We are submitting the patch to Sony on Monday, then we’ll see how long it takes to get approved and published.

We’ll keep you posted as we continue work on this patch!”

Any news, if the patch will be available on Nov 10th? :)

DSR is quite a bit more expensive than MSAA… Because all you’re doing is rendering the game at a higher resolution and scaling down. With MSAA, the scene is edge detected and super-sampled in those areas, reducing the workload needed. So in terms of anti-aliasing itself, MSAA is more efficient for a given level of aliasing reduction. BUT, DSR will give you a cleaner overall image because it’s not just anti-aliasing things but also sampling textures at a higher detail, and often models are loaded in at a high detail LOD due to the resolution being rendered.

So it’s a choice between lower performance and slightly better image quality versus decent performance and less aliasing alone.

I would be very interested in a “Limited Run Games” release. It’s been quite successful for all limited runs that came out!

I completely understand, although I, and many others, would appreciate if we had the choice.

Thanks.

Yes, the TV will upscale, but (as I understand your article) you will generate a higher quality 1080p image over the higher resolution choice (better AA, higher LODs etc.). Also, some (read: a especially my) TVs have much higher input lag in native 4k mode. My TV in 1080p game mode does not
actually upscale the image to a nice 4k image, but plain double the pixels on each axis (nearest neighbor upscale if you will). Although I can see a difference between a 4k rendered image and a 1080p one, the difference for me does not warrant the loss in IQ or frame rate (even at 65″).

But if you play in 1080p on a 4k TV … the image is then upscaled from 1080p to 4k. You aren’t going to avoid upscaling.

We are working out the details of the user interface still; we are mostly just doing technical work right now to make the rendering modes work.

On the plain PS4 one can choose the output resolution. Is this connected to this setting for us to choose?

-chris

We may not be able to, for platform reasons. We’ll see.

I want to be able to play on 1440p (and, potentially, resolutions higher than that) rather than 1080p 4x MSAA. Or maybe someone wants to play the game at 1080p 4x AA with additional graphical fidelity.

Will you let us choose between either?

sorry for posting my question in this forum – found no other place yet (mail etc.).
I have a question regarding to the NVIDIA Ansel update, which is available on steam since August 22nd.
When will this update be available at the humblebundle site, where I have downloaded the game installer?

Thanks in advance.

I use GTX 970’s in SLI on my gaming PC, so what I do is DSR 1440 –>108op downsampling (which has a weak sort of supersampling AA effect), plus I also use at least 2x MSAA, preferably more and wherever possible 2x Sparse Grid SuperSampling as well. The resulting image is very nice and the various forms of AA working together clean up the image more overall than any one of them could alone.

Now, I realise you can’t expect that much out of a console, but I think 1440–>1080p plus 2x MSAA should be very doable for a game like the witness on PS4 pro.

Yeah, we are talking about 1440 with worse AA versus 1080 with better AA. It’s not obvious.

The Witness is playable but I would not want to play an action game this way. It actually feels like more than 55ms to me but I haven’t measured it.
Hopefully they will patch the firmware to fix this.

This particular TV has a lot more input latency in HDR mode than I would like. I wouldn’t consider it playable for an action game. But hopefully they will issue a firmware update that fixes this via an HDR game mode (I think some other TVs have done that already).

Imho because games are getting greedier in term of computing power over time and I guess some developers/editors will end up not wanting to spend time/money in backward compatibility and will condition the availability of their game on PS4 to the possibility to not implement this compatibility.

But may be I’m taking the problem the wrong way and Sony has more to offer to the editors in term of visibility which place him on the strong side of negotiations.

Or may be I just see evil everywhere :-)

Good to hear these are still in the plan! +1 Mac!

1440 downscaled will look better than native 1080. That’s not the question though. It’s whether or not 1440 downscaled looks better than just using better AA. I assume that the main benefit you get from downsampling is just better AA anyway right? It’s effectively just SSAA as opposed to MSAA. By my understanding at least.

If it’s a choice between higher resolution or better AA (which it sounds like it will be) I’d be very surprised if AA was the better way to go in any situation. Even if you’re not close enough to be able to see much of a difference between 4k and 1080, it’s not as if your eyes are somehow only seeing every other pixel or something. You’re still getting subtle benefits from that extra resolution. The most tangible is less need for AA.

It would have to be in a future patch … we don’t know when that will be yet (we are mainly focused on the launch right now).

We haven’t figured this out yet.

