[HN Gopher] AMD and Sony's PS6 chipset aims to rethink the curre...
___________________________________________________________________
AMD and Sony's PS6 chipset aims to rethink the current graphics
pipeline
Author : zdw
Score : 279 points
Date : 2025-10-11 04:36 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| three_burgers wrote:
| It feels like each time SCE makes a new console, it'd always come
| with some novelty that's supposed to change the field forever,
| but after two years they'd always end up just another console.
| noir_lord wrote:
| It does but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, they
| at least are willing to take some calculated risks about
| architecture - since consoles have essentially collapsed to
| been a PC internally.
| three_burgers wrote:
| I don't think it's a bad thing either. Consoles are a curious
| breed in today's consumer electronics landscape, it's great
| that someone's still devoted to doing interesting experiments
| with it.
| jpalawaga wrote:
| You end up with a weird phenomenon.
|
| Games written for the PlayStation exclusively get to take
| advantage of everything, but there is nothing to compare the
| release to.
|
| Alternatively, if a game is release cross-platform, there's
| little incentive to tune the performance past the benchmarks of
| comparable platforms. Why make the PlayStation game look better
| than Xbox if it involves rewriting engine layer stuff to take
| advantage of the hardware, for one platform only.
|
| Basically all of the most interesting utilization of the
| hardware comes at the very end of the consoles lifecycle. It's
| been like that for decades.
| ViscountPenguin wrote:
| I suspect it won't be as much of an issue next gen, with
| Microsoft basically dropping out of the console market.
| awill wrote:
| 3rd party games will still want to launch on the Nintendo
| Switch 2, so it's still the same problem.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| The Switch (even 2) is nowhere near the same class of
| performance as PlayStation or Xbox, games on them aren't
| comparable.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Yet those companies don't necessarily compete for
| performance and comparaison, but instead for their own
| profit. If Nintendo makes profit from selling a device
| that runs a game in lower spec than Sony, they're Happy
| with it. Computing devices aren't driven by performance
| only.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Sure, but the point I want replying to was about the
| Switch 2 being able to make up for the loss of the Xbox
| as a PlayStation competitor. It can't.
| ErneX wrote:
| They are definitely doing something but it seems it's going
| to be more PC-like. Like even supporting 3rd party stores.
|
| I'm intrigued.
| beagle3 wrote:
| It's also that way on the C64 - while it came out in 1981,
| people figures out how to get 8 bit sound and high resolution
| color graphics with multiple sprites only after 2000...
| three_burgers wrote:
| I think apart from cross-platform woes (if you can call it
| that), it's also that the technology landscape would shift,
| two or few years after the console's release:
|
| For PS2, game consoles didn't become the centre of home
| computing; for PS3, programming against the GPU became the
| standard of doing real time graphics, not some exotic
| processor, plus that home entertaining moved on to take other
| forms (like watching YouTube on an iPad instead of having a
| media centre set up around the TV); for PS4, people didn't
| care if the console does social networking; PS5 has been
| practical, it's just the technology/approach ended up adopted
| by everyone, so it lost its novelty later on.
| pjmlp wrote:
| That is very country specific, many countries home
| computers since the 8 bit days always dominated, whereas
| others consoles always dominated since Nintendo/SEGA days.
| anthk wrote:
| Also tons of blue collar people bought Chinese NES clones
| even in mid 90's (at least in Spain) while some other
| people with white collar jobs bought their kids a Play
| Station. And OFC the Brick Game Tetris console was
| everywhere. By late 90's, yes, most people afforded a
| Play Station, but as for myself I've got a computer in
| very early 00's and I would emulate the PSX and most N64
| games just fine (my computer wasn't a high end one, but
| the emulators were good enough to play the games at
| 640x480 and a bilinear filter).
| ffsm8 wrote:
| You got a very "interesting" history there, it certainly
| not particularly grounded in reality however.
|
| PS3s edge was generally seen as the DVD player.
|
| That's why Sony went with Blue Ray in the PS4, hoping to
| capitalize on the next medium, too. While that bet didn't
| pay out, Xbox kinda self destructed, consequently making
| them the dominant player any way.
|
| Finally:
|
| > PS5 has been practical, it's just the technology/approach
| ended up adopted by everyone, so it lost its novelty later
| on.
|
| PS5 did not have any novel approach that was consequently
| adopted by others. The only thing "novel" in the current
| generation is frame generation, and that was already being
| pushed for years by the time Sony jumped on that bandwagon.
| MindSpunk wrote:
| You've got your history wrong too.
|
| The PS2 was the DVD console. The PS3 was the bluray
| console.
|
| The PS4 and PS5 are also bluray consoles, however blurays
| are too slow now so they're just a medium for movies or
| to download the game from.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| You're right, I mixed up the version numbers from memory.
| I'd contest the statement "the history is wrong" though,
| that's an extremely minor point to what I was writing.
| musicale wrote:
| > PS5 did not have any novel approach that was
| consequently adopted by others
|
| DualSense haptics are terrific, though the Switch kind of
| did them first with the Joy-Cons. I'd say haptics and
| adaptive triggers are two features that should become
| standard. Once you have them you never want to go back.
|
| PS5's fast SSD was a bit of a game changer in terms of
| load time and texture streaming, and everyone except
| Nintendo has gone for fast m.2/nvme storage. PS5 also
| finally delivered the full remote play experience that
| PS3 and PS4 had teased but not completed. Original PS5
| also had superior thermals vs. PS4 pro, while PS5 pro
| does solid 4K gaming while costing less than most game
| PCs (and is still quieter than PS4 pro.) Fast loading,
| solid remote play, solid 4K, low-ish noise are all things
| I don't want to give up in any console or game PC.
|
| My favorite PS5 feature however is fast game updates (vs.
| PS4's interminable "copying" stage.) Switch and Switch 2
| also seem to have fairly fast game updates, but slower
| flash storage.
| ericye16 wrote:
| Maybe I ate too much marketing but it does feel like having the
| PS5 support SSDs raised the bar for how fast games are expected
| to load, even across platforms.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| Not just loading times, but I expect more games do more
| aggressive dynamic asset streaming. Hopefully we'll get less
| 'squeeze through this gap in the wall while we hide the
| loading of the next area of the map' in games.
|
| Technically the PS4 supported 2.5" SATA or USB SSDs, but yeah
| PS5 is first gen that requires SSDs, and you cannot run PS5
| games off USB anymore.
| numpad0 wrote:
| That was kind of true until Xbox 360 and later Unity, those
| ended eras of consoles as machines made of quirks as well as
| game design as primarily software architecture problems. The
| definitive barrier to entry for indie gamedevs before Unity was
| the ability to write a toy OS, a rich 3D engine, and GUI
| toolkit by themselves. Only little storytelling skills were
| needed.
|
| Console also partially had to be quirky dragsters because of
| Moore's Law - they had to be ahead of PC by years, because it
| had to be at least comparable to PC games at the end of
| lifecycle, not utterly obsolete.
|
| But we've all moved on. IMO that is a good thing.
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| I really hope that this doesn't come to pass. It's all in on the
| two worst trends in graphics right now. Hardware Raytracing and
| AI based upscaling.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| What's wrong with hardware raytracing?
