F.I.S.T. Forged in Shadow Torch sure seems like a redundant name, doesn’t it? But for a
game that requires a fair bit of backtracking, I guess it kinda makes sense. F.I.S.T. is an
absolutely entertaining romp through a dieselpunk world inhabited by anamorphic animal characters
fighting against oppressive robotic overlords in an effort to save their captured friend. You
play as the main protagonist Rayton armed with his mechanical fist, fitting I know, as you traverse
the gorgeously crafted 2.5D world. For those uninitiated 2.5D meaning the game is in a 3D
landscape but operates entirely on a side scroller format. What makes this one interesting to me, and
why I was excited to get the opportunity to dig into it, was the abundance of modern tech packed
in. Nvidia provided me with a code for coverage purposes so let’s explore it together, shall we?!
F.I.S.T. may have been published by Chinese giant Bilibili Game,
but it was developed by the small studio TiGames and they managed to pack a ton
of next-gen features in here. You know, at some point we have to stop calling them next-gen
features and just modern features. Either way, TiGames has gone full tilt in partnership with
Nvidia and RTX to treat the eyes with loads of flair. If you want to know more about the
entire RTX suite as of now feel free to hit the card in the upper corner of the screen.
Ray Tracing is here and in no short supply. Lighting is key to make a world
pop and this one rings true in the world of F.I.S.T.. Present is Ray Traced Reflections,
Ray Traced Global Illumination, as well as Ray Traced Caustics and physically based textures. All
of these combine to take the lighting in F.I.S.T. to the next level and give the game visual depth.
That comes with a grave cost on performance, however, but Nvidia’s DLSS technology is included
with this title to recover those frames. Later on, you’ll see what makes this DLSS implementation
quite interesting and a bit different than what we’ve seen in the past.
Another interesting technology from Nvidia used in this title is Nvidia Reflex. This is
to reduce the system latency and just like RTX we have a full explainer of
exactly what this technology is linked in the card in the upper corner of the screen.
Long and short, this game can get quite hairy and you might find
you need lightning-quick input response to get past some of the most intense battles.
The implementation of Ray Tracing in F.I.S.T. is good, but the options are a bit on the slim
side. In fact, I have to take a moment to complain about the way the visual options
for advanced features like RT and DLSS are handled. They’re not IN the game but only
accessible from the main menu of the game. It’s an oversight in my opinion, and makes it quite hard
to adjust your performance mid-game. In the main menu there are three options for RT; Off, Low,
High. That’s it. I’m personally not a fan of when individually target options are
so limited when a game supports three different kinds of RT functions.Here
is a breakdown of which option handles which feature:.RT Low enables reflections and caustics,
while RT High enables reflections and caustics along with global illumination.
So how do they look? Well, they look great! But I know what you’re thinking:
since this is a side-scrolling game with a limited camera viewport it doesn’t NEED things
like RT reflections to make up for off-screen objects. Well, in an opening area of the game here
we can see how RT reflections really make reflective surfaces pop. Look at the tiles
in the foreground, and notice how they have texture and not just a sheen like with RT OFF.,
And the reflection of the sign is clear with RT Low enabled instead of a low-resolution
screen space effect. Even more, the vertical pipe on the left has reflections from various
angles.later you’re going to see the performance impact is quite interesting on this one.
Crank the option to RT High and you’ll see the inclusion of global illumination,
which adds that depth of color around all the light sources and gives the world a natural glow.
With all this in mind, let’s check out another area of the game. Here you can see the impact
a bit more, especially on the caustics and reflection where you can notice how the door
on the right of the screen has so much more depth when RT is enabled. For the most part you can get
by with RT on low most of the time and have a great experience. But there are some parts of
the game when the environment gets brighter and the Global Illumination really makes your
character and the others on screen really pop in a way that baked lighting just can’t do.
As always, Ray Tracing brings a performance impact, and this game is no different. Before we
talk about those numbers we HAVE to discuss the implementation of DLSS in this title
which is one of the most interesting uses I’ve seen to date. In the main menu,
there is no option for quality levels, only Auto with the ability to adjust sharpening.
It’s quite limiting, but how does it look? Well, quite good in my opinion. A big reason
for this is that F.I.S.T. uses per-object motion blur and that actually aids in the
cleaning up of potential artifacts commonly induced by DLSS. In fact, I really don’t know
why you wouldn’t just enable it by default as it sharpens the image up a little compared to the
native TAA used by Unreal Engine 4 and makes the image just a bit crisper. From there you can feel
free to adjust the sharpening level to your liking and I found no performance impact from doing so.
Speaking of performance, this title does have a framerate cap of 120 FPS and means the theoretical
top-end performance could be much higher than what we were able to measure. Tested at
4K running a Ryzen 9 3900X and Founders Edition RTX 3080 with RT disabled, F.I.S.T. runs at a
comfortable 115 FPS on average. Enable RT on low and we see a literal 5 FPS performance hit as it
drops to 110 FPS. But if you want to crank it full out with RT High prepare to see your frames drop
over half to around the 50 FPS average mark in my testing area. But don’t count it out yet because
you still have DLSS as an option. Enabling DLSS with RT off locks the FPS at that 120 FPS limit,
and the same goes for RT on Low. With DLSS, RT High sees more than double the
frames it got without, so full-on RT High is back on the table boys!
F.I.S.T. is a game that I saw float about some time ago and since my time with it I’ve found
it to be a truly enjoyable experience so far. I very much look forward to finishing the game
and appreciate seeing how well such a small studio put together these modern DX12 features.
What we have here is a beautiful game that gives you advanced options to really sink
your newer hardware into. It also manages to give you some great ray tracing features
even if you don’t own a DLSS capable GPU to push it to the max. . While the frame rate
cap really puts a damper on the ability to see the true impact of ray tracing on this title,
I don’t think 120 FPS is going to feel like much of a limit here.
I want to thank you for joining me today on this adventure into the world of F.IS.T.
and its graphical features. If you enjoyed it let me know by hitting the thumbs up and
make sure you’re subscribed here at PCWorld for future featured analysis.