Test Builds for anyone interested; note that Unreal Engine needs to be set to Borderless Fullscreen in-game before you enable a Waitable SwapChain or it’s going to try to do a fullscreen mode switch once every frame until you restart the game (said repeated attempts to mode switch every frame actually causes the engine to run out of memory eventually).
SpecialK32.7z (6.3 MB) SpecialK64.7z (7.6 MB)
Looking mighty good 
I need to take it for a spin later though – I really don’t have any fun game to play nowadays so there’s been little gaming the last few weeks for me.
And on that note, have you thrown an eye on Halo: The Master Chief Collection any? That is a weird one – the launcher/main menu technically runs on one engine, and then all the individual games seemingly runs on their own little engine(s) that hooks into the main engine somehow.
Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary and Halo 2 Anniversary also apparently runs two engines in realtime simultaneously or something, according to PCGW.
So the end result is a mismatch of Unreal Engine, Halo Engine, and Saber3D Engine running in various mixed modes depending on game and graphical settings and whatnot.
SK’s frame limiter seems to work, but the various swapchain management overrides doesn’t. Although it’s not a major concern as this game actually makes use of Discard (Flip) by default on my system.
On another note, the Controlled Folder Access feature of Windows 10 is… quite something… It’s surprising just how many applications it prevents from writing to the Documents folder. So far it have prevented Uplay, ShareX, FFMPEG, NieR: Automata, Halo: The Master Chief Collection (closed beta), and once even Explorer itself from writing to the folder.
And I’ve just had it running for like a day or two and barely launched any games or applications…
Sounds like what the re-release of the Monkey Island game does things where you just press a button and it instantly switches between the old and new game because it’s running both in the back-end of the engine in some way so it just shifts from one to the other.
Don’t know what Halo 2 Anniversary does though but from what I am hearing the enhanced version of Halo 1 runs over the original port which works fairly well but it doesn’t quite match up with collisions and other data so it’s less impressive than what they achieved with the second game.
Need to pick that up come to think of it soon as they’re done with Halo 4 and updates to the existing content.
Suppose Bungie themselves are doing Destiny now, would be nice to have some of their older titles remade though I suppose fan fixes and efforts plus open source data has allowed some of it like for Marathon.
And however Halo Infinite will turn out, could be interesting long as 343 don’t get too stuck in the open world formula that’s currently going on now ha ha.
EDIT: Ah and the new Leisure Suit Larry game is out speaking of old adventure titles.
Shame Al Lowe didn’t part on the best of terms with the remake of the first game and then getting stopped from selling the source code too.
From the sounds of it the two new ones are solid but miss the point of the games, somehow.
(“Larry is a loser.” It’s pretty simple ha ha.)
And all the rest of Sierra’s older library of games much as the obscure trial and error and error and error puzzles drove players insane. 
(Leading to in part I believe the creation of Lucas Arts for a few years before the adventure genre declined.)
Oh and someone benchmarked Legion early.
EDIT: Hmm actually several videos available must be some preview thing.
Think the Ultimate edition unlocked early too but the base game is already 60 Euro then 90 Euro for the season pass content (“Gold edition”) which is already way above normal pricing.
Then I think it’s 120 Euro for Ultimate with a small pre-order discount (Only for this edition.) which on top of the Gold edition has a bunch of smaller extras and this two day early unlock.
(Really not worth the cost.)
You can also do that 100 Ubi-coins for a 20% discount but conveniently that particular function is under maintenance until later today for some reason.
(Store itself and all that works fine.)
EDIT: And more GPU rumors.
The animation work in that WD benchmark
Yeah I hear that on the various forums I’ve been reading from and getting info via, it’s probably built up from the engine in the former games eh what’s it called again Disrupt as a fusion of Anvil (AC3/AC4) and Dunia (FC3/FC4) I think so there’s some legacy and older stuff as a result.
Watch_Dogs 2 had some variety but not the greatest animation quality so another four or five years on and yeah that and it seems the textures are getting a lot of criticism now.
(There should be a texture pack as a optional DLC if that’s already available but they don’t always make that much of a difference.)
EDIT: Could do with a engine overhaul like what Anvil had for Assassin’s Creed 3 and then again for Origins but from memory it’s a similar problem with a large amount of animations but the actual feel or quality to how these look and sync up isn’t the greatest.