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| There are a lot of theoretical arguments I could give you
| about how almost all cases where hardware BVH can be used,
| there are better and smarter algorithms to be using instead.
| Being proud of your hardware BVH implementation is kind of
| like being proud of your ultra-optimised hardware bubblesort
| implementation.
|
| But how about a practical argument instead. Enabling
| raytracing in games tends to suck. The graphical improvements
| on offer are simply not worth the performance cost.
|
| A common argument is that we don't have fast enough hardware
| yet, or developers haven't been able to use raytracing to
| it's fullest yet, but it's been a pretty long damn time since
| this hardware was mainstream.
|
| I think the most damning evidence of this is the just
| released Battlefield 6. This is a franchise that previously
| had raytracing as a top-level feature. This new release
| doesn't support it, doesn't intend to support it.
|
| And in a world where basically every AAA release is panned
| for performance problems, BF6 has articles like this:
| https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/battlefield-6-this-is-
| what-...
| noir_lord wrote:
| > But how about a practical argument instead. Enabling
| raytracing in games tends to suck. The graphical
| improvements on offer are simply not worth the performance
| cost.
|
| Pretty much this - even in games that have good ray
| tracing, I can't _tell_ when it 's off or on (except for
| the FPS hit) - I cared so little I bought a card not known
| to be good at it (7900XTX) because the two games I play the
| most don't support it _anyway_.
|
| They oversold the technology/benefits and I wasn't buying
| it.
| ahoka wrote:
| There were and always are people who swear to not see the
| difference with anything above 25hz, 30hz, 60hz, 120hz,
| HD, Full HD, 2K, 4K. Now it's ray-tracing, right.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Glad you intimately know how my perception of lighting in
| games works better than I do - though I'm curious how you
| do.
| array_key_first wrote:
| I can see the difference in all of those. I can even see
| the difference between 120hz and 240hz, and now I play on
| 240hz.
|
| Ray tracing looks _almost_ indistinguishable from really
| good rasterized lighting in MOST conditions. In scenes
| with high amounts of gloss and reflections, it 's a
| little more pronounced. A little.
|
| From my perspective, you're getting, like, a 5%
| improvement in only one specific aspect of graphics in
| exchange for a 200% cost.
|
| It's just not worth it.
| foldr wrote:
| There's an important distinction between being able to
| see the difference and caring about it. I can tell the
| difference between 30Hz and 60Hz but it makes no
| difference to my enjoyment of the game. (What can I say -
| I'm a 90s kid and 30fps was a luxury when I was growing
| up.) Similarly, I can tell the difference between ray
| traced reflections and screen space reflections because I
| know what to look for. But if I'm looking, that can only
| be because the game itself isn't very engaging.
| keyringlight wrote:
| I think one of the challenges is that game designers have
| trained up so well at working within the non-RT
| constraints (and pushing back those constraints) that
| it's a tall order to make paying the performance cost
| (and new quirks of rendering) be paid back by RT
| improvements. There's also how a huge majority of
| companies wouldn't want to cut off potential customers in
| terms of whether their hardware can do RT at all or
| performance while doing so. The other big one is whether
| they're trying to recreate a similar environment with RT,
| or if they're taking advantage of what is only possible
| on the new technique, such as dynamic lighting and
| whether that's important to the game they want to make.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| To me, the appeal is that game environments that can now
| be way more dynamic because we're not being limited by
| prebaked lighting. The Finals does this, but doesn't
| require ray tracing and it's pretty easy to tell when ray
| tracing is enabled: https://youtu.be/MxkRJ_7sg8Y
|
| But that's a game design change that takes longer
| asah wrote:
| naive q: could games detect when the user is "looking
| around" at breathtaking scenery and raytrace those? offer a
| button to "take picture" and let the user specify how long
| to raytrace? then for heavy action and motion, ditch the
| raytracing? even better, as the user passes through
| "scenic" areas, automatically take pictures in the
| background. Heck, this could be an upsell kind of like the
| RL pictures you get on the roller coaster... #donthate
|
| (sorry if obvious / already done)
| danparsonson wrote:
| Not exactly the same but adaptive rendering based on
| viewer attention reminded me of this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_rendering
| keyringlight wrote:
| Even without RT I think it'd be beneficial to tune
| graphics settings depending on context, if it's an
| action/combat scene there's likely aspects the player
| isn't paying attention to. I think the challenge is it's
| more developer work whether it's done by implementing
| some automatic detection or manually being set scene by
| scene during development (which studios probably do
| already where they can set up specific arenas). I'd guess
| an additional task is making sure there's no glaring
| difference between tuning levels, and setting a baseline
| you can't go beneath.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| > Enabling raytracing in games tends to suck.
|
| Because enabling raytracing means the game supports non-
| raytracing too. Which limits the game's design on how they
| can take advantage of raytracing being realtime.
|
| The only exception to this I've seen The Finals:
| https://youtu.be/MxkRJ_7sg8Y . Made by ex-Battlefield devs,
| the dynamic environment from them 2 years ago is on a whole
| other level even compared to Battlefield 6.
| Mawr wrote:
| There's also Metro: Exodus, which the developers have re-
| made to only support RT lighting. DigitalFoundry made a
| nice video on it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbpZCSf4_Yk
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| > But how about a practical argument instead.
|
| With raytracing lighting a scene goes from taking hours-
| days to just designating objects that emit light
| Our_Benefactors wrote:
| Not OP, but a lot of the current kvetching about hardware
| based ray tracing is that it's basically an nvidia-exclusive
| party trick, similar to DLSS and physx. AMD has this
| inferiority complex where nvidia must not be allowed to
| innovate with a hardware+software solution, it must be pure
| hardware so AMD can compete on their terms.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Much higher resource demands, which then requires tricks like
| upscaling to compensate. Also you get uneven competition
| between GPU vendors because it is not hardware ray tracing
| but Nvidia raytracing in practice.
|
| On a more subjective note, you get less interesting art
| styles because studio somehow have to cram raytracing as a
| value proposition in there.
| bob1029 wrote:
| It will never be fast enough to work in real time without
| compromising some aspect of the player's experience.
|
| Ray tracing is solving the light transport problem in the
| hardest way possible. Each additional bounce adds
| exponentially more computational complexity. The control
| flows are also very branchy when you start getting into the
| wild indirect lighting scenarios. GPUs prefer straight SIMD
| flows, not wild, hierarchical rabbit hole exploration. Disney
| still uses CPU based render farms. There's no way you are
| reasonably emulating that experience in <16ms.
|
| The closest thing we have to functional ray tracing for
| gaming is light mapping. This is effectively just ray tracing
| done ahead of time, but the advantage is you can bake for
| hours to get insanely accurate light maps and then push 200+
| fps on moderate hardware. It's almost like you are cheating
| the universe when this is done well.
|
| The human brain has a built in TAA solution that excels as
| frame latencies drop into single digit milliseconds.
| zubspace wrote:
| The problem is the demand for dynamic content in AAA games.
| Large exterior and interior worlds with dynamic lights, day
| and night cycle, glass and translucent objects, mirrors,
| water, fog and smoke. Everything should be interactable and
| destructable. And everything should be easy to setup by
| artists.
|
| I would say, the closest we can get are workarounds like
| radiance cascades. But everything else than raytracing is
| just an ugly workaround which falls apart in dynamic
| scenarios. And don't forget that baking times and storing
| those results, leading to massive game sizes, are a huge
| negative.
|
| Funnily enough raytracing is also just an approximation to
| the real world, but at least artists and devs can expect it
| to work everywhere without hacks (in theory).
| sintax wrote:
| > It will never be fast enough to work in real time ...
|
| 640Kb surely is enough!
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| How is Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (that is purely
| raytraced) compromised compared to regular version that
| uses traditional lighting?
| ErneX wrote:
| Manually placed lights and baking not only takes time away
| from iteration but also takes a lot of disk space for the
| shadow maps. RT makes development faster for the artists, I
| think DF even mentioned that doing Doom Eternal without RT
| would take so much disk space it wouldn't be possible to
| ship it.
|
| edit: not Doom Etenral, it's Doom The Dark Ages, the latest
| one.
| shantara wrote:
| The quoted number was in the range of 70-100 GB if I
| recall correctly, which is not that significant for
| modern game sizes. I'm sure a lot of people would opt to
| use it as an option as a trade off for having 2-3x higher
| framerate. I don't think anyone realistically complains
| about video game lighting looking too "gamey" when in a
| middle of an intense combat sequence. Why optimize a Doom
| game of all things for standing still and side by side
| comparisons? I'm guessing NVidia paid good money for
| making RT tech mandatory. And as for shortened
| development cycle, perhaps it's cynical, but I find it
| difficult to sympathize when the resulting product is
| still sold for EUR80
| jayd16 wrote:
| Devs get paid either way, consumers just pay for more dev
| waiting instead of more game.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| You still have to manually place lights. Where do you
| think the rays come from (or rather, go to).
| Mawr wrote:
| It's fast enough today. Metro Exodus, an RT-only game runs
| just fine at around 60 fps for me on a 3060 Ti. Looks
| gorgeous.
|
| Light mapping is a cute trick and the reason why Mirror's
| Edge still looks so good after all these years, but it
| requires doing away with dynamic lighting, which is a non-
| starter for most games.
|
| I want my true-to-life dynamic lighting in games thank you
| very much.
| Mawr wrote:
| 1. People somehow think that just because _today 's_ hardware
| can't handle RT all that well it will never be able to. A
| laughable position of course.
