This game is very cpu dependant and all consoles have very poor cpu power. In order to get this game running well sacrifices need to be made with the graphics.
It is a cryengine game so comparisons should only be made with other cryengine games. This could include Farcry 5 which runs on a version of the original cryengine.
It should be noted that this is an indie game with a limited budget so we all need to be patient and let the devs do their best.
Denise wants to know what specifically requires KCD to churn so much CPU. Is the number and nature of the assets so different than other relatively more console friendly games?
Yes. Absolutely.
Not many games like this in history of gaming.
Its easy for peope to think one 3d game world is akin to another.
Just the log piles in this game make me smile. … the rooving with authentic shingles.
Having no loading is an order of magnitude more complex than other games…
Eg Witcher (3),… walk into first tavern of game; loading.
I wont deny the art assets in said tavern are beautiful- but it is very different to play a game without, say, Skyrims ‘city zones’ (load).
What is required to keep an engine interpreting which direction the pkayer is traveling in and to predict and preempt loading of future valleys and forrestd- in a way that doesnt break immersion (pauses)…
We might not remember now, but Oblivion had small ‘cells’ all over the map with ‘micro loads’ for what wqs ahead.
I wont say the ai is exemplary (i believe there is a few posts about its combat finesse is 'lacking),… but it is all happening in a world that is alive. I used to hate watching Skyrims time transistions - say every five minutes the shadows would just magically move a large arc… then nothing… then a large arc. It kills immersion watching time transistioning in Skyrim.
Me personally (not Denise) loves vegetation. Hard to get right. The wind in the Witcher isnt realistic. It looks great but it feels like a fantasy world half the time with physics that feel prebaked.
The wind affecting vegetation in KCD is the most impressive I have ever seen. Watching the undergrowth and fields and forrests react to what feels like realworld rules.
This stuff doesnt feel prebaked at all. A lot of computation is going on. And yes- on the fly rotation of textures of differing quality also adds a hit.
The game is designed for multicore and uses that power well.
I have never seen animals flock so well.
When I watch what my six core/twelve thread intel pushes… I am suitably impressed. I have seen this game get the physics and game engine off teo primary cores… this game uses fifty percent more cpu that even the witcher 3 at ultra with hairworks… and quite simply- it makes the witcher 3 look like the older title it is.
Bot saying the wotcher isnt pretty- just qualifying that KCD IS doing some amazing stuff.
Stuff seldom done.
Could the difference in GPU between the ps4 and xbox one have something to do with the jitterring/screen shaking that many xbox players are experiencing?
XBOX-One/-S using AMD Jaguar and XBOX-One-X is using an customized AMD-Jaguar Evolved CPU. PS4/Pro are using an AMD-Jaguar CPU too. But Pro has only clocked CPU from normal.
Yeah all consoles use a custom version of AMD processors that were used in Pcs over 5 years ago. They have the GPU built into the same chip and share system memory. The closest comparison would be an old Laptop with an 8 core AMD phenom processor, a Raedeon 7870 GPU and 8GB of shared memory. This system would barely run the menu screen let alone the game. Consoles perform really well for the specs they have.
I thought that it was just the xbox one that was like that. Doesn’t the ps4 have a separate 1.84 TFLOP AMD Radeon. I don’t know much about this stuff but I thought that was different.
As far as I understand they both use the same apu which is a chip that has both a cpu and gpu inside it. The clock speed of the ps4 chip is slightly faster than xbox one and it has faster memory. The xbox one x uses the same hardware but is faster again and has more memory than the ps4 with much better cooling too.
The cpu side of things is incremental improvements.
The xbone had stronger cpu is my understanding (by a small amount), architecture was the same -just a sloght speed bump.
The esram customisation on the xbox side of the coin means that, when programmed for, the RAM speed disadvantage is nostly nullified. (Xbox having a shared ram that is more (re)configurable).
The gpu differences is where the money is at.
At the time of console launch the xbox had a market equivalent $40 gpu where as the playstation had a $110 gpu.
It was about forty percent faster.
And hence most multiplats ran 20% higher resolution at 20%higher framerate.
Xbox countered with the ‘s’ variant (trying to minimise the obvious differences).
When building the x it was no accident that it is around forty percent more grunty than the psPro.
