@jigglemaster7: That's not true for this game. As many users have verified.
If you're going to try and drag the crew, at least do a cursory glance over the common knowledge about what you're talking about so you don't look so foolish.
If I buy a boxed Xbox One copy, will I be able to use it as a PC copy? I don't have an Xbone but I like to collect physical copies, and this seems like my only option. Thanks
Nope. Digital only for the Play Anywhere feature. The physical copy (there is only one, no discs being pressed for PC at all) is only for XB1.
The dynamic stuff works FANTASTIC in Forza Apex for me. Set it to 60fps and it's super smooth.
When I was using a GTX760 with Apex, Dynamic was great for doing stuff like pushing down the mirror rendering res to keep the frame-rate basically perfect. Being able to pick which options were locked and which it could modify to keep the perf up was awesome (and not in Horizon).
But moving to a 1070 meant I saw the other side of Dynamic: random frame drops that completely went away when I set it to all fixed settings. If you've got to perf to basically keep a constant high settings selection all the time then Dynamic is a problem. If you're struggling for perf then it seems like a great way of getting the most out of the resources you've got.
I hope this is not a sign of things to come for microsofts play anywhere thing. The xbox version looks way more playable and for 30fps looks pretty damn smooth. The framerate dipping on the pc version , for such a powerful pc is completely unacceptable. Think I might try the apex demo see if that has similar problems on my 970 and oldish cpu. Was going to buy this as well.
I can play Apex at 4K Ultra without issue. Silky smooth with v-sync.
I can't play Horizon 3 without effort (drop the thread priority to Low & turn of V-sync to avoid a stuttering mess, accept some framerate drops in some areas) with Ultra at 1440p and even on High at 1080p then the framerate drops are basically the same. Not as bad as the QL drops but noticeable. This is a weird game in how much it is the CPU that is loaded - I'm using MSAA 4x and getting 63fps in an area, MSAA off and it goes to 65fps with V-sync off; that's a good sign that the GPU is not heavily loaded and yet this runs on 8 tablet-class cores on the XB1 but not on my 95Watt desktop CPU?
4xMSAA is destroying the frame rate. Other benchmarks with the same GPU are getting anywhere from 60-100fps.
No, its not. While it may be generally correct that lots of games (which are GPU-limited) benefit greatly from turning the AA down, Horizon 3 seems to be generally CPU-bound and so lots of reports (including my own testing) are that MSAA makes almost no difference to perf. The GPU isn't being maxed out and has spare processing to sampling multiple times on the polygon edges. This is a perf bug that lots of people are getting and wasn't solved for all system by the driver update (which reports from pre-release are that even more people were getting exactly this stuttering issue with perf holes before the driver update).
4xMSAA + FXAA? It's weird that they even offer both simultaneously. Disable FXAA and just use MSAAx4. Or the other way around but FXAA is typically less spectacular, though more economic in FPS
FXAA + MSAA is generally bad (the argument: MSAA removes the aliased shapes that FXAA looks for so why even bother running that pass?) is the traditional wisdom. But if you look at the extent of the foliage (where the edge of the object isn't the polygon/quad boundary but the texture transparency bit) and shader aliasing (when the light blows something out so it's not a polygon edge that's aliasing but the shader adding harsh gradients) in this game, there is clearly a case for running FXAA to at least reduce the aliasing of those elements here, even with MSAA making sure the polygon edges aren't aliased.
This is the new wisdom [see note in link] and why temporal solutions are going to be the future: MSAA was great when aliasing was an issue at polygon boundaries (as we even brute-forced SSAA for semi-transparent quads which is how games got round foliage issues before - a rather expensive approach but effective) but now we've got shader aliasing all over the place, it's time to look at new solutions.
The abnormally high system requirements for these Xbox One PC ports seems fucking mind-boggling. If they continue to optimize the PC versions this poorly, people are going to start ignoring them. Maybe that's part of their plan to get more people to buy One's, but it just makes them look lazy.
Well, time for me to start work on a small new (high perf 3D) engine and *looks at example of 1st party DX12 engines coming out of MS*, I guess I'm going to be getting very familiar with Vulkan over the next couple of years then!
You have to wonder if MS realise they actually need to show why DX12 is the actual threaded path forward for the industry. Apple are pushing Metal, Sony have their GNM/GNMX with PSSL, and everyone is sort of ok with Vulkan (in as much as Khronos continues to be a threat, even if OpenGL is not something with much traction outside of porting to other PC OS).
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