Think For Honor had some dynamic technique here but I don’t know if Ubisoft has been using that for much else.
Hmm wonder what will mean for Far Cry 6 and Dunia too and I suppose in a few weeks it’ll be possible to compare against Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and this latest game on the new Anvil engine.
Ubisoft has quite a few internal game engines between it’s studios though I suppose it’s not exactly a bad thing.
Dunia
Disrupt
Anvil
Snowdrop
Probably some others but I think that’s the major ones although Snowdrop isn’t used as much outside of Massive and Division.
(Somehow ended up in the South Park game though.)
EDIT: Scimitar for Prince of Persia but that’s probably not happening (No idea what the remake of Sands of Time is running on come to think of it.) and then I guess they had some work on UE2 and UE3 for a while.
If they ever do make a new actual Splinter Cell game rather than Sam Fisher is in every Ubisoft franchise but doesn’t get his own game maybe they’ll be using Anvil like what Wildlands and Breakpoint did.
I think a better option than relying on EDID is to either get a colorimeter and measure yourself, or trust the reviewers like rtings etc, looking at reviews though i’m pretty confident that most displays are minimum 93-94% DCI-P3.
Hmm interesting, with Path of exile at least just having it injected but not doing anything, leads to weird sub 12fps 0.1%-1% frametime lows when spells/mobs are loaded when they pop-up, leading to a truly horrible experience (visible stutter even with gsync), seems i gotta use RTSS framelimiter then as it doesn’t have this issue.
Hmm Uplay updated now it’s Ubisoft Connect.
Merging a few features into one and a couple of other changes.
Sooo anyone going to bring up how Cyberpunk was delayed again? 
Really!? I thought it went gold already… Doesn’t that technically mean that they are only delaying the day one patch? Still really sucks though…
It’s better than what happened to Gothic 3 but it seemed obvious, they failed certification once already earlier this years or so it’s stated but unconfirmed.
I assume it’s a very problematic situation with the current-gen console builds and the games scope while less than Witcher 3 (Said to be about half the size of the main story though the city areas and surroundings seem more dense environment wise.) implements a lot of new ideas and first for CD Project RED.
As such the amount of polish and QA must be massive and I wasn’t expecting it to go very well in fact I expected a very rough launch unless it was delayed further possibly even cancelling the current-gen console builds but there’s too much invested in these for that to be viable.
EDIT: As to Gothic 3 well…
Piranha Bytes made a much larger game than they had thus far ran well over time and I presume budget and Jowood was starting to struggle financially.
Game went gold and hit reviews and bombed terribly but it hadn’t hit stores yet so Jowood did a recall and PB had to make a 1.01 update and a new disc with this update already on it with as from one PB employee a changelog the size of a book.
Still had a ton of issues on launch and eventually the parting between PB and Jowood on less than good terms also ended support early but after a while the community stepped up and worked with Jowood and later on Spellbound to mitigate as much of the problems as could be done.
For CD Project here it’s a bit similar but after the successes of Witcher and Witcher 2 even with problems with White Wolf Edition as a console release and updated edition of the first game and a lengthier development time and problems with Witcher 3 they managed to pull it off it wasn’t without problems but patches and the impressive effort on the DLC worked really well.
(Switch port as well reviving the game once more on that platform and a upcoming re-release with RTX ray-tracing support next year.)
Cyberpunk I think can be a similar hit but if it does fail it could probably hurt CD Project RED pretty heavily too and they’ve sunk a lot of time and money into it although Witcher and Gwent and such could keep them afloat even if it under sells or has very problematic launch issues needing work.
Cross-platform console functionality for the XBox One and PS4 is going to be tough too and the later release for the native PS5 and X Series consoles though backwards compatibility could still ensure the game has the console hardware to be more smoothly playable this way.
I’ve said from the start they should skip the current gen consoles. Sure there’s a lot of money to earn from the current gen userbase, but i just can’t see the game’s vision being realised with these base machines holding them back. These are the same devs who complained about the consoles holding back Witcher 3’s visuals. Maybe i’m wrong and they’ll surprise me, but i won’t hope on anything.
Yeah they should have re-evaluated it after deciding to go for the new console hardware since the older consoles are going to be a tech burden to maintain and keep supported but with deals and merchandise like the XBox One X Cyber Punk 2077 it’s probably not possible.
