This video is brought to you by Dell Gaming.
Don’t just play, game!
(Peels film from front of PC)
And there’s more where that came from.
This video has been played, captured, edited and released on the new Dell Inspiron 5675.
This is from their new Ryzen-powered desktop PC lineup that will be available for the upcoming
Black Friday.
It’s geared towards gaming, but with its powerful 8-core processor and SSD / HD combo,
the PC I used was more than capable of handling anything I threw at it, be it 3D design, music
creation or video editing.
With it, I’m going to investigate the hidden, mysterious, but very important world of video
game optimisation.
Better graphics are often associated with MORE.
More details!
More lens flare!
More explosions!
But often there are better, smarter tricks that can be used instead.
CS:GO’s SAS models recently got a beautiful make-over to bring them up to today’s standards.
But you may be surprised to know that in terms of complexity, they saw an increase of 7%.
Only 7% more polygons to make a character model that looks a lot more than 7% better,
complete with far more dangly things attached to him!
This is what being smart can achieve.
Of course this character model is just a small example.
Let’s see what it can achieve if applied to an entire game.
Here’s Crysis, a game I’m sure you’re all aware of.
And here’s the Inspiron’s first challenge: the DVD.
Fortunately the front panel doesn’t just feature modern connections, card readers and
4!
USB slots, but it also comes prepared for older technology with a DVD RW.
These days you seldom need it, but it saves you McGuyvering up a complex solution when
you do.
Oh and there’s more film here as well.
(Peels film) Crysis needs no introduction.
Now 10 years old, its graphics are still relevant because of the forward-thinking approach the
studio adopted.
They didn’t build it like a game- rather, they got a pre-rendered, movie-like video
called ‘Core-X’ and strived to make Crysis look as good as that.
They matched it within a year, and later had a game that looked even better than that pre-rendered
video.
But there was a draw-back.
CAN IT RUN CRYSIS?
The game ran terribly!
You could say it was the…
DARK SOULS of computer benchmarks :D
It became a dank meme to ask THIS at every opportunity.
The joke soon got old and downvoted, and yet the question continued to be asked!
Well here’s the Inspiron running it at QHD, max settings plus AA, so yes, it can run Crysis.
Oh look, more film.
(Peels film) What they did for a sequel was a little unexpected.
Rather than make it look even better, they instead tried to keep the same quality but
to make it optimised enough for everybody to finally be able to play it.
Think the SAS model, but for a whole game.
This was particularly evident on lower settings where it only cut ‘extra’ details.
It retained the important bits, such as the overall look and feel- and best of all it
managed all this with excellent framerates!
Honestly I struggle to spot what’s missing from these settings unless given a direct
side-by-side comparison.
In contrast to this, the original game looked hilariously bad at low settings.
It was flat, unfinished and unloved.
Amusingly, for the second game they changed the names of the graphics levels to reflect
the improvements, naming the ‘lowest’ setting ‘high’ and then having to come
up with new names for the rest of them.
Thanks to their smart work, even the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 could now handle this
game- albeit at the lowest, ‘high’ settings.
I’m always happy when I hear that a game runs well on consoles.
Because as a PC user, I’m selfishly thinking of all the ways I can use my PC’s additional
power to have a superior experience.
Crysis 2 and its increased optimisation lets me run it like Crysis, but with higher framerates.
Or at a higher resolution.
Or with improved detail settings!
And with a modern system – like this - I can have the best of all worlds.
Sadly, the response to Crysis 2 wasn’t positive.
Whereas people complained the original didn’t run well, they now said that the sequel had
been dumbed down for consoles.
Admittedly, they had aggressively optimised this game.
The most unforgiveable of these changes was to the level design, which had replaced the
original’s open-endedness with smaller, more linear paths that ran a lot better.
Detail-wise they were probably better!
There was just less of it.
What is sadly overlooked is the stuff that Crysis 2 did better.
I believe there were 2 things; firstly, the levels were carefully constructed from lots
of high quality props and models, rather than being bumpy ground with stuff sprinkled on
top of it.
And secondly, the lighting made everything look nicer, even if it wasn’t any more detailed!
Everything visually pops, whereas sometimes the first game feels like a missed opportunity.
Even if the first game showed MORE stuff or had MORE detail, it would still appear less
pleasing than the second game, which sported prettier art direction and lighting.