Well, I game on console and PC. Use a 1080p TV for both and run nearly all my PC games @ 1440p with DSR downscaling plus some MSAA. Looks much better than native 1080p to my eyes.

Great that you are continuing to support your games!

We are working on these still … we’ll announce when we have something concrete to say!

Thank you :) Great job on the game btw and future patches.

I don’t know why you would not believe Sony on this. They control the platform and can dictate what developers are allowed to do on the platform.

We are still working on the interface for switching between modes, but we will take ideas like this into account. Ultimately it might not matter, it might always be better for this game to render at the highest resolution. Unclear yet.

Our patch will be free to anyone who owns the game. I don’t know how it works for anyone else!

It is a possibility. It’s just that you start to get into diminishing returns at that point, so it may be better to spend the GPU power a different way. But we’ll do whatever produces the overall best result. (It’s also not clear to me that 1440p 2x MSAA downscaled to 1080 would not just be worse than 1080p 4x MSAA … but we could try it some time and compare.)

In any case, regardless of that, I absolutely loved the game and I will eventually be picking up a PS4 Pro, so I am thrilled you’re going to the effort of doing a patch (and a thorough one at that) for the game. I’ll probably have forgotten half of the puzzles by then so I’ll be sure to do another playthrough.

I’d say the best PS4 Pro news is that it had Wireless AC support. Unlike the UHD BR drive, that actually has an impact on gaming. :)

Is it technically possible to manually pick the option of 1080p (with possible better visuals) when using a 4K TV? And will you allow this?

In all cases it would be pretty neat to compare the two. But I also know that some people with smaller 4K TVs viewed at a distance might not be able to appreciate the finer resolution. You might ask why they have a 4K TV at all – that’s just how the market is going, and the better quality panels with HDR etc. are increasingly only on 4K TVs. So I just wondered.

Thanks

But: I would like to be able to switch between the different display modes on a 4K display if possible. Just to be able to compare them and select the one that offers the best result for my taste.

Despite Sony promises I bet a bottle of Ruinart with a friend that by next September a game exclusive to PS4 pro (said without retro compatibility on PS4) will be announced.
I’d be curious to have your opinion an this if you’re willing/allowed to talked about it.

TAA actually looks its best when things aren’t in motion (or when there’s very little motion). It’s possible to do TAA without motion vectors at all with some smart filtering (comparing with previous frames), although that only yields benefits with unmoving or near-unmoving (in screen space) objects.

It also complements dynamic resolution scaling beautifully, but if you already have a good upscaling solution, that may not be of interest to you.

And since the style of The Witness, from what I’ve seen, makes it less prone to specular aliasing and the like, I can see why MSAA might be a sufficient — and even good — solution in your case.

Is handling these display variations that PS4 Pro enables challenging to implement? It seems like it would still be fairly straightforward compared to the myriad of PC configurations…

I dunno yet what will happen in that case. We would probably just let the PS4 Pro do whatever it does by default, but I am not sure what that is.

We worked hard to make the workload always fit beneath a certain size so that we can have a solid frame rate.
I think that’s better than dynamic resolution scaling for high-end platforms. (We do dynamic resolution on low-end platforms, such as the Low Quality setting on the PC).

As for TAA, I don’t totally like the idea of it. If you think about it, TAA is basically a form of motion blur. I prefer to do things that are solid and work well even without motion!

Also, at 60hz TAA should be quite convincing and a lot cheaper than MSAA.

Have you considered working with Limited Run Games for a physical release? Great job on a fantastic game and I am delighted we are getting a PS4 Pro patch. Thank you.

It looks unlikely. We talked with some publishers about doing it, but there was never a situation that seemed very good for us. Sometime in the future, if we do a physical release, it’d be a small limited run, but I don’t know the chances of that; there are no plans at this time.

Well, there are always tradeoffs. A lot of peoples’ TVs won’t do 120fps, for example; of those that do, maybe some of them don’t take a 120Hz signal over HDMI, and instead just frame-interpolate or whatever.

But if we render at higher visual quality, we know that everyone with a PS4 Pro can get that benefit.

With something like HDR, it’s an in-between case; not everyone can get the benefit, but it also doesn’t cost any performance really, so it’s not like we are giving up anything big to support HDR.

Menus, subtitles, the cursor and frame around the border of the screen when tracing puzzles, and … maybe other stuff I am forgetting. The Witness is a game that is pretty light on UI generally, but what is there we want to look good (especially text — text looks really nice in 4k!)