00:00 Intro
01:30 After Arkham
02:14 Character Rendering
05:19 Environmental Details
10:27 PS5 vs Xbox
14:02 Performance Analysis on Consoles
16:05 The PC Version Has Issues
21:09 What About Steam Deck?
25:35 The Wrap-up
After a vast, extended period of development, Rocksteady's Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League has finally released - and of all the Digital Foundry team, it was John Linneman with the most reservations about the game based on its pre-launch campaign. But you know what? While there are a range of caveats, he's come away having had fun with the game. The PC version though? It REALLY needs work...
Built on Unreal Engine 4
- Striking detail on character models and hair rendering praised. "Rendering is meticulous"
- The world is nice and colorful with good amount of verticality.
- However it feels cluttery and mid-field detail doesn't look that good (in service of getting the game to 60 FPS)
- The city is very well designed, comparisons done to Gotham Knights
- Atmospheric effects praised. Arkhan Knight still has the better water effects
- "Ultra seamless with very little load times"
- The game looks a lot more attractive in-person than watching low bitrate youtube videos
- Consoles
- Visuals:
- Series X | PS5 are virtually identical with Series X having 'slightly nicer' looking shadows
- Series S dials back things like SSR and lower resolution shadows.
- All consoles have camera-judder in cut-scenes
- Series X: average 1728p
- PS5: averages 1440p
- Series S: averages 900p
- DF thinks the game is using FSR2 with Tier 1 VRS on consoles, the image can be very noisy in fast motion
- Segments of the image look like they're rendering at quarter res
- Series S suffers the most here.
- Performance:
- All consoles hit 60 FPS target most of the time
- But all consoles have stuttering to 33 / 50 ms that VRR can't resolve
- Results in the game not feeling as smooth as it should.
- PS5 runs with a very small advantage but it's small enough to not make a difference
- Summation: PS5/SX are nearly identical, Series S runs similarly but is visually messy compared to the two.
- PC
- PC has optional RT and a shader comp step at launch
- For DF, they had to toggle the RT setting a few times before it saved
- Initially, the PC version seems to run decently, with RT reflections taking over SSR
- After tutorial area the PC version starts showing lots of issues
- Lots of frame-time stutter, shader comp stutter and traversal stutter in strong rigs
- "Extremely unstable" performance on Alex's beefy PC
- Disabling RT improves average fps but doesn't do anything for the stutters / judders
- The stutter is "so much worse" than anything on console.
Steamdeck:
- Drop all settings to low, v-sync to off and FPS cap at 60 or 90 to be playable.
- Preferable at 800p with FXAA or TAA
- Forced VRS can cause some textures to drop as low as 60p on Steamdeck
* Yes, 60p, not missing an extra digit at the end
- FSR2 up-scaling is possible but it just turns everything into soup
- Consistent play can cause long stretches of pauses as the deck can simply run out of memory