Plus existing pre-orders and hype, I can see this first year being a bit of a hurdle for a lot of studios similarly and once there’s a good opportunity to begin dropping support that’s going to make a lot of developers happy to fully focus on the new hardware standards.
It’s what over half a decade and you can’t skip the base console and say it’s X One X and PS4 Pro only so that’s not a easy situation unless done by a separate team or studio almost outside of the new console build / PC because the hardware is that old and it will hold back on some areas as a result not just graphical effects.
EDIT: They, that was the name of the prior CD Project RED first person game that got cancelled some years ago.
(Co-developed with Metropolis?)
(Might have been a CD Project - not CD Project RED - publishing agreement come to think of it.)
EDIT: But yeah it’s not unheard of that a game goes gold and gets delayed at the very last but it’s very unusual and I don’t think you can claim going gold if Microsoft or Sony are still partway through the review and certification process for the submitted build it kinda has to pass though it’s possible CD Project’s PR got a bit jumpy here which might also explain some of the developers on Twitter saying they heard about the game going gold…from reading news site announcing the game as such rather than internally from the studio heads and branch managers and all that.
Wonder what’s going on internally too.
It’s a big “AAA” tier / budgeted title with a large number of staff involved and people working on getting this done but they’re missing the November launch lineup and sales now for the Holiday and mid-December would be the holiday weeks and such so it really should be late January or early February once everything is back on track for the new year since it’s already going to be missing out on the late October to mid November sales period with this delay.
(Maybe even a bit later still.)
Extra time wouldn’t hurt either but it’s going to mean extra overtime and pressure on the developers as with the usual issues around the crunch mentality and how that’s handled outside of some fewer studios that are dealing with this better or at least reportedly dealing with this in a better way.
Possibly line it up and get the next-gen console versions out at the same time too with that move.
EDIT: Potentially if they did fail PS4 or XBox One X certification it’s more on how that takes two - three weeks maybe a month to go through submission, certification and getting the approval.
But then that would also mean making the new builds and shipping that out but perhaps it’s manageable even if it’s going to be close in terms of timing.
Depends I guess, PR might say it needs more polish and some extra time but a month is what one or maybe two weeks of development and then final QA and play testing for another week or two possibly rolling that into a near mandatory 1.01 launch day update.
EDIT: Or the higher ups wants it out before the end of the year if possible without it being completely broken or totaling in reviews and streams and what not.
But I think this process is based around fiscal quarters not entirely lining up with the general yearly quarters so that seems less likely.
Oh well it’s probably the usual PR at least testing and quality and more time and delivering a refined and polished experience whatever the real internal reasoning behind the delay is.
(The holiday sales weeks now is a miss and a bit of a bigger one after all it’s not the easiest to push past that unless it was unavoidable.)
EDIT: Suppose if they don’t delay it too much thus October → November → December here then there’s less of a chance of pre-orders being cancelled in favor of maybe picking the game up later or at a discount for all the other titles and the new console games and exclusives also coming out.
Delaying to earlier next year would also widen that gap and potential sales competition but if they feel they have a solid chance and data on for example current pre-orders is good then they might chance it not that it always works out.
Oh well just speculating really, hoping the game ends up being good and doing well but I am a bit skeptical although it would be nice to be wrong but something’s up with the delays after all.
EDIT: (One last)
Witcher 3 also sold well, wonder what the launch expectations and sales estimates are, it’s kinda stupid how it’s gone with some franchises where selling a million or several and nope it failed according to the publisher or investors.
(Plus it doesn’t matter as much for later sales and lasting a long while it has to be this initial launch window even as GAAS has allowed for more long-term projected sales and support.)
I think the delays are mostly down to a combination of hype and the devs over-estimating themselves - these two coexist in a rather unhealthy manner.
November 2020 was a good deadline because everyone knew that’s when next-gen consoles would release. To CDPR, it was a good way to end the current generation of gaming. Plus they thought in the first place they’d be able to do the impossible and make a dream open world run on PS4/ Xbone. CDPR also can’t help but keep trying to add to the hype, lol.
The hype for the game has been well through the roof, they’re just not allowed to put out a disappointing game in any way, they basically have a perfect reputation because of Witcher 3. Trying to live up to the hype also meant delaying the game constantly, to keep working at it further and further.
Of course, this is just me making guesses. I’m not concerned by the delay personally, having already considered some time ago to wait a few months after release for some patches to roll out.
