Digital Foundry: Tomb Raider Trilogy: Stadia's Most Impressive Ports? Full Xbox One X Comparisons!

severianb · Dec 5, 2019

Phellps said:
I don't see the appeal of Stadia when it's games are running too close to consoles, to be honest.

Alex was being kind when he gave the Stadia version a good overall review.

It's supposedly got this 10TF GPU, but compared to the 6TF X1X, the Stadia version has:

Worse Textures.
NO Volumetric lighting (this is disgusting. Look at the scene where Lara is swimming through a bunch of skulls and bones suspended in water, looks horrible)
The lack of texture filtering on the floor is jarring.

With the Stadia's supposed horsepower, it should be wiping the floor with the X1X.... and it's actually worse. Wow.

severianb · Dec 5, 2019

Flappy Pannus said:
Would love to see the Definitive Version of 2013 Tomb Raider on the PC with tesselation. Doubt it will happen, but this shows there's basically a 'PC version' of this out there.

Hell no. OG PC Lara is the best. Why did they have to screw up her face? They should have just kept the 2013 PC Tomb Raider Lara in all the games. I don't get it.
But yeah.... that tessellation is sweet. Time to dust off that old HD7950-powered PC I installed this on and replay the best version of Lara again.

WhtR88t · Dec 5, 2019

Phellps said:
I don't see the appeal of Stadia when it's games are running too close to consoles, to be honest.

It's crazy to me this is an issue considering they were touting it as the same power as the next gen consoles.

I guess they'll need to update the servers to support whatever games we're going to be playing on PS5.

OG_Thrills · Dec 5, 2019

FutureLarking said:
That's not how things work at all. The actually streaming is carried out by a dedicated piece of hardware, it doesn't care about graphical features being implemented.

Did you watch the vid? There was a lot missing in the straight comparison. The XB1X / dedicated hardware is on another echelon in comparison.

chandoog · Dec 5, 2019

Dictator said:
One thing to say here - SOTR is definitely not using close to PC's ultra settings. It has no HBAO+, no tessellation, no Screen Space shadows and definitely no Ray Traced shadows.
But thanks for the summary chandoog :)

Oh whoops, that was just a bit of editorializing based on that side by side where DoF looked like PC Ultra :p

Will modify that.

Zips · Dec 5, 2019

Wow... that doesn't actually sound enticing at all.

And what the actual hell happened to TR2013? Graphical settings removed or even scaled back? Can't maintain UHD resolutions? What?

Dreamwriter · Dec 5, 2019

Zips said:
Wow... that doesn't actually sound enticing at all.

And what the actual hell happened to TR2013? Graphical settings removed or even scaled back? Can't maintain UHD resolutions? What?

That was a mistake in the article, TR2014 does have the graphic settings. It's in "high performance" that uses the dynamic resolutions to maintain a locked 60fps, the game also has a "high resolution" mode that has a locked 4k (I *think* at 30fps but not sure).

zoku88 · Dec 5, 2019

I wonder how these compare to the existing Linux ports. Unfortunately, not many people do comprehensive benchmarks on Linux. I could only find basic fps ones and they don't really elaborate on settings.

thebishop · Dec 5, 2019

Linus815 said:
perhaps porting these games to Vulkan is not something that the devs spent too much time/effort on maybe?

This is my thought. And not to say "lazy devs", just that these games weren't designed for Vulkan in the first place.

I'm curious to see how Rage2 compares, which only offers a Vulkan renderer on PC.

Pasha · Dec 5, 2019

This is incredibly unimpressive for a 10TF system.

Deleted member 25042 · Dec 5, 2019

Google has some explaining to do.
I have no idea how they can get these sorts of results with the advertised hardware.

Belthazar90 · Dec 5, 2019

I don't understand Stadia, at all. I mean, isn't its whole purpose to run the games on max settings on low spec PCs/phones through streaming? I mean, this all looks like what a very average and affordable PC can pull off (without the latency obviously) or even a $300~500 console.

PS: why are people calling those ports? Isn't those just the PC versions running at a Google datacenter?

Dark1x · Dec 5, 2019

Belthazar90 said:
I don't understand Stadia, at all. I mean, isn't its whole purpose to run the games on max settings on low spec PCs/phones through streaming? I mean, this all looks like what a very average and affordable PC can pull off (without the latency obviously) or even a $300~500 console.

PS: why are people calling those ports? Isn't those just the PC versions running at a Google datacenter?

Nope. Not at all. They're ported to Stadia spec hardware running Vulkan.

Windrunner · Dec 5, 2019

I thought the whole point of Stadia was 4K/60 with all the bells and whistles. If it's already getting out-classed by the Xbox One X with PS5 and Scarlett a year out from release then that's not encouraging. Regardless of launch teething issues as an explanation for this, the promised high end PC experience is not being realised.

horkrux · Dec 5, 2019

I don't think they could all collectively fuck up hard enough to make these 10TF seem like 5. You probably simply don't actually get the full resources. They've lied about the 4K 60, why not also lie about actual allocation per client.

Fezan · Dec 5, 2019

Dark1x said:
Baffling isn't it?

Dark1x is it possible stadia is running emulated Windows version or one stadia machine is running two stadia instances hence the lower than expected performance?

thebishop · Dec 5, 2019

Dark1x said:
Nope. Not at all. They're ported to Stadia spec hardware running Vulkan.

I'm curious how different the Stadia port is from the existing Linux port of Shadow. Phoronix got an avg of 80fps on a vega64 running 1080p on the highest settings. It seems like the profile locked into Stadia is far more conservative.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=shadow-tomb-raider&num=4

Meatwad · Dec 5, 2019

tapedeck said:
Seems to be par for the course so far..again, I have absolutely no idea what the appeal of Stadia is or who it's supposed to be aimed at..

The idea behind Stadia is to remove ownership completely from the equation and transform gaming 100% into a service. Any thoughts as to how this would actually benefit consumers were merely secondary

Zelus · Dec 5, 2019

bane833 said:
It's almost like all those promises were just PR bullshit.

What???????

FutureLarking · Dec 5, 2019

OG_Thrills said:
Did you watch the vid? There was a lot missing in the straight comparison. The XB1X / dedicated hardware is on another echelon in comparison.

which has nothing to do with your original point of getting it to stream. It will quite happily stream the XB1X output if it was given it to stream

Flappy Pannus · Dec 7, 2019

severianb said:
Hell no. OG PC Lara is the best. Why did they have to screw up her face? They should have just kept the 2013 PC Tomb Raider Lara in all the games. I don't get it.
But yeah.... that tessellation is sweet. Time to dust off that old HD7950-powered PC I installed this on and replay the best version of Lara again.

Oh yeah I agree on Lara, she looks better in the PC (for the most part - the DE has sub-surface scattering) - which is why I'd like a meld of the two versions. There were definite upgrades in some of the environments in terms of foilage density/animation though. And as said if they could reduce the TressFX impact that would be a bonus.

Digital Foundry: Tomb Raider Trilogy: Stadia's Most Impressive Ports? Full Xbox One X Comparisons!

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