Alien: Isolation - Video Card Performance Review @ [H]

Nice review. My aging 660ti is starting to be an issue in a few games, so it's nice to see a newer title being so efficient. That said, WTF is FXAA doing to the button outline in this screenshot? It's made the square around the button bulge for some reason:
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Modred189 said:
Nice review. My aging 660ti is starting to be an issue in a few games, so it's nice to see a newer title being so efficient. That said, WTF is FXAA doing to the button outline in this screenshot? It's made the square around the button bulge for some reason:
http://www.hardocp.com/images/articles/1415263227VkpLJMz5Ci_7_12_l.jpg
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There's an environmental heat haze wavy effect in the game, it just happened to appear in the screenshot. I had to be quick taking the screenshot cause the green light flashes on and off, and it just happened to intersect in my screenshot, like looking through a lens.
 
wabbitseason said:
Great review.

This is why people despise Nvidia:
AMD had a heavy hand in the development of this game in order to push DX11 graphics features and introduce some of AMD's own technology into the game. While some of these 3D graphical effects are AMD created, these are done under DirectCompute so that these work on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. There are no proprietary graphics effects in this game, everything can be rendered equally on NVIDIA or AMD GPUs given the proper DirectX feature level support. Please take note of this NVIDIA! This is how you move gaming forward which betters the entire industry, not just the Green stock price!
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I like seeing you give credit where credit is due, and criticism where it is not.
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Couldn't agree more. Perhaps if reviewers pointed this out more often, Nvidia would...


No, actually, they still wouldn't. :(
 
Brent_Justice said:
There's an environmental heat haze wavy effect in the game, it just happened to appear in the screenshot. I had to be quick taking the screenshot cause the green light flashes on and off, and it just happened to intersect in my screenshot, like looking through a lens.
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Hah! That's kind of funny.
 
Morphological antialiasing was a technique developed by an Intel graphics researcher. SMAA was derived from a morphological AA implementation done by a Spanish student unaffiliated with AMD, and SMAA was co-developed by Spanish researchers and Crytek.

SMAA was not "born out of AMD's morphological AA". It's actually derived from work done by Intel.
 
Modred189 said:
Nice review. My aging 660ti is starting to be an issue in a few games, so it's nice to see a newer title being so efficient. That said, WTF is FXAA doing to the button outline in this screenshot? It's made the square around the button bulge for some reason:
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Even though I have a 280X I was using FXAA by default and after reading the article turned on SMAA T2x and the game looked so much better!

One graphic that I have turned off is film grain, its awful, why do people like it? Or do developers think gamers will like it? It was also in Aliens: Colonial Marines and made a already shitty looking game look shittier!
 
Odellus said:
that's pretty interesting. wonder why thief benefits so much from it and origins doesn't, considering they're on the same engine.
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I believe SE & AMD run a heavily modified version of the Unreal engine for Thief. They did go as far as adding Mantle to it. (Much to the chagrin of epic I'm sure!)

Under mantle the game is phenomenally smooth with min. FPS doubling and CPU cores are load balanced (even HT cores on my i7), so I'd wager some of those optimization benefits can also be used on the DX version.
 
ICOM said:
So...am I to understand this game is challenging? As though it's a bad thing?
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It's a good and bad thing. The alien is a little too persistent in my opinion--it basically follows you on a tether through the vents of the station just waiting for you to make it come out with some kind of noise, and on the harder difficulties it just plain comes out of the vents and stalks the hallways relentlessly. This is all pants-crappingly scary at first until you get caught out one time and hide behind some random flipped over table that doesn't even completely cover you and the alien just walks right on by.

As you progress through the game you learn that there's actually many more people on the station that the alien could have been stalking as well, but for some reason he's got a hardon for you and never leaves you alone.

The game would have been MUCH better if the alien wasn't so relentless in its pursuit of you and you alone. This game cranks up the tension to 11 so much that after a little while you don't even care or feel it anymore. It needed more periods of relief from the alien to heighten the tension of actually having it around. It's kind of a standard Pacing 101 thing in movies and games that this game fails at.

The game is still excellent in spite of that, though.
 
Was on the fence with this one, and picked it up yesterday (largely due to positive comments here). Great game. Has had me on the edge of my seat since started playing. Great graphics and atmosphere; fun gameplay.

I do agree that they could have slowed down the pacing a bit to increase the suspense. I'm only about 30% through the game, but once you encounter the Alien it's basically balls out, non-stop cat and mouse. Also, weird that the Alien pays other humans around little attention -- would have also made for some fun mechanics e.g. lead the alien to a bunch of other humans as a distraction and watch them get torn up.
 
harmattan said:
I do agree that they could have slowed down the pacing a bit to increase the suspense. I'm only about 30% through the game, but once you encounter the Alien it's basically balls out, non-stop cat and mouse. Also, weird that the Alien pays other humans around little attention -- would have also made for some fun mechanics e.g. lead the alien to a bunch of other humans as a distraction and watch them get torn up.
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You can use the ALIEN against other humans by throwing a noisemaker their way.
 
ICOM said:
So...am I to understand this game is challenging? As though it's a bad thing?
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it's definitely challenging even on the lowest difficulty setting...at least until you get the flamethrower around mid-game...then the alien becomes much less of an annoyance
 
Yeah you need to throw a noisemaker into the crowd without being seen yourself. If someone sees you or shoots at you the Alien will notice you too and will kill you after dealing with them or even come after your first. I had one section in an atrium where I tried sneaking past the people twice only to get shot in the back of the head both times. I got tired of it and just tossed a noisemaker into the middle of the room and hid outside of it until the Alien finished dealing with them and then left the scene.

