bandwidth is way higher than actual consoles unified bandwidth when you look at similar GPUs... plus low and mid-end GPU users usually set their games to low resolution and framerates that makes AF bandwidth use smaller... just these with big GPUs running 1440p/4k at 120/144fps will have a big use of bandwidth by AF but theses GPUs have enough bandwidth to do everything.

That is so well put that there is no longer an excuse to not understand why now. If even a dumbass like me understood after your post, then I think anybody here can.

 

[Deleted member 13]

Yea @ethomaz is really stepping up his game on tech understanding. I like it!