|
| 2. People turn on RT in games not designed with it in mind
| and therefore observe only minor graphical improvements for
| vastly reduced performance. Simple chicken-and-egg problem,
| hardware improvements will fix it.
| realusername wrote:
| So far the AI upscaling/interpolating has just been used to
| ship horribly optimized games with a somewhat acceptable
| framerate
| wtallis wrote:
| And they're achieving "acceptable" frame rates and
| resolutions by sacrificing image quality in ways that aren't
| as easily quantified, so those downsides can be swept under
| the rug. Nobody's graphics benchmark emits metrics for how
| much ghosting is caused by the temporal antialiasing, or how
| much blurring the RT denoiser causes (or how much noise makes
| it past the denoiser). But they make for great static
| screenshots.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| The gimmicks aren't the product, and the customers of frontier
| technologies aren't the consumers. The gamers and redditors and
| smartphone fanatics, the fleets of people who dutifully buy,
| are the QA teams.
|
| In accelerated compute, the largest areas of interest for
| advancement are 1) simulation and modeling and 2) learning and
| inference.
|
| That's why this doesn't make sense to a lot of people. Sony and
| AMD aren't trying to extend current trends, they're leveraging
| their portfolios to make the advancements that will shape
| future markets 20-40 years out. It's really quite bold.
| distances wrote:
| I also find them completely useless for any games I want to
| play. I hope that AMD would release a card that just drops both
| of these but that's probably not realistic.
| stanac wrote:
| They will never drop ray tracing, some new games require ray
| tracing. The only case where I think it's not needed is some
| kind of specialized office prebuilt desktops or mini PCs.
| Sol- wrote:
| The amount of drama about AI based upscaling seems
| disproportionate. I know framing it in terms of AI and
| hallucinated pixels makes it sound unnatural, but graphics
| rendering works with so many hacks and approximations.
|
| Even without modern deep-learning based "AI", it's not like the
| pixels you see with traditional rendering pipelines were all
| artisanal and curated.
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| AI upscaling is equivalent to lowering bitrate of compressed
| video.
|
| Given netflix popularity, most people obviously don't value
| image quality as much as other factors.
|
| And it's even true for myself. For gaming, given the choice
| of 30fps at a higher bitrate, or 60fps at a lower one, I'll
| take the 60fps.
|
| But I want high bitrate and high fps. I am certainly not
| going to celebrate the reduction in image quality.
| lnenad wrote:
| > I am certainly not going to celebrate the reduction in
| image quality
|
| What about perceived image quality? If you are just playing
| the game chances of you noticing anything (unless you crank
| up the upscaling to the maximum) are near zero.
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| People have different sensitivities. For me personally,
| the reduction in image quality is very noticeable.
|
| I am playing on a 55" TV at computer monitor distance, so
| the difference between a true 4K image and an upscaled
| one is very significant.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > AI upscaling is equivalent to lowering bitrate of
| compressed video.
|
| When I was a kid people had dozens of CDs with movies,
| while pretty much nobody had DVDs. DVD was simply too
| expensive, while Xvid allowed to compress entire movie into
| a CD while keeping good quality. Of course original DVD
| release would've been better, but we were too poor, and
| watching ten movies at 80% quality was better than watching
| one movie at 100% quality.
|
| DLSS allows to effectively quadruple FPS with minimal
| subjective quality impact. Of course natively rendered
| image would've been better, but most people are simply too
| poor to buy game rig that plays newest games 4k 120FPS on
| maximum settings. You can keep arguing as much as you want
| that natively rendered image is better, but unless you send
| me money to buy a new PC, I'll keep using DLSS.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| The contentious part from what I get is the overhead for
| hallucinating these pixels, on cards that also cost a lot
| more than the previous generation for otherwise minimal gains
| outside of DLSS.
|
| Some [0] are seeing 20 to 30% drop in actual frames when
| activating DLSS, and that means as much latency as well.
|
| There's still games where it should be a decent tradeoff
| (racing or flight simulators ? Infinite Nikki ?), but it's
| definitely not a no-brainer.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/EiOVOnMY5jI
| ErneX wrote:
| I disagree. From what I've read if the game can leverage RT the
| artists save a considerable amount of time when iterating the
| level designs. Before RT they had to place lights manually and
| any change to the level involved a lot of rework. This also
| saves storage since there's no need to bake shadow maps.
| shantara wrote:
| So what stops the developers from iterating on a raytraced
| version of the game during development, and then executing a
| shadow precalcualtion step once the game is ready to be
| shipped? Make it an option to download, like the high
| resolution texture packs. They are offloading processing
| power and energy requirements to do so on consumer PCs, and
| do so in an very inefficient manner
| jayd16 wrote:
| Looks different. But for quick previs before the bake, this
| is done.
| Our_Benefactors wrote:
| Cell processor 2: electric boogaloo
|
| Seems they didn't learn from the PS3, and that exotic
| architectures don't drive sales. Gamers don't give a shit and
| devs won't choose it unless they have a lucrative first party
| contract.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Custom graphics architectures aren't _always_ a disaster - the
| Switch 2 is putting up impressive results with their in-house
| DLSS acceleration.
|
| Now, shackling yourself to AMD and expecting a miracle... that
| I cannot say is a good idea. Maybe Cerny has seen something we
| haven't, who knows.
| farseer wrote:
| The entire Switch 1 game library is free to play on
| emulators. They probably put a custom accelerator to prevent
| reverse engineering. A consequence of using weaker spec parts
| than their competitors.
| bigyabai wrote:
| The Switch 1 also had CUDA cores and other basic hardware
| accelerators. To my knowledge (and I could be wrong), none
| of the APIs that Nintendo exposed even gave access to those
| fancy features. It should just be calls to NVN, which can
| be compiled into Vulkan the same way DXVK translates
| DirectX calls.
| izacus wrote:
| What is "in-house dlss acceleration" in your context? What's
| in-house about it?
| bigyabai wrote:
| It's better off if I let Digital Foundry take it from here:
| https://youtu.be/BDvf1gsMgmY
|
| TL:DW - it's not quite the full-fat CNN model but it's also
| not a uselessly pared-back upscaler. Seems to handle
| antialiasing and simple upscale well at super low TDPs
| (<10w).
| izacus wrote:
| Ok, but that's still nVidia DLSS tech from desktop,
| what's Nintendo in-house about it?
| bigyabai wrote:
| It's literally not. From the description of TFA:
| In this video, Alex goes in-depth on Switch 2 DLSS,
| confirming that there are actually two different forms of
| the technology available - the DLSS we know from PC
| gaming and a faster, far more simplified version.
| ErneX wrote:
| This isn't exotic at all. This is the future roadmap of AMD
| even for their own PC GPUs.
|
| Since Mark Cerny became the hardware architect of PS they have
| not made the mistakes of the PS3 generation at all.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Hopefully their game lineup is not as underwhelming as the ps5
| one.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| underwhelming? what do you mean?
|
| every year, Playstation ranks very high when it comes to GOTY
| nominations
|
| just last year, Playstation had the most nominations for GOTY:
| https://x.com/thegameawards/status/1858558789320142971
|
| not only that, but PS5 has more 1st party games than
| Microsoft's Xbox S|X
|
| 1053 vs 812 (that got inflated with recent Activision
| acquisition)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PlayStation_5_games
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_Series_X_and_Seri...
|
| It's important to check the facts before spreading random FUD
|
| PS5 had the strongest lineup of games this generation, hence
| why they sold this many consoles
|
| Still today, consumers are attracted to PS5's lineup, and this
| is corroborated by facts and data https://www.vgchartz.com/
|
| In August for example, the ratio between PS5 and Xbox is 8:1;
| almost as good as the new Nintendo Switch 2, and the console is
| almost 5 years old!
|
| You say "underwhelming", people are saying otherwise
| whatever1 wrote:
| Yeah, I don't recall a single original game from the PS5
| exclusive lineup (that wasn't available for PS4). We did get
| some remakes and sequels, but the PS5 lineup pales in
| comparison to the PS4 one.
|
| Also, to my knowledge, the PS5 still lags behind the PS4 in
| terms of sales, despite the significant boost that COVID-19
| provided.
| guidedlight wrote:
| The PS4 lineup pales in comparison to the PS3 lineup, which
| pales in comparison to the PS2 lineup, which pales in
| comparison to the PS1 lineup.
|
| Each generation has around half the number of games as the
| previous. This does get a bit murky with the advent of
| shovelware in online stores, but my point remains.