My favorite tense moment so far was in the Medbay. I got to a door I was supposed to go through and found that it was locked and I had to backtrack somewhere else to open it (of course). I turned to go back through the hallway and there were a couple people in there now. I hid behind the bulkhead in the hallway as one of them walked right past me and started searching a box on top of a medical gurney. I was trying to figure out how to sneak out of there without being seen by the other guy when I heard the alien drop down in the other room and kill the other guy. But now I'm between the guy searching the box and the alien. The alien runs right by me and starts to kill the guy right in front of my face, I immediately sneak and hide under a different gurney only 5 feet away from him, thinking there was no way he didn't see me. He wound up walking right past me again and going back in the vents.
 
Yknow that feeling when you were little playing hide and seek. Whenever someone is close to your hiding spot you get that sudden urge to pee. :D

I haven't played this game but it sounds like I'll need to pack a urinal next to my comp :p:D
 
wonderfield said:
But where is credit being paid to NVIDIA for opening FXAA — which this game implements — to everyone?
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FXAA has been around for a long, long time. Go back to reviews from that era and bask in the wild praise heaped on Nvidia for it. FXAA is atrocious and always has been. So is MLAA, btw. Only SMAA is actually revolutionary. You're just trolling, though, my bad.
 
wabbitseason said:
FXAA has been around for a long, long time. Go back to reviews from that era and bask in the wild praise heaped on Nvidia for it. FXAA is atrocious and always has been. So is MLAA, btw. Only SMAA is actually revolutionary. You're just trolling, though, my bad.
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FXAA is nice because it is cheap. And some games (particularly those with movie grain) don't suffer too much from IQ degradation. There are also some people (myself included) that aren't as IQ sensitive and just don't notice it much.
 
im running two 7770s(1GBs) in CF and the game runs perfect at max settings with a solid 60FPS. :D
so yeah, this game does not need a lot of GPU power.
 
Deferred rendering is great for performance, I love how fast and good this game runs. Shadows are like 90% of the realism for me when it comes to visuals.
 
polonyc2 said:
it's definitely challenging even on the lowest difficulty setting...at least until you get the flamethrower around mid-game...then the alien becomes much less of an annoyance
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Yeah but you don't have a lot of flamethrower fuel, at least on hard level. I also found it makes the ALIEN more aggressive after you use the flamethrower on it.
 
I just finished the game and it was great, a new favorite. That IGN review really disappoints as I used to trust that site for game reviews, not anymore now.

I also appreciate the HardOCP article too. I didn't realize I was using the less optimal AA setting till I was quarter way through the game.
 
misterbobby said:
DSR does not really do anything for the aliasing in this game.
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I beg to differ; I tested 1440p up to 4k and noticed dramatic reduction in aliasing. Though on a 24" monitor. Still, from your sig you have a 23"

Have not played much of the game yet

EDIT: Though indeed, the big one, specular aliasing, is noticeable
 
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I don't know about you guys, but it occurred to me the thing that makes the aliasing so noticeable on this game is where the light reflects off of metal surfaces (like the tops of lockers) there is aliasing and my attention is drawn to it by the "breathing" effect of the player character. If you stand completely still and look at the top of a lit surface you will see it moves up and down with the breathing effect and it is like yelling at you "Hey, look at these massive jaggies right here!".
 
Lord_Exodia said:
AMD made mantle open to anyone but Nvidia decided to not use it. They could write it into their drivers at any time if they change their mind.
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+1

But well all know Nvidia won't unless hell freezes over. It would give some kudos to AMD/ATI which Nvidia is loath to do.

Nvidia makes great products, don't get me wrong, but I dislike their tactics in business. I really dislike all the hate that gets tossed at AMD when so much gets overlooked from Nvidia
 
I didn't read this article when it released a month ago and stumbled upon it while searching/researching something else. In case anyone else stumbles upon it or reads the comments in the future I want to make one thing clear:

Mantle is NOT open. It requires a GCN based card to work. It is not open for nVidia to use and I wish this huge lie would die already. Is AMD open to letting other vendors use it? Yes. Can they? NO, they cannot, at least not as it stands right now. Even if nVidia wanted to use it they could not. Stop spreading this lie that it's an open standard and that it's all on nVidia's shoulders to support it.

Will it become open or vendor agnostic? Perhaps. That appears to be AMDs long term plan. However, as it stands now in it's current form it is most certainly not open and the papers regarding its development and specifications are not available to the general public.
 
This game has very good graphics and is easy to run. I think the closed environment helps.
 
A bit of a necropost, I know, but on page 2, "Game Settings", the review states:

"Finally is the Deep Color option. This actually turns on the ability for this game to be rendered at 10-bit (10bpp) or 30-bit color. Most people have 8-bit LCD panels, or 8-bit with FRC. On more expensive professional displays there are true 10-bit panels out there with full SRGB and such. If you have a true 10-bit panel (no 8-bit with FRC) and a video card that supports it, this game can take advantage of the larger color palette. If you view screenshot comparisons on an 8-bit panel you won't see any difference."

However, some good photos taken by zone74 in a recent post did show the difference, which can be seen as the removal of banding from light halos. From what I hear that's pretty much the only difference you'll see anywhere with 10bit color.

I have not been able to find any performance comparison of only deep color on vs deep color off with all other settings the same, so I don't have any idea how much, if any, performance cost it has.

Alien Isolation, as far as I know, remains the only game with 10 bit color as an option.
 
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