Gadgetory

the graphics choices for sea of thieves are pretty interesting rare decided to focus its efforts primarily on making highly physically and visually accurate water and reflections off of the water allowing the rest of the graphics to follow a more cartoony simple cue sea of thieves is exceptionally playable on even ancient hardware for PC making an Xbox at versus PC comparison particularly apt the two should be a highly comparable in visual quality we'll be looking at that and at Xbox framerate and frame time performance in today's content before that this video is brought to you by Thermaltake and the view 71 enclosure the view 71 is a full tower case that's capable of fitting three video cards and most configurations it's also one of the better cooling cases in our recent case testing bench lineup the view 71 has hinged a tempered glass doors on either side that make it easy to open and show off and it comes with at least one rain fan though you can get the RGB version if you prefer learn more at the link in the description below sea of thieves is one of the first particularly big multiplayer titles to be added to the xbox play anywhere program this means that it's playable on both Xbox one and Windows 10 you could buy one key and play it on both devices PC and Xbox it's also somewhat oddly a Windows 10 exclusive game yet it uses DirectX 11 either way though the Xbox and PC players are free to encounter each other and sea of thieves and they can even party up together so the only downside here is that you're forced to interact with the Windows 10 store and marketplace and the Xbox app but otherwise these two aspects make a PC vs. Xbox comparison interesting because any player who owns both could switch between them and so we wanted to look at how the graphics compare and what is the equivalent group of settings between sea of thieves on Xbox and sea of thieves on PC thanks to Xbox and PC cross-play we were able to sync up PC and console footage easily by accruing a ship with two accounts one on each platform an interesting side effect of this method was the discovery that the worlds are almost entirely in sync even on different platforms makes sense that the wave patterns must be synchronized because they effects the ship's position but even the clouds are pretty close to identical although they are subject to the PCs greater draw distance as far as settings go it seems that the PC and Xbox more-or-less look the same when the pcs on max settings the Xbox version of the game is pretty close to maximum fidelity on the PC there are a couple of differences we'll be talking about through this content but overall they are very close the lighting and some of the draw distance and poppin elements are the biggest changes with the Xbox of course having shorter draw distance and later poppin but otherwise a couple of quick notes we originally set the default standard color space intended for TVs rather than PC RGB on the Xbox and then we switched it back later so a couple of the Xbox scenes used in this comparison may look washed out that's not a game fan it's an Xbox thing if you use the TV color space let's get some charts and gameplay footage on the screen to start out with as a reminder for our footage playback in console comparisons we illustrate frame pacing with a left-side scrolling ticker in binary red indicates a drop or in this case a tare while green indicates a successfully generated new frame walking through the most interesting footage where we're swimming in the storm but we encounter several frame tears on the Xbox one X that are both observable and measurable these don't occur frequently and seem largely relegated to this very specific load intensive scenario overall we don't believe this screen tearing to be of significant detriment to gameplay but we did want to highlight its presence servicing from the wave shows a hard tear in one instance we can also see the bow of the ship get torn as the frame refreshes out of interval and so forth our framerate analysis program detects tears as unique frames right now but that's okay in this case tearing can be seen in the charts where frame x dipped to sixteen point seven milliseconds as a reminder framed Heron is functionally the opposite of stuttering at a 30fps target our frame to frame interval should be 33 milliseconds between frames or sixteen point six 67 milliseconds at a 60 FPS target if the GPU can't prepare a frame and time to hit the 33 milliseconds target with vsync enabled it should replay the previous frame this causes a stutter what we're seeing is the opposite of a starter here though we're seeing a tear these happen when the GPU is completing frames out of interval so it may be pushing out runt frames to the display and rendering out of vsync refresh intervals in this chart of the swimming and the storm test we did you'll see occasional dips to 16 millisecond frame times this typically would indicate a 60 FPS frame something that's actually desirable in our present in-house benchmarking software though again this is indicative of one of those tears it looks like a frame delivered faster but the frame quality is lower as a result of the tearing you'll also see a couple of spikes up to 66.7 milliseconds and 50 milliseconds for individual frame presents but nothing too bad or experience harming both of these would be representative of stutters or dropped frames our next demonstration is when sailing towards the island and playing around with the cannons the game is nearly perfectly steady at thirty three point three milliseconds or 30 FPS for the entirety of the test pass eventually we encounter some framedrops that pushes up to sixty six millisecond frame times remember lower or more consistent or both better and then we encounter a tear and then we encounter a severe series of frame drops at around the 900 second mark in this chart we encounter a frame time of 233 milliseconds meaning that it took about a quarter of a second to draw the next frame that's a long time