|
| I think this only proves is that games are now ridiculously
| expensive to create and met the quality standards expected.
| Maybe AI will improved this in this future. Take-Two has
| confirmed that GTA6's budget has exceeded US$1 billion,
| which is mind-blowing.
| ErneX wrote:
| Returnal is probably one the best 1st party games available
| and it's a PS5 exclusive.
|
| Its sequel Saros is coming out next year too.
|
| There's also Spider-Man 2, Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart,
| Astro Bot, Death Stranding 2, Ghost of Yotei...
|
| Their output hasn't been worse than the PS4 at all imo.
| jsheard wrote:
| The most extreme example of this is that Naughty Dog, one
| of Sony's flagship first-party studios, has still yet to
| release a single original game for the PS5 after nearly
| five years. They've steadily been making fewer and fewer
| brand new games each generation and it's looking like they
| may only release _one_ this time around. AAA development
| cycles are out of control.
| ManlyBread wrote:
| There's simply no point in buying that console when it has
| like what, 7 exclusive titles that aren't shovelware? 7
| titles after 5 years? And this number keeps going down
| because games are constantly being ported to other systems.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >constantly being ported to other systems.
|
| And why wouldn't they? In many cases they're are some
| compiler settings and a few drivers away from working.
| ManlyBread wrote:
| That's not an argument in favor of PS5.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I don't say it was. If anything it's an argument in favor
| of Xbox with DirectX.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Noone is gonna give you some groundbreaking tech for your
| electronic gadget.... As IBM showed when they created the Cell
| for Sony and then gave almost the same tech to Microsoft :D.
| ErneX wrote:
| I don't think they ever claimed that. Every time Mark Cerny
| discusses PS hardware he always mentions that it's a
| collaboration, so whatever works for AMD they can use on their
| own GPUs, even for other clients.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| I'm just saying no sane company gonna give you any edge in
| chiptech.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I was going to say "again?", but then I recalled DirectX 12 was
| released 10 years ago and now I feel old...
|
| The main goal of Direct3D 12, and subsequently Vulcan, was to
| allow for better use of the underlying graphics hardware as it
| had changed more and more from its fixed pipeline roots.
|
| So maybe the time is ripe for a rethink, again.
|
| Particularly the frame generation features, upscaling and frame
| interpolation, have promise but needs to be integrated in a
| different way I think to really be of benefit.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Don't forget mantle.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| While I didn't forget about it, I did misremember the
| timeline. So yea, Mantle should definitely be mentioned.
| scns wrote:
| Did not Mantle become Vulkan?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Yeah but that doesn't mean that much of Mantle is
| recognizeable in Vulkan, because Vulkan wanted to cover the
| entire range of GPU architectures (including outdated and
| mobile GPUs) with a single API, while Mantle was designed
| for modern (at the time) desktop GPUs (and specifically AMD
| GPUs). Vulkan basically took an elegant design and "ruined"
| it with too much real-word pragmatism ;)
| pjmlp wrote:
| The rethink is already taking place via mesh shaders and neural
| shaders.
|
| You aren't seeing them adopted that much, because the hardware
| still isn't deployed at scale that games can count on them
| being available, and also it cannot ping back on improving the
| developer experience adopting them.
| UltraSane wrote:
| I remember reading about directx 1 in PC Gamer magazine
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Seems like the philosophy here is, if you're going to do AI-based
| rendering, might as well try it across different parts of the
| graphics pipeline and see if you can fine-tune it at the silicon
| level. Probably a microoptimization, but if it makes the PS6 look
| a tiny bit better than the Xbox, people will pay for that.
| amlib wrote:
| Could the PS6 be the last console generation with an expressive
| improvement in compute and graphics? Miniaturization keeps giving
| ever more diminishing returns each shrink, prices of electronics
| are going up (even sans tariffs), lead by the increase in the
| price of making chips. Alternate techniques have slowly been
| introduced to offset the compute deficit, first with post
| processing AA in the seventh generation, then with "temporal
| everything" hacks (including TAA) in the previous generation and
| finally with minor usage of AI up-scaling in the current
| generation and (projected) major usage of AI up-scaling and
| frame-gen in the next gen.
|
| However, I'm pessimistic on how this can keep evolving. RT
| already takes a non trivial amount of transistor budget and now
| those high end AI solutions require another considerable chunk of
| the transistor budget. If we are already reaching the limits of
| what non generative AI up-scaling and frame-gen can do, I can't
| see where a PS7 can go other than using generative AI to
| interpret a very crude low-detail frame and generating a highly
| detailed photorealistic scene from that, but that will, I think,
| require many times more transistor budget than what will likely
| ever be economically achievable for a whole PS7 system.
|
| Will that be the end of consoles? Will everything move to the
| cloud and a power guzzling 4KW machine will take care of
| rendering your PS7 game?
|
| I really can only hope there is a break-trough in miniaturization
| and we can go back to a pace of improvement that can actually
| give us a new generation of consoles (and computers) that makes
| the transition from an SNES to a N64 feel quaint.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Gaming using weird tech is not a hardware manufacturer or
| availability issue. It is a game studio leadership problem.
|
| Even in the latest versions of unreal and unity you will find
| the classic tools. They just won't be advertised and the engine
| vendor might even frown upon them during a tech demo to make
| their fancy new temporal slop solution seem superior.
|
| The trick is to not get taken for a ride by the tools vendors.
| Real time lights, "free" anti aliasing, and sub-pixel triangles
| are the forbidden fruits of game dev. It's really easy to get
| caught up in the devil's bargain of trading unlimited art
| detail for unknowns at end customer time.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Beyond the PS6, the answer is very clearly graphics generated
| in real time via a transformer model.
|
| I'd be absolutely shocked if in 10 years, all AAA games aren't
| being rendered by a transformer. Google's veo 3 is already
| extremely impressive. No way games will be rendered through
| traditional shaders in 2035.
| Certhas wrote:
| This _might_ be true, but it's utterly absurd to claim this
| is a certainty.
|
| The images rendered in a game need to accurately represent a
| very complex world state. Do we have any examples of
| Transformer based models doing something in this category?
| Can they do it in real-time?
|
| I could absolutely see something like rendering a simplified
| and stylised version and getting Transformers to fill in
| details. That's kind of a direct evolution from the upscaling
| approach described here, but end to end rendering from game
| state is far less obvious.
| aurareturn wrote:
| I could absolutely see something like rendering a
| simplified and stylised version and getting Transformers to
| fill in details. That's kind of a direct evolution from the
| upscaling approach described here, but end to end rendering
| from game state is far less obvious.
|
| Sure. This could be a variation. You do a quick render that
| any GPU from 2025 can do and then make the frame hyper
| realistic through a transformer model. It's basically
| saying the same thing.
|
| The main rendering would be done by the transformer.
|
| Already in 2025, Google Veo 3 is generating pixels far more
| realistic than AAA games. I don't see why this wouldn't be
| the default rendering mode for AAA games in 2035. It's
| insanity to think it won't be.
|
| Veo3: https://aistudio.google.com/models/veo-3
| jsheard wrote:
| > Already in 2025, Google Veo 3 is generating pixels far
| more realistic than AAA games.
|
| Traditional rendering techniques can also easily exceed
| the quality of AAA games if you don't impose strict time
| or latency constraints on them. Wake me up when a version
| of Veo is generating HD frames in less than 16
| milliseconds, on consumer hardware, without batching, and
| _then_ we can talk about whether that inevitably much
| smaller model is good enough to be a competitive game
| renderer.
| Certhas wrote:
| Well you missed the point. You could call it prompt
| adherence. I need veo to generate the next frame in a few
| milliseconds, and correctly represent the position of all
| the cars in the scene (reacting to player input) reliably
| to very high accuracy.
|
| You conflate the challenge of generating realistic pixels
| with the challenge of generating realistic pixels that
| represent a highly detailed world state.
|
| So I don't think your argument is convincing or complete.
| LtdJorge wrote:
| > Google Veo 3 is generating pixels far more realistic
| than AAA games
|
| That's because games are "realtime", meaning with a tight
| frame-time budget. AI models are not (and are even
| running on multiple cards each costing 6 figures).
| aurareturn wrote:
| I mistaken veo3 for Genie model. Genie is the Google
| model I should have referenced. It is real time.
