Gadgetory

remember this this is the Buffalo so how do you remember the Buffalo so required viewing for this video is our final fantasy deep dive where we looked at game works implementation and just objects in general where the game was drawing objects that were not anywhere near the player this is something that we were not only able to validate with other software outside of ansel but also Square Enix posted a series of tweets that more or less acknowledged the issue and said that they were working towards a solution so what was the issue then the quick recap is that there was severe performance loss in most of the benchmark utility because aspects of the game that the player was nowhere near were being rendered anyway thus causing lower performance than would seem appropriate for what was being shown on screen today we're revisiting it with the playable demo of Final Fantasy 15 to see if that's been improved before that this video is brought to you by the new cable mod pro series cable mods new pro cables come with pre-installed closed combs for clean builds accompanied by a revamped color style and vibrance the cables are now using thicker wires and they've also added right-angled internal USB 3 extension and right-angled SATA data cables by the pro series cable kits at the link below or customized at your cable set with the configurator also linked below so first up the settings have changed significantly from previously previously the settings options were light standard and high and the difference there were differences within them that you had the hunt and find because these settings specifics were not exposed to the user in fact in order to change the settings at all beyond those three presets you had to use external software to expose the ini files and this is obviously not an expected use case by square-enix so we were able to use some of that software and change the settings files which allowed us to do independent game works on off a be testing and one of the things that troubled us was that the game work settings were only on with the high option and we're off with the standard option however there are other things changed as well like view distance and other quality detail settings that were not related to game work so it made it difficult to individually check what was causing what performance hit and so we were able to isolate those variables and test them one of the numbers off top my head was hair works on versus off could cause a 17% performance hit on Nvidia and something like a 37% performance hit on AMD the result of which was visible in gameplay most the time and that most problematic was that this performance hit existed even when you were miles away from any objects with hair works because the main characters in the game do not use hair works in fact we have screenshots of their hair meshes from an application a debugging application where you can see that they're just meshes it's not hair work so we know that the characters aren't using hair works however there were Buffalo in the game that use hair works and in the play will demo there are a couple of characters as well and monsters that use the hair works so we're gonna do a really quick test just to see if anything's improved this is not a super in-depth GPU benchmark because the game is still going change from today to the final launch so we might as well just wait till then at this point our first objective was to determine whether the unnecessary hair works issue had been resolved as that was causing the biggest performance concern overall previously we were seeing again somewhere between 17 and 40 percent performance deficit depending on which card and which setting and this was a result of the Buffalo that were rendering 100% of the time something that square-enix indirectly confirmed later and through other sources we've confirmed as well so our initial findings were absolutely correct and hopefully those problems will be resolved today and as we get into this chart I think you'll see that they mostly are because now as we look at the first test site the service station we noticed that the toggling of hair works on and off did not change performance this is what you would expect there are no hair works objects in this scene or nearby any performance difference was a result of normal variance and error and is not measurable within our test resolution these results suggest that hair works is not being rendered when no hair works objects are present which is correct that should be and is significantly improved over the initial benchmark we observed the same correct performance behavior out in the middle of the desert where no hair works objects were around and testing and combat versus the first boss mob a user of hair works by the way we logged an on versus off performance disparity of approximately 7% on Vega at 56 with a similar disparity on the gtx 1070 note that these results are not comparable to our initial benchmark where we discovered the issues as this is a single mob entity with hair works versus a large group of buffalo that means the boss alone is costing you 7 to 8 percent of your performance and in the initial benchmark we had numerous buffalo objects that were again costing a lot more than that so we can say for sure that there is a performance hit with hair works and tightly knit on versus off does show a difference so we know that hair works is functional on at least certain enemies or mobs that have it we also know in at least the two test sites that we just sort of spot checked that hair works on versus off shows no difference when there are no hair works objects present this is expected and good behavior we have not tested the entire benchmark it's fully possible that there are still instances where a performance deficit exists with hair works on when no hair works objects are apparent to the player so it's possible that still exists this was a much shorter test than