M$ are hoping that the psPro vs xbonex plays out like the ‘battle’ between ps4 and xbone.
It wont- they are not entry level systems - and are both already bragging rights capable.
The x is actually very bad cost/performance and will be for awhile. But that isnt M$ intent- they are just trying to stay relevant.
Unfortunately it is we consumers who suffer with mismatched hardware generations filling the market and a lack of tight optimisation for said systems- exarcerbated by a more rapid platform deployment going forward. …
In the past- console titles really punched above their weight on second and third gen releases.
Except in nintendo where forst party optimised titles had gameplay AND graphics superior to all other releases (like what the x will have), making developers unwilling to gamble on going against the first parties.
Xbox x for exclusives? Definately.
Playstation and a PC the norm for many gamers presently? Check.
The xbox x is great - for people who want cheap psPro with several controllers and a collection of games.
Going forward- psPro will have vastly higher unit numbers and more games ‘tweaked’ for it (ps4 owned last generation sales)
(Comment not to DrSparky… more about the gpus…following thread posts)
The gpu is where the money is at.
Event a kinnect plugged into an xbox drops its cpu effectiveness. (About 10% lost to the camera)
XboxOne was a bad design and cost m$ their market advantage in many markets… ps4 is the console of choice for most.
Justin- no the jitter is unlikely caused by a speed difference in the graphics parts.
Being of the same generation and using the same hardware they run very similarly.
My pc graphics card is a delux amd part of an older generation. Probably similar to what WH had around during development.
My three-four year old mid tier PC runs the game at ultra plus settings and 45 frames per second.
Consoles are hampered by their cpus… which are having every last squeeze put on the by this game.
An xbox one with kinnect should perform differently to a one s which the ps4 should have an easier time over as well.
Its hard to say as KCD isnt the typical game and the RAM setups on either platform might have advantages that are worth more framerate than they would typically affect…
If possible w CryEngine, shouldn’t then KCD compensate by Skyrim-ing for consoles? To invoke a movie title, seems like WH has pushed for a bridge too far
Skyrim used gamebryo engine… an inhouse engine not showcasing any particular strengths.
It worked and saved bethesda paying money out of house.
They used it for many titles- good for them.
Over time we tweaked it. PC release of Oblivion had all sorts ofnuser configs to makenuse of more ram and cpu power- we would have more ‘active cells’ around us…
But this wasnt how the game was written and added all sorts if issues.
Eg having more cells active around us had creatures far away fighting other creatures.
By the time Skyrim rolled around systems had grown in power and the size of the ‘cells’ that the game had loaded were considerably larger.
It still required load zones (open world is a hard genre to do!!) -so walking into a town would have the game close out what was loaded and load a new world (the city) -the game would give the city walls the player couldnt cross and the sense of the city living/existing in a ‘greater world’ was real enough. (Suspension of disbelief achieved)
Playing with mods, ‘open cities’ allows Skyrim players to walk from riverwood right into whiterun. The problem with this mod is allows players to bypass triggers at the cell start of towns. It also allows npslcs in towns to run outside and get caught in dragon fights etc…
KCD makes a base game doa bunch of things that not many other games are even trying.
In time they will have it all sorted-cryengine will then hopefully allow an easier to implement co-op mod by the nature of it being a fully capable engine.
I ran crysis when it fist came out (at ultra, albeit @720 res).
I loved the physics. I loved the vegetation; most importantly I loved the game world with no loading.
Whilst it might have had brief hiccups (eg saving)- it showed what the engine was capable of…
KCD delivers on an (unwritten) promise the games industry gave me over a decade ago - a medieval game done using cryengine.
The number of polygons and the size of the world are all considerably larger than what has been done before.
Larger worlds might exist and prettier graphics moght exist elsewhere, but not at the same time.
KCD is the biggest world with the most immersive graphical quality I have yet seen.
The only thing that kills a cpu more is destructible physics in large complex environments (eg battlefield 1).
If KCD had destructavle physics en masse (something not really needed except cannons sieging castles) it would be an order of magnitude harder again to render.
The present target makes perfect use of six-seven core cpus very well (consoles have eight but one is usually diabled to help yield and another might be left for the operating system)
The AI, the wind, the weather system, animal behaviours, heck just the animations and diversity in all the little things… KCD is the most impressive title I have seen in years. (Better than witcher with hairworkx)
Just having water flow the right direction (requires a mod in skyrim) with art assets that mirror a medieval working of said water physics is awesome.