| kgdiem wrote:
| Doesn't this imply that a transformer or NN could fill in
| details more efficiently than traditional techniques?
|
| I'm really curious why this would be preferable for a AAA
| studio game outside of potential cost savings. Also imagine
| it'd come at the cost of deterministic output / consistency
| in visuals.
| mdale wrote:
| Genie 3 is already a frontier approach to interactive
| generative world views no?
|
| It will be AI all the way down soon. The models internal
| world view could be multiple passes and multi layer with
| different strategies... In any case; safe to say more AI
| will be involved in more places ;)
| Certhas wrote:
| I am super intrigued by such world models. But at the
| same time it's important to understand where they are at.
| They are celebrating the achievement of keeping the world
| mostly consistent for 60 seconds, and this is 720p at
| 24fps.
|
| I think it's reasonable to assume we won't see this tech
| replace game engines without significant further
| breakthroughs...
|
| For LLMs agentic workflows ended up being a big
| breakthrough to make them usable. Maybe these World
| Models will interact with a sort of game engine directly
| somehow to get the required consistency. But it's not
| evident that you can just scale your way from "visual
| memory extending up to one minute ago" to 70+ hour game
| experiences.
| meindnoch wrote:
| How much money are you willing to bet?
| aurareturn wrote:
| All my money.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Even in a future with generative UIs, those UIs will be
| composed from pre-created primitives just because it's
| faster and more consistent, there's literally no reason
| to re-create primitives every time.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Go short Nintendo and Sony today. I'm the last one who's
| going to let my technical acumen get in the way of your
| mistake.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Why would gaming rendering using transformers lead to one
| shorting Nintendo and Sony?
| lm28469 wrote:
| Is this before or after fully autonomous cars and agi? Both
| should be there in two years right?
|
| 10 years ago people were predicting VR would be everywhere,
| it flopped hard.
| aurareturn wrote:
| I've been riding Waymo for years in San Francisco.
|
| 10 years ago, people were predicting that deep learning
| will change everything. And it did.
|
| Why just use one example (VR) and apply it to everything?
| Even then, a good portion of people did not think VR would
| be everywhere by now.
| Fade_Dance wrote:
| Baidu Apollo Go is conpletes millions of rides a year as
| well, with expansions into Europe in the Middle East. In
| China they've been active for a long time - during COVID
| they were making autonomous deliveries.
|
| It is odd how many people don't realize how developed
| self-driving taxis are.
| oblio wrote:
| The future isn't evenly distributed.
|
| I think most people will consider self driving tech to be
| a thing when it's as widespread as TVs were, 20 years
| after their introduction.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| > I've been riding Waymo for years in San Francisco.
|
| Fully autonomous in select defined cities owned by big
| corps is probably a reasonable expectation.
|
| Fully autonomous in the hands of an owner applied to all
| driving conditions and working reliably is likely still a
| distant goal.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| And outside of a few major cities with relatively good
| weather, self driving is non existent
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| It did flop, but still a hefty loaf of money was sliced off
| in the process.
|
| Those with the real vested interest don't care if that
| flops, while zealous worshippers to the next brand new
| disruptive tech are just a free vehicle to that end.
| kranke155 wrote:
| VR is great industrial tech and bad consumer tech. It's too
| isolating for consumers.
| fidotron wrote:
| Transformer maybe not, but neural net yes. This is profoundly
| uncomfortable for a lot of people, but it's the very clear
| direction.
|
| The other major success of recent years not discussed much so
| far is gaussian splats, which tear up the established
| production pipeline again.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Neural net is already being used via DLSS. Neural rendering
| is the next step. And finally, a full transformer based
| rendering pipeline. My guess anyway.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| The future of gaming is the Grid-Independent Post-Silicon
| Chemo-Neural Convergence, the user will be injected with
| drugs designed by AI based on a loose prompt (AI generated as
| well, because humans have long lost the ability to formulate
| their intent) of the gameplay trip they must induce.
|
| Now that will be peak power efficiency and a real solution
| for the world where all electricity and silicon are hogged by
| AI farms.
|
| /s or not, you decide.
| pavlov wrote:
| Stanislaw Lem's "The Futurological Congress" predicted this
| in 1971.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| FYI it's got an amazing film adaptation by Ari Folman in
| his 2013 "The Congress". The most emotionally striking
| film I've ever watched.
| speed_spread wrote:
| There will be a war between these biogamers and smart
| consoles that can play themselves.
| jayd16 wrote:
| It's all about nerual spores
|
| https://youtu.be/NyvD_IC9QNw
| MarCylinder wrote:
| Just because it's possible doesn't mean it is clearly the
| answer. Is a transformer model truly likely to require less
| compute than current methods? We can't even run models like
| Veo 3 on consumer hardware at their current level of quality.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| That's just not efficient. AAA games will use AI to pre-
| render assets, and use AI shaders to make stuff pop more, but
| on the fly asset generation will still be slow and produce
| low quality compared to offline asset generation. We might
| have a ShadCN style asset library that people use AI to tweak
| to produce "realtime" assets, but there will always be an
| offline core of templates at the very least.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Be prepared to be shocked. This industry moves extremely
| slow.
| Uvix wrote:
| It sounds like even the PS6 isn't going to have an expressive
| improvement, and that the PS5 was the last such console. PS5
| Pro was the first console focused on fake frame generation
| instead of real output resolution/frame rate improvements, and
| per the article PS6 is continuing that trend.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| What really matters is the cost.
|
| In the past a game console might launch at a high price point
| and then after a few years, the price goes down and they can
| release a new console at a high at a price close to where the
| last one started.
|
| Blame crypto, AI, COVID but there has been no price drop for
| the PS5 and if there was gonna be a PS6 that was really
| better it would probably have to cost upwards of $1000 and
| you might as well get a PC. Sure there are people who haven't
| tried Steam + an XBOX controller and think PV gaming is all
| unfun and sweaty but they will come around.
| Uvix wrote:
| As long as I need a mouse and keyboard to install updates
| or to install/start my games from GOG, it's still going to
| be decidedly unfun, but hopefully Windows' upcoming built-
| in controller support will make it _less_ unfun.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Today you can just buy an Xbox controller and pair it
| with your Windows computer and it just works and it's the
| same same with the Mac.
|
| You don't have to install any drivers or anything and
| with the big screen mode in Steam it's a lean back
| experience where you can pick out your games and start
| one up without using anything other than the controller.
| withinboredom wrote:
| If you have steam, ps4/ps5 controllers also work fine.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| They do but they cost a lot more.
| withinboredom wrote:
| My ps5 came with one for "free"
| musicale wrote:
| They do not work fine in every game. That is why I think
| you need a Steam controller as well.
| jamesnorden wrote:
| Plus add your GOG games as non-Steam games to Steam and
| launch them from big screen mode as well.
| Uvix wrote:
| But when I have to install drivers, or install a non-
| Steam game, I can't do that with the controller yet.
| That's what I need for PC gaming to work in my living
| room.
| Rohansi wrote:
| Or you just need a Steam controller. They're discontinued
| now but work well as a mouse+keyboard for desktop usage.
| It got squished into the Steam Deck so hopefully there's
| a new version in the future.
| musicale wrote:
| I like big picture mode in Steam, but.... controller
| support is spotty across Steam games, and personally I
| think you need both a Steam controller and a DualSense or
| Xbox controller. Steam also updates itself by default
| every time you launch, and you have to deal with Windows
| updates and other irritations. Oh, here's another update
| for .net, wonderful. And a useless new AI agent. SteamOS
| and Linux/Proton may be better in some ways, but there
| are still compatibility and configuration headaches. And
| half my Steam library doesn't even work on macOS, even
| games that used to work (not to mention the issues with
| intel vs. Apple Silicon, etc.)
|
| The "it just works" factor and not having to mess with
| drivers is a huge advantage of consoles.
|
| Apple TV could almost be a decent game system if Apple
| ever decided to ship a controller in the box and stopped
| breaking App Store games every year (though live service
| games rot on the shelf anyway.)
| overfeed wrote:
| > [...]controller support is spotty[...]
|
| DualSense 4 and 5 support under Linux is rock-solid,
| wired or wireless. That's to be expected since the
| drivers are maintained by Sony[1]. I have no idea about
| the XBox controller, but I know DS works perfectly with
| Steam/Proton out of the box, with the vanilla Linux
| kernel.
|
| 1. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sony-HID-PlayStation-PS5
| musicale wrote:
| I have clarified that I meant controller support in the
| Steam games themselves. Some of them work well, some of
| them not so well. Others need to be configured. Others
| only work with a Steam controller. I wish everything
| worked well with DualSense, especially since I really
| like its haptics, but it's basically on the many (many)
| game developers to provide the same kind of controller
| support that is standard on consoles.
| overfeed wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification. I've into that a couple of
| times - Steam's button remapping helps sometimes, but
| you'd have to remember which controller button the on-
| screen symbol maps to.
| samtheprogram wrote:
| Launch Steam in big screen mode. Done.
| Uvix wrote:
| I'm aware of Big Picture Mode, and it doesn't address
| either of the scenarios I cited specifically _because_
| they can 't be done from Big Picture Mode.
| Retric wrote:
| Inflation. PS5 standard at $499 in 2019 is $632 in 2025
| money which is the same as the 1995 PS 1 when adjusted for
| inflation $299 (1995) to $635(2025).
| https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
|
| Thus the PS6 should be around 699 at launch.
