Avowed - Digital Foundry Tech Review - PC/Xbox Series X|S Tested!

Obsidian's latest adventure - Avowed - fully taps into Unreal Engine 5, delivering a visually accomplished and polished experience. The PC version scales beyond consoles, but how well does it run on mainstream and high-end hardware? And how well does the game look and run on Xbox Series X and Series S consoles? John Linneman has the DF review.

00:00 - Introduction
01:08 - The Basics
02:57 - Nanite Works Wonders in Avowed
06:15 - Lumen Shines
07:32 - Xbox Mode Comparisons
11:10 - Xbox Performance Testing
12:32 - Let's Talk PC
15:48 - The Alex Battaglia PC Analysis
24:04 - Let's Wrap This Up

[isned]

In case anyone is wondering, the ground is sometimes invisible in the software lumen scene visualizer because software lumen doesn't include height map based terrain directly in the distance field scene. It still gets traced against in a preprocessing step where the height map gets raymarched, so there isn't light passing through the ground, but it doesn't have a distance field so it is missing in some diagnostic modes. It looks like hardware lumen throws everything into one big acceleration structure, so that's why the terrain shows up there.

[josephchrisman]

“Worlds larger than a small hallway” killed me

[TheeCambion]

why are we testing games on 5080s and 5090s like 5 people have those gpus come

[JoeNokers]

Having at least one AMD card and Intel card in the roundups would be really nice to see how driver support is for those vendors. As it stands this roundup is missing crucial information for about 15% of consumers.

[nsinghc]

John: This game is good. This game is very good.
Alex: So this game has issues.

[zakwojnar]

Regarding the lack of water reflections in performance mode, I honestly prefer that. Screen space reflections in large bodies of water get so occluded by camera movement, it's almost always more distracting to me than a super-basic cube map. One day, we'll have enough commonplace ray tracing that it won't matter, but for now, I'd prefer a blurry cube map or other fake solution over SSR.

[Longlostpuss]

I think gaming is in a bit of a mess.

With all the power on tap, we should not be seeing any issues at all running games at 1080p, let alone talking about the state of 4K gaming still, even with this mighty 5090 in the mix.

Nothing seems to run as it should.

[jorge]

Wow those 27mins went by fast. I was surprised when the video ended.

[JoseMonkeys]

Im so happy with my Series X. Game Pass is the best deal in gaming, no doubt.

[KingShotgunHobo]

UE5 at a technoparty: TURN UP THE NOISE!

[christopherparks]

John bringing his husky, post sickness ASMR voice for this review

[Wolfie_]

I will bring a bit of context because it seems people have something against Alex and automatically think bad about anything he says.

He is NOT recommending you play at 60 FPS 1080p Ultra Performance DLSS.

In order to test CPU loads which are usually affected by Shader Compilation or Traversal Stutters, you must keep the CPU load as high as possible while the GPU load is as low as possible. You keep the settings at Ultra because that means ALL the possible effects will have to be loaded causing Shader Compilation if there is any, but you maintain the GPU load as low as possible by running DLSS ultra performance at 1080.

When you do this any performance issue is related to the CPU and not the GPU. Now that you know the minimum performance that your CPU can deliver without hitching or issues, you can enable the rest of the features back in the GPU trying to balance the load of both to achieve a smooth experience.

Meaning you can now set the game at a higher resolution with a better DLSS setting such as Quality or Balanced in order to achieve a GPU load close to 99% while knowing your CPU won't get in the way.

[XgamerdaveX]

Pop-in has always been my biggest visual bugbear. I’m glad nanite has come along to solve this issue.

[CampbellYoungblood]

Boycott Lumen Reflections!! It’s not right to have severed employees making our reflections.

[spyro]

I really love the approach of two people taking a look at this from different angles. Really balances this out in a very nice way. Feeling perfectly informed from you. :)

[Metalkoopa]

never forget when John said "runs well on my pc" while using a top end intel cpu and a 4090 😂😂😂

[mckidney]

Since I always forget, then I will put it here:
- Prioritize Epic on Shadow Quality, Reflection Quality and Global Illumination.
- Enable HW raytracing.
- Enable frame limiter in case the performance is below Refresh Rate and/or Reflex to avoid stutters.

I really wish recommendations like this were also added to DF Clips.

[seydaneen]

i don't even know much about this game but every time I've seen that art of the skeleton with the patches of color it makes me wanna play it

[Luke-fxgw]

Still puzzled why we havnt had a kingdom come deliverance 2 tech analysis from Alex considering its such a well optimised game compared to the first.

[Makoto]

Happy to hear that Xbox Series S has a steady 30 fps. I don't mind 30 as long as its stable.