our initial one where we basically spent an entire day researching it for this one we're just doing a spot check to build some more data on what Square Enix has been working on and once the game ships will do another deep dive and see how it looks then because at this point we're so limited with what we can do in the demo and we don't know what's going to change so you could understand why there's not a big desire to build a gigantic data set and then have it all wiped out when the actual game ships however for now what we're seeing is that hair works out OD scallion appears to be working at least mostly properly in the two very quick spot checks possible that it's broken elsewhere but we haven't seen evidence of that yet and another item of note that's important is that optimization overall is significantly improved this is something we can say for absolute certain because if you look around the game doesn't matter if you use ansel or not you can use other debugging tools because I think some people got hung up on the fact that we were creating video with ansel previously but you can use other tools like render dock to basically fetch items out of memory like meshes textures every single pass to draw the frame all the way up till the frames completion and render dock is is still showing objects that we can't see near the player however they are significantly lower level of detail to the point where it's probably irrelevant that they're being drawn at all and most of these objects are at least somewhat nearby so although a lot of overdraw is still happening the game is still drawing a lot of objects that you can't see on the screen actively they are lower level of detail which was true to some extent with the initial benchmark so it's not like that's completely new but it does look like either more care was taken since the benchmark or while they were building this one in parallel with the benchmark they did a better job with LED either way optimizations clearly better this time than last the big question of course is how will it carry over to the game will we see performance uplift overall and this is where the next big point comes in which is that graphic settings are seriously changed from the benchmark which had three presets now there are four presets low average high and highest and of those only highest has any game works options enabled at all and interestingly it is lacking I think pretty much all game works options except hair works so turf was disabled by default from when we looked at the playable demo and vxa o is still off and also something you can't change so it's not in yet these shadow libraries are defaulted to off with highest settings so this is a pretty serious change before more I think there were three from the top of a top my head I think there were three GameWorks options that were enabled previously out of five and now not sure about flow but we know that only hair works is on and turf is off that's a big difference alone because those two are the biggest contributors to frame rate differences so in the very least if you want to get those other options now you can but you have to go through custom options so you can actually set a custom graphics configuration I know it's amazing mind-blowing technology and the fact that it's changed like this means that when benchmarking or when users are discussing the game they talk about highest settings the only really major influence outside of the normal graphics options would be hair works and compared to previously that's pretty big improvement because it's it will look more fair to all vendors in this configuration and if you still want the Nvidia game works options which you might you can enable them separately three custom graphics configuration so that's a big change and we thank Square Enix for it's not just a game we're saying it's just it's the fact that you can customize graphics now that was a big concern so we're glad to see that and the extra care taken with game works options is also appreciated because there I mean we had 1080 T eyes that were struggling to play the game previously so that's not okay you could of course tuned down but you have to you have to build the game for the lowest common denominator which is probably someone who doesn't really get what's causing that performance loss they're just not sure why it's not running well so so it's tuned better now for people who might not be as tech savvy as all of you are but to recap better job overall with LOD scaling there's a better job with object render distance there is a better job with hair works implementation and when it is being called and rendered and we still observed that many objects in the far distance we're coming down the directx pipe down draw calls but many of them were lower detail so that eliminates a lot of performance concerns that's not to say that Final Fantasy 15 is well optimized now it's not say that it's clear and free of any issues with or without game works that really wasn't the only culprit it was everything was being drawn so there could still be problems we'll look into it though in the game launches for now just wanted to give you an update kind of close the story on the beta and pre-launch stuff and say that yes it looks at least a little bit better so good news there but stay tuned make sure you subscribe to catch the final launch deep dive that we'll be doing when we're gonna double back and really dig into it make sure that screen ecstatic good job with optimization and as always subscribe for more go to patreon.com/scishow cameras and access to helps that directly we would strongly recommend you watch the first video in the series because it will explain a lot more we'll put that in a one of the cards or something like that thank you for watching you get a store at Cameron's Nexus net if you want to pick up one of the Graf logo shirts that I was wearing for this video I'll see you all next time