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| The main issue with inflation is that my salary is not
| inflation adjusted. Thus the relative price increase
| adjusted by inflation might be zero but the relative
| price increase adjusted by my salary is not.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Those in charge of fiat printing presses have run the
| largest theft or wealth in world history since 1971 when
| the dollar decoupled from gold.
| Retric wrote:
| Cash is a small fraction of overall US wealth, but
| inflation is a very useful tax on foreigners using USD
| thus subsidizing the US economy.
| Aurornis wrote:
| The phrase "cost of living increase" is used to refer to
| an annual salary increase designed to keep up with
| inflation.
|
| Typically, you should be receiving at least an annual
| cost of living increase each year. This is standard
| practice for every company I've ever worked for and it's
| a common practice across the industry. Getting a true
| raise is the amount above and beyond the annual cost of
| living increase.
|
| If your company has been keeping your salary fixed during
| this time of inflation, then you are correct that you are
| losing earning power. I would strongly recommend you hit
| the job market if that's the case because the rest of the
| world has moved on.
|
| In some of the lower wage brackets (not us tech people)
| the increase in wages has actually outpaced inflation.
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| Thank you for your concern but I'm in Germany so the
| situation is a bit different and only very few companies
| have been able to keep up with inflation around here.
| I've seen at least a few adjustments but would not likely
| find a job that pays as well as mine does 100% remote.
| Making roughly 60K in Germany as a single in his 30s
| isn't exactly painful.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > but would not likely find a job that pays as well as
| mine does 100% remote.
|
| That makes sense. The market for remote jobs has been
| shrinking while more people are competing for the smaller
| number of remote jobs. In office comes with a premium now
| and remote is a high competition space.
| tormeh wrote:
| If you want to work 100% remote you could consider
| working for a US company as a consultant?
| 1000100_1000101 wrote:
| Typically "Cost Of Living" increases target roughly
| inflation. They don't really keep up though, due to
| taxes.
|
| If you've got a decent tech job in Canada your marginal
| tax rate will be near 50%. Any new income is taxed at
| that rate, so that 3% COL raise, is really a 1.5% raise
| in your purchasing power, which typically makes you worse
| off.
|
| Until you're at a very comfortable salary, you're better
| off job hopping to boost your salary. I'm pretty sure all
| the financial people are well aware they're eroding their
| employees salaries over time, and are hoping you are not
| aware.
| Retric wrote:
| Tax brackets also shift through time, though less
| frequently. So if you only get COL increases for 20 years
| you're going to be reasonably close to the same after tax
| income barring significant changes to the tax code.
|
| In the US the bottom tax brackets where 10% under 2020
| $19,750 then 12% next bucket, in 2025 it's 10% under
| $23,850 then 12% next bracket.
| https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/historical-
| income...
| skuzye wrote:
| And here I am in the UK, where the brackets have been
| frozen until 2028 (if they don't invent some reason to
| freeze further).
| Retric wrote:
| Freezing tax brackets is a somewhat stealthy way to shift
| the tax burden to lower income households as it's less
| obviously a tax increase.
| ponector wrote:
| Is your salary the same as 10 years ago?
| blihp wrote:
| When I bought a PS 1 around 1998-99 I paid $150 and I
| think that included a game or two. It's the later in the
| lifecycle price that has really changed (didn't the last
| iteration of it get down to either $99 or $49?)
| dangus wrote:
| But now you're assuming the PC isn't also getting more
| expensive.
|
| If a console designed to break even is $1,000 then surely
| an equivalent PC hardware designed to be profitable without
| software sales revenue will be more expensive.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| PCs do get cheaper over time though, except if there is
| another crypto boom, then we are all doomed.
| greenavocado wrote:
| You have to price it equivalent grams of gold to see the
| real price trend
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Im still watching 720p movirs, video games.
|
| Somewhere between 60 hz and 240hz, theres zero fundamental
| benefits. Same for resolution.
|
| It isnt just that hardware progress is a sigmoid, our
| experiential value.
|
| The reality is that exponential improvement is not a
| fundamental force. Its always going to find some limit.
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| > Im still watching 720p movirs, video games.
|
| There's a noticeable and obvious improvement from 720 to
| 1080p to 4k (depending on the screen size). While there
| are diminishing gains, up to at least 1440p there's still
| a very noticeable difference.
|
| > Somewhere between 60 hz and 240hz, theres zero
| fundamental benefits. Same for resolution.
|
| Also not true. While the difference between 40fps and
| 60fps is more noticeable than say from 60 to 100fps, the
| difference is still noticeable enough. Add the reduction
| in latency that's also very noticeable.
| saulpw wrote:
| Is the difference between 100fps and 240fps noticeable
| though? The OP said "somewhere between 60hz and 240hz"
| and I agree.
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| That would be very obvious and immediately noticeable
| difference but you need enough FPS rendered (natively not
| with latency increasing frame generation) and a display
| that can actually do 240hz without becoming a smeary
| mess.
|
| If you have this combination and you play with it for an
| hour and you go back to a locked 100hz Game you would
| never want to go back. It's rather annoying in that
| regard actually.
| oivey wrote:
| Even with frame generation it is incredibly obvious. The
| latency for sure is a downside, but 100 FPS vs 240 FPS is
| extremely evident to the human visual system.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Somewhere between a shoulder tap and a 30-06 there is a
| painful sensation.
|
| The difference between 60 and 120hz is huge to me. I
| havent had a lot of experience above 140.
|
| Likewise, 4k is a huge difference in font rendering, and
| 1080->1440 is big in gaming.
| drawfloat wrote:
| 4K is big but certainly was not as big a leap forward as
| SD to HD
| theshackleford wrote:
| > Is the difference between 100fps and 240fps noticeable
| though?
|
| Yes.
|
| > The OP said "somewhere between 60hz and 240hz" and I
| agree.
|
| Plenty of us dont. A 240hz OLED still provides a
| signifacntly blurrier image in motion than my 20+ year
| old CRT.
| majkinetor wrote:
| On my projector (120 inch) the difference between 720p
| and 4k is night and day.
| crote wrote:
| Screen size is pretty much irrelevant, as nobody is going
| to be watching it at nose-length distance to count the
| pixels. What matters is _angular resolution_ : how much
| area does a pixel take up in your field of vision? Bigger
| screens are going to be further away, so they need the
| same resolution to provide the same quality as a smaller
| screen which is closer to the viewer.
|
| Resolution-wise, it depends a lot on the kind of content
| you are viewing as well. If you're looking at a locally-
| rendered UI filled with sharp lines, 720p is going to
| look _horrible_ compared to 4k. But when it comes to
| video you 've got to take bitrate into account as well.
| If anything, a 4k movie with a bitrate of 3Mbps is going
| to look _worse_ than a 720p movie with a bitrate of
| 3Mbps.
|
| I _definitely_ prefer 4k over 720p as well, and there 's
| a reason my desktop setup has had a 32" 4k monitor for
| _ages_. But beyond that? I _might_ be able to be
| convinced to spend a few bucks extra for 6k or 8k if my
| current setup dies, but anything more would be a complete
| waste of money - at reasonable viewing distances there 's
| absolutely zero visual difference.
|
| We're not going to see 10.000Hz 32k graphics in the
| future, simply because nobody will want to pay extra to
| upgrade from 7.500Hz 16k graphics. Even the "hardcore
| gamers" don't hate money _that_ much.
| Vvector wrote:
| Does an increased pixel count make a bad movie better?
| Mawr wrote:
| Does a decreased pixel count make a good movie better?
| Mawr wrote:
| Lower latency between your input and its results
| appearing on the screen is exactly what a fundamental
| benefit is.
|
| The resolution part is even sillier - you literally get
| more information per frame at higher resolutions.
|
| Yes, the law of diminishing returns still applies, but
| 720p@60hz is way below the optimum. I'd estimate 4k@120hz
| as the low end of optimal maybe? There's some variance
| w.r.t the application, a first person game is going to
| have different requirements from a movie, but either way
| 720p ain't it.
| greenavocado wrote:
| How many grams of gold has the PS cost at launch using gold
| prices on launch day
| ZiiS wrote:
| Really strange that a huge pile of hacks, maths, and more
| hacks became the standard of "true" frames.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Welcome to the Age of the Plateau. It will change everything we
| know. Invest accordingly.
| 64718283661 wrote:
| And what do you think to invest in for such times?