to be staring at a series of frame drops again fortunately this is not common and it's not significantly detracting from the experience that said it's an occasional problem and we hope that rares upcoming performance patch that was promised for Xbox will address this issue we can show some footage of the sequence happening in our video capture for anyone curious there are a few instances of this type of frame drop occurring but overall it's not bad the same goes for tears they happen in really intense scenarios and then seem to go away for the rest of the game graphics settings are relatively sparse on PC options include these five settings shadow detail model detail texture detail water detail and lighting detail model detail and water detail are among the two most important settings in the game model detail impacts pop in LOD scaling at longer view distances and mesh LOD water detail of wave reflections ripples and impacts the performance on both the CPU and the GPU in our testing we observed that dropping from mythical the max settings all the way down to a minimum of curst there is relatively minimal quality change over all sea of thieves seems to mostly exaggerate the texture details setting and the water detail with the rest impacting visuals in limited ways tax for detail for instance oddly impacts loading screen texture resolution and UI elements water is where rare invested most of its graphics resources clearly and you can see that in reflections there are some oddities in water for example some of the reflections that show through will occur when we're swimming through taller waves and you can see what's supposed to be a reflection of a ship or island in the distance however it's being shown on the screen incorrectly when that object is nowhere near us overall though the water looks highly realistic and it has white caps and other physically accurate elements that would be reflected in an ocean we did notice that the Xbox's model detail setting is lower than on PCs highest settings the models that load in so far away on the PC that's actually difficult to discern any popping in at all but that's not true on the Xbox one example of the pop and distance disparity would be the barrels atop one of the boathouse roofs that we saw in the game where the PC version loads them in early before we ever really notice them and the Xbox version hasn't caught up yet also on Xbox it's occasionally possible to see sharp lines beyond at which waves are not rendered while on the PC the distance is again so great that the line is invisible we didn't do an SSD versus hard drive benchmark this time but for what it's worth we also noticed that the Xbox easing its stock hard drive took something like 40 seconds longer to load into a game and loaded textures are more slowly than the PC using an SSD at the time of this writing rare is planning a fixed to quote performance issues on the Xbox one X in a patch that's shipping early next week the week of the 25th the issues apparently occur in specific unnamed places and we don't think we encountered those areas during testing but if we did hopefully they're resolved soon other than that we only noticed some subtle lighting dip says there was it less reflected glare from the muzzle flash of cannons on the Xbox and the shipwrights tall was more brightly lit on PC due to sunlight either bouncing off of water or just more directional light being rendered than on the console there are also some differences in occlusion and overall though the primary difference was just that draw distance finally lens flare is absent on console which is odd seeing as it's a computationally cheap post-processing effect it's enabled on even the lowest setting on PC like it or not and it's entirely absent on the Xbox it's also possible that there are other small differences like these but if so they're difficult enough to detect that they don't affect the experience lighting and reflections on and under the surface of the water itself seem identical but Whitecaps on PC contrast more and are better defined this is an example of one of those smaller differences that's kind of hard to notice so that's it for the Xbox Performance and the PC versions comparison we didn't really bother with PC performance testing because it's irrelevant you could run the game on ancient hardware they even call their lowest setting cursed and for what it's worth the lowest setting on PC aside from a couple of details looks pretty darn close to the max settings on PC it's almost indistinguishable so the main things you'll notice would be slightly delayed popping and if you lower water detail that'll look a lot worse but everything else the character models meshes static meshes all of the other objects in the game look more or less the same so textures are the big difference basically if you wanted to tune your settings for low-end Hardware we'd recommend keeping texture resolution high keeping water detail medium to high and everything else should be pretty much the same in terms of visual quality you'll lose a bit on draw distances but that's it and that's not a big thing to lose if you're on low on hardware so that's the that's everything you need to know about C of Thieves graphics it's really pretty basic in terms of the graphics options available the water is where they spent the entirety of their time there are some odd reflection behaviors in water as we demonstrated but other than that it looks really good and it's probably some of the best water we've seen in a game so job well done too for that the rest of it is really more of a stylized look anyway as always you can check the article linked in the description below for more on this subscribe for additional content on PC and Xbox we primarily do focus on PC hardware though go to patreon.com/scishow brands next it stops out directly and stored on Cameron's nexus net to pick up one of our mod mats they will be in stock in a couple of days at this point so thank you for watching I'll see you all next time