And later with the second game they rolled out an update that introduced some cutting
edge features.
With these it was certainly technically superior to the original, though the damage had already
been done and sadly this patch lost quite a bit of the optimisation in the process.
Funnily enough, for a series known for cutting edge graphics, neither of these games properly
supported the latest technology.
Whereas Crysis 2’s DX11 patch came out after release, Crysis 1’s DX10 features could
be run in DX9 with just a simple config file tweak. 10 years ago I did this and enjoyed
playing through the game at 10 frames a second.
But never fear, because Crytek finally delivered with Crysis 3.
A game with modern tech, superb visuals and enough optimisation for everyone to be able
to run it.
A happy ending to the trilogy.
These 3 Crysis games tell a fascinating story of graphical improvement and optimisation.
And since this, more advancements have been made.
Once again I thank consoles for most of these, since their limited processing power forces
developers to create these new technologies.
Us with powerful PCs then get the benefit.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022990/Rendering-Rainbow-Six-Siege Rainbow 6: Siege, for example, uses checkerboard
Rendering.
This means it skips every other pixel, effectively only calculating half the number, then uses
magic to fill in the gaps.
The result on modern hardware means much better framerates.
You can either choose to keep that, or move to a higher resolution and get the same performance
as you would have without it.
Good news for everybody.
The Inspiron was happily running this at maximum settings at QHD without a problem.
LOD has been in games forever, replacing stuff with lower quality models when they’re a
long way from the player to speed things up.
This technology helps scenery to look and run well at any distance, so as you’d imagine
is particularly important in open-ended games, like Skyrim.
A more fun example to show this is in the previous game, Oblivion, which would switch
trees with creepy movey 2D pictures when it thinks you won’t notice.
It was acceptable back then but running at 4K now, you can obviously see the limitations!
Tessellation is sort of the same but sort of the opposite, where it generates more details
as you get closer.
If the effect is used properly then you won’t see the changes taking place.
But this fantastic demonstration lets you mess about with different values, ranging
from no tessellation at all to… quite a lot.
If we zoom into this distant cliff you should be able to see more and more detail being
added to it as we approach.
I’ll repeat that again, only zoomed up so you can see the changes taking place more
easily.
This is just one of many ways that modern titles can extract as much quality for as
little performance impact as they can.
Titanfall 2 and Shadow of War both use Dynamic Resolution Scaling, where the game is continually
adjusting its resolution to give you the best visual quality while remaining smooth to play.
This scales for all computers, and the chances are when the resolution is at its lowest during
demanding scenes, you won’t even notice because you’ll be too busy dodging the explosions
and all that extra detail that’s being thrown in your face!
Technologies such as Vulkan and DX12 remove overhead, meaning that more of your computer’s
performance can be used to power games rather than being held up elsewhere.
New games such as Tomb Raider, Doom and Deus Ex are already adopting these new standards.
And it’s not just the games and developers that are improving their optimisation- hardware
is as well.
Newer Graphics Card generations come with more powerful hardware AS WELL as being better
at using what they’ve got.
For example, The Geforce 1060 included in this Inspiron features 4th Generation Compression.
This comparison shows the improvement- the purple spots indicate the areas of a gaming
image that it can compress.
The more, the better.
A lot of it was already covered in the older generation, but you can see the further improvements
made with the latest 4th gen technology.
Even if everything else about the card remained the same, this advancement would still lead
to better performance than with older cards!
The Inspiron also sports AMD’s Ryzen 1700X processor.
This is a very powerful chip that can handle a lot more than just games.
Right now, most modern titles only use a fraction of its full potential.
But as everything else advances, I expect to see the Ryzen 1700X and its 16 threads
to continue performing well.
It’s a sort of future-proofing that’s nice to have.
Oh look, more film.
(Close-up of film being peeled) So thank you to Dell for providing the hardware
that has powered everything in this video.
I found some nice extras, too- it’s a desktop PC WITH BUILT-IN WIFI!
And its Maxxaudiopro control panel was fun to mess about in, letting me up the bass or
surround sound for games and the like.
Click the link in this video’s description to see the Inspiron Gaming lineup- and be
sure to look out for Dell’s Black Friday offers from the 23rd November on Dell.co.uk.