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| Moats. Government relationships. Simple and unsexy. Hard
| assets.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Hard assets and things with finite supply. Anything real.
| Gold, bitcoin, small cap value stocks, commodities,
| treasuries (if you think the government won't fail).
|
| https://portfoliocharts.com/2021/12/16/three-secret-
| ingredie...
| didibus wrote:
| > Anything real
|
| > bitcoin
|
| :D
| Mistletoe wrote:
| If it isn't real, I invite you to get some easily or
| print more.
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/news/hyperinflation-
| produces-su...
|
| https://decrypt.co/332083/billionaire-ray-dalio-urges-
| invest...
| chowells wrote:
| If the Internet goes away, Bitcoin goes away. That's a
| real threat in a bunch of conceivable societal failure
| scenarios. If you want something real, you want something
| that will survive the loss of the internet. Admittedly,
| what you probably want most in those scenarios is diesel,
| vehicles that run on diesel, and salt. But a pile of gold
| still could be traded for some of those.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| Everyone always talk like societal collapse is global.
| Take a small pile of gold and use it to buy a plane
| ticket somewhere stable with internet and your bitcoin
| will be there waiting for you.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Is your argument that not being able to "get some easily"
| makes a thing _more_ real?
| DJBunnies wrote:
| Bitcoin hate is real, here. At least.
| Loic wrote:
| My kids are playing Fortnite on a PS4, it works, they are
| happy, I feel the rendering is really good (but I am an old
| guy) and normally, the only problem while playing is the
| stability of the Internet connection.
|
| We also have a lot of fun playing board games, simple stuff
| from design, card games, here, the game play is the fun factor.
| Yes, better hardware may bring more realistic, more x or y, but
| my feeling is that the real driver, long term, is the quality
| of the game play. Like the quality of the story telling in a
| good movie.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| That's the Nintendo way. Avoiding the photorealism war
| altogether by making things intentionally sparse and
| cartoony. Then you can sell cheap hardware, make things
| portable etc.
| xiande04 wrote:
| I.e., the uncanny valley.
| gyomu wrote:
| Cartoony isn't the uncanny valley. Uncanny valley is
| attempted photorealism that misses the mark.
| pipes wrote:
| Unreal engine 1 looks good to me, so I am not a good judge.
|
| I keep thinking there is going to be a video game crash soon,
| over saturation of samey games. But I'm probably wrong about
| that. I just think that's what Nintendo had right all along:
| if you commoditize games, they become worthless. We have
| endless choice of crap now.
|
| In 1994 at age 13 I stopped playing games altogether. Endless
| 2d fighters and 2d platformer was just boring. It would take
| playing wave race and golden eye on the N64 to drag me back
| in. They were truly extraordinary and completely new
| experiences (me and my mates never liked doom). Anyway I
| don't see this kind of shift ever happening again. Infact
| talking to my 13 year old nephew confirms what I (probably
| wrongly) believe, he's complaining there's nothing new. He's
| bored or fortnight and mine craft and whatever else. It's
| like he's experiencing what I experienced, but I doubt a new
| generation of hardware will change anything.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Unreal engine 1 looks good to me, so I am not a good
| judge.
|
| But we did hit a point where the games were good enough,
| and better hardware just meant more polygons, better
| textures, and more lighting. The issues with Unreal Engine
| 1 (or maybe just games of that era) was that the worlds
| were too sparse.
|
| > over saturation of samey games
|
| So that's the thing. Are we at a point where graphics and
| gameplay in 10-year-old games is good enough?
| taraindara wrote:
| If the graphics aren't adding to the fun and freshness of
| the game, nearly. Rewatching old movies over seeing new
| ones is already a trend. Video games are a ripe genre for
| this already.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Now I'm going to disagree with myself... there came a
| point where movies started innovating in storytelling
| rather than the technical aspects (think Panavision).
| Anything that was SFX-driven is different, but the
| stories movies tell and how they tell them changed, even
| if there are stories where the technology was already
| there.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _Are we at a point where graphics and gameplay in
| 10-year-old games is good enough?_
|
| Personally, there are enough good games from the 32bit
| generation of consoles, and before, to keep me from ever
| _needing_ to buy a new console, and these are games from
| ~25 years ago. I can comfortably play them on a MiSTer
| (or whatever PC).
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| "if you commoditize games, they become worthless"
|
| ???? hmm wrong??? if everyone can make game, the floor is
| raising making the "industry standard" of a game is really
| high
|
| while I agree with you that if everything is A then A is
| not meaning anything but the problem is A isn't vanish,
| they just moved to another higher tier
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Every generation thinks the current generation of graphics
| won't be topped, but I think you have no idea what putting
| realtime generative models into the rendering pipeline will
| do for realism. We will finally get rid of the uncanny valley
| effect with facial rendering, and the results will almost
| certainly be mindblowing.
| Rover222 wrote:
| I think the inevitable near future is that games are not
| just upscaled by AI, but they are entirely AI generated in
| realtime. I'm not technical enough to know what this means
| for future console requirements, but I imagine if they just
| have to run the generative model, it's... less intense than
| how current games are rendered for equivalent results.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| I don't think you grasp how many GPUs are used to run
| world simulation models. It is vastly more intensive in
| compute that the current dominant realtime rendering or
| rasterized triangles paradigm
| taraindara wrote:
| I'm thinking more procedural generation of assets. If
| done efficiently enough, a game could generate its assets
| on the fly, and plan for future areas of exploration. It
| doesn't have to be rerendered every time the player moves
| around. Just once, then it's cached until it's not needed
| anymore.
| Rover222 wrote:
| I don't think you grasp what I'm saying? I'm talking
| about next token prediction to generate video frames.
| Keyframe wrote:
| not all games need horse power. We've now past the point of
| good enough to run a ton of it. Sure, tentpole attractions will
| warrant more and more, but we're turning back to mechanics,
| input methods, gameplay, storytelling. If you play 'old' games
| now, they're perfectly playable. Just like older movies are
| perfectly watchable. Not saying you should play those (you
| should), but there's not kuch of a leap needed to keep such
| ideas going strong and fresh.
| ad133 wrote:
| This is my take as well. I haven't felt that graphics
| improvement has "wowed" me since the PS3 era honestly.
|
| I'm a huge fan of Final Fantasy games. Every mainline game
| (those with just a number; excluding 11 and 14 which are
| MMOs) pushes the graphical limits of the platforms at the
| time. The jump from 6 to 7 (from SNES to PS1); from 9 to 10
| (PS1 to 2); and from 12 to 13 (PS3/X360) were all mind
| blowing. 15 (PS4) and 16 (PS5) were also major improvements
| in graphics quality, but the "oh wow" generational gap is
| gone.
|
| And then I look at the gameplay of these games, and it's
| generally regarded as going in the opposite direction- it's
| all subjective of course but 10 is generally regarded as the
| last "amazing" overall game, with opinions dropping off from
| there.
|
| We've now reached the point where an engaging game with good
| mechanics is way more important than graphics: case in point
| being Nintendo Switch, which is cheaper and has much worse
| hardware, but competes with the PS5 and massively outsells
| Xbox by huge margins, because the games are _fun_.
| musicale wrote:
| FF12 and FF13 are terrific games that have stood the test
| of time.
|
| And don't forget the series of MMOs:
|
| FF11 merged Final Fantasy with old-school MMOs, notably
| Everquest, to great success.