Tge attention to detail and care is tremendous.
We can tell so much has been culled- so if even half of what they are sitting on gets reimplemented- tgis will be amazing.
I think as they optimise and get a handle on low powered consoles capabilities for this engine- a lot of reimplementation will happen.
Crysis is powerful. Rendering nature is hard (nothing made of triangles).
Crysis 2 made it to consoles only because the game world was chosen to allow for it.
They turned a jungle into a city. Building render much better out of triangles… allowing for much simpler objects that allowed the game engine to suceed on low powered parts.
Crysis 2 ran on low powered consoles.
The time is right for our ‘super powered consoles’ (yes xbone and ps4) to have a crack at it. With organic environments even…
So, if I’m reading correctly, you think the CPU load is manageable for consoles even though high.
My Skyrim-ing comment was to suggest dividing landscape of KCD into sectors/load zones for XB and PS4 as a way to reduce demand in one area (asset throughput processing) in order to enable uptick in another area … listening to you and other PC users seems like a balance. tilt the balance (maybe I got the tech wrong and that makes no sense). Nerfing KCD for consoles would adversely impact triggers and other stuff you mentioned but (theoretically) allow XB and PS4 to render Bohemia without rampant pop-ins, clipping resolution, FPS decline, etc
I think the game world has been designed from the ground up with certain ‘minimum sized’ cells.
Their optimisation so far has been to make the game vastly better use low powered hardware and the slight reduction in textures will have big pass on benefits to making it happen.
Consoles can do this game. It will simply be a game that sets a new standard for what present consoles CAN do.
Game makers have had it relatively easy for a few years now- all platforms having enough grunt for realising almost any project.
KCD is ambitious; its biggest bugbear that true for any game approaching reality… any immersion break snaps us into calling out errors- they remind us it is a game and not a real breathing world/ecosystem. Games with any amount of non belief in them (most games) -our mind makes the game world real. That mind is a forgiving one as it alr3ady is imagining making a fantasy world believable… and lets go all sorts of ‘niggles’.
like my PC. I admit going thru parts of towns now at 8 fps it isn’t quite as jerky.
BUT I WANT MORE!
Same occurs to pc and i’ve tested a little bit and found out that the effect is gone if i switch my texture settings from high to medium (but not applying the change) and back to high.
After apply, my grass texture is like 1.4/.1/.2 and looks beatuiful again.
BUT if i quit the game and start it again, everything is ugly.
I’ve tested commands, reset of settings, steam verify, extracted and compared files.
But with more and more investigation i am sure it is something in the executable and dll
Maybe a cache problem?
interesting!
Can you make some screenshots/a video and send this bugreport to
support@kingdomcomerpg.com
Thank you!
I will do my best and will try to make a vid of it.
I had it today over several restarts- the game kept reserting to some defaukts and changing my settings.
I have found, multiple times, with previous updates - a need to keep reinforcing settings and a need to run around in game a bit.
Im on 1.4.3 now and see a few more speed optimisations thrown in.
1 or 2 is in direction of getting triangles to the screen asap. Ihave had two models render parts onto them in front of me (previously only ever once happened before-over hundreds of hours).
It all works much better though.
I couldnt really catch out model rendering into far distance on the main street of Skalitz over many ‘test runs’.
Something I could catch out at least 2/5 runs in all previous game builds.
It was noticably ‘more realistic’ for it.
The framerate low around the ‘first store’ is still there; as is the first corner store(s) in Rattay…
Fires flames around bathouse jolts ‘up’ at edge of middle distance render zone… it breaks immersion a little but reveals further tricks are being used for optimisation.
This is all good stuff. I too prefer not having graphics gimped; but the outcome is less framerate lows. For me the game did seem more fluid in latest build (1.4.3)
kk, but mine was not reset by the game itself. I did that myself.
The game was set by me to standard and everything was on medium settings.
I just put the texture setting of Medium on high, Loaded a save, Everything is nice, Saved the game, Finished it and started it again immediately, Loading the save and grass looks like ultra low lod objects that developers use for the end of a map.