|
| FF14 2.0 was literally A Realm Reborn from the ashes of the
| failed 1.0, and was followed by the exceptional Heavensward
| expansion.
|
| FF14 Shadowbringers was and is considered great.
| crote wrote:
| Consoles are the perfect platform for a proper pure ray tracing
| revolution.
|
| Ray tracing is the obvious path towards perfect photorealistic
| graphics. The problem is that ray tracing is _really_
| expensive, and you can 't stuff enough ray tracing hardware
| into a GPU which can _also_ run traditional graphics for older
| games. This means games are forced to take a hybrid approach,
| with ray tracing used to augment traditional graphics.
|
| However, full-scene ray tracing has essentially a fixed cost:
| the hardware needed depends primarily on the resolution and
| framerate, not the complexity of the scene. Rendering a million
| photorealistic objects is not much more compute-intensive than
| rendering a hundred cartoon objects, and without all the
| complicated tricks needed to fake things in a traditional
| pipeline any indie dev could make games with AAA graphics. And
| if you have the hardware for proper full-scene raytracing, you
| no longer need the whole AI upscaling and framegen to fake
| it...
|
| _Ideally_ you 'd want a GPU which is 100% focused on ray
| tracing and ditches the entire legacy triangle pipeline - but
| that's a _very_ hard sell in the PC market. Consoles don 't
| have that problem, because not providing perfect backwards
| compatibility for 20+ years of games isn't a dealbreaker there.
| khalladay wrote:
| > Rendering a million photorealistic objects is not much more
| compute-intensive than rendering a hundred cartoon objects
|
| Surely ray/triangle intersection tests, brdf evaluation,
| acceleration structure rebuilds (when things move/animate)
| all would cost more in your photorealistic scenario than the
| cartoon scenario?
| reactordev wrote:
| Matrix multiplication is all that is and GPUs are really
| good at doing that in parallel already.
| oivey wrote:
| So I guess there is no need to change any of the
| hardware, then? I think it might be more complicated than
| waving your hands around linear algebra.
| reactordev wrote:
| Yes there is, to improve ray tracing...
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Rendering a million photorealistic objects is not much more
| compute-intensive than rendering a hundred cartoon objects
|
| Increasing the object count by that many orders of magnitude
| is definitely much more compute intensive.
| reactordev wrote:
| Only if you have more than 1 bounce. Otherwise it's the
| same. You'll cast a ray and get a result.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| No, searching the set of triangles in the scene to find
| an intersection takes non-constant time.
| cubefox wrote:
| I believe with an existing BVH acceleration structure,
| the average case time complexity is O(log n) for n
| triangles. So not constant, but logarithmic. Though for
| animated geometry the BVH needs to be rebuilt for each
| frame, which might be significantly more expensive
| depending on the time complexity of BVH builds.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Yeah, this search is O(log n) and can be hardware-
| accelerated, but there's no O(1) way to do this.
| cubefox wrote:
| What if we keep the number of triangles constant per
| pixel, independently of scene complexity, through
| something like virtualized geometry? Though this would
| then require rebuilding part of the BVH each frame, even
| for static scenes, which is probably not a constant
| operation.
| newsclues wrote:
| So create a system RT only GPU plus a legacy one for the best
| of both worlds?
| cubefox wrote:
| Combining both ray tracing (including path tracing, which is
| a form of ray tracing) and rasterization is the most
| effective approach. The way it is currently done is that
| primary visibility is calculated using triangle
| rasterization, which produces perfectly sharp and noise free
| textures, and then the ray traced lighting (slightly blurry
| due to low sample count and denoising) is layered on top.
|
| > However, full-scene ray tracing has essentially a fixed
| cost: the hardware needed depends primarily on the resolution
| and framerate, not the complexity of the scene.
|
| That's also true for modern rasterization with virtual
| geometry. Virtual geometry keeps the number of rendered
| triangles roughly proportional to the screen resolution, not
| to the scene complexity. Moreover, virtual textures also keep
| the amount of texture detail in memory roughly proportional
| to the screen resolution.
|
| The real advantage of modern ray tracing (ReSTIR path
| tracing) is that it is independent of the number of light
| sources in the scene.
| EasyMark wrote:
| doubtful, they say this with every generation of console and
| even gaming pc systems. When it's popularity decreases then
| profits decrease and then maybe it will be "the last
| generation".
| jayd16 wrote:
| There's likely still room to go super wide with CPU cores and
| much more ram but everyone is talking about neutral nets so
| that's what the press release is about.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| After raytracing, the next obvious massive improvement would be
| path tracing.
|
| And while consoles usually lag behind the latest available
| graphics, I'd expect raytracing and even path tracing to become
| available to console graphics eventually.
|
| One advantage of consoles is that they're a fixed hardware
| target, so games can test on the exact hardware and know
| exactly what performance they'll get, and whether they consider
| that performance an acceptable experience.
| winterismute wrote:
| There is no real difference between "Ray Tracing" and "Path
| Tracing", or better, the former is just the operation of
| intersecting a ray with a scene (and not a rendering
| technique), the latter is a way to solve the integral to
| approximate the rendering equation (hence, it could be
| considered a rendering technique). Sure, you can go back to
| the terminology used by Kajiya in his earlier works etc etc,
| but it was only a "academic terminology game" which is
| worthless today. Today, the former is accelerated by HW since
| around a decade (I am cunting the PowerVR wizard). The latter
| is how most of non-realtime rendering renders frames.
|
| You can not have "Path Tracing" in games, not according to
| what it is. And it also probably does not make sense, because
| the goal of real-time rendering is not to render the perfect
| frame at any time, but it is to produce the best reactive,
| coherent sequence of frames possible in response to
| simulation and players inputs. This being said, HW ray
| tracing is still somehow game changing because it shapes a
| SIMT HW to make it good at inherently divergent computation
| (eg. traversing a graph of nodes representing a scene):
| following this direction, many more things will be unlocked
| in real-time simulation and rendering. But not 6k samples
| unidirectionally path-traced per pixel in a game.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > You can not have "Path Tracing" in games
|
| It seems like you're deliberately ignoring the terminology
| currently widely used in the gaming industry.
|
| https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/should-you-bother-with-
| path...
|
| https://gamingbolt.com/10-games-that-make-the-best-use-of-
| pa...
|
| (And any number of other sources, those are just the first
| two I found.)
|
| If you have some issue with that terminology, by all means
| raise that issue, but "You can not have" is just factually
| incorrect here.
| winterismute wrote:
| > If you have some issue with that terminology, by all
| means raise that issue, but "You can not have" is just
| factually incorrect here.
|
| It is not incorrect because, at least for now, all those
| "path tracing" modes do not do compute multiple "paths"
| (with each being made of multiple rays casted) per pixel
| but rasterize primary rays and then either fire 1 [in
| rare occasions, 2] rays for such a pixel, or, more often,
| read a value from a local special cache called a
| "reservoir" or from a radiance cache - which is sometimes
| a neural network. All of this goes even against the
| defition your first article gives itself of path tracing
| :D
|
| I don't have problems with many people calling it "path
| tracing" in the same way I don't have issues with many
| (more) people calling Chrome "Google" or any browser "the
| internet", but if one wants to talk about future trends
| in computing (or is posting on hacker news!) I believe
| it's better to indicate a browser as a browser, Google as
| a search engine, and Path Tracing as what it is.
| dataangel wrote:
| they can't move everything to the cloud because of latency
| ClimaxGravely wrote:
| I'd hesitate to call the temporal hacks progress. I disable
| them every time.
| xiande04 wrote:
| It's not just technology that's eating away at console sales,
| it's also the fact that 1) nearly everything is available on PC
| these days (save Nintendo with its massive IP), 2) mobile
| gaming, and 3) there's a limitless amount of retro games and
| hacks or mods of retro games to play and dedicated retro
| handhelds are a rapidly growing market. Nothing will ever come
| close to PS2 level sales again. Will be interesting to see how
| the video game industry evolves over the next decade or two. I
| suspect subscriptions (sigh) will start to make up for lost
| console sales.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > Nothing will ever come close to PS2 level sales again.
|
| The switch literally has and according to projections the
| Switch 1 will in fact have outsold the PS2 globally by the
| end of the year.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > non generative AI up-scaling
|
| I know this isn't an original idea, but I wonder if this will
| be the trick for step-level improvement in visuals. Use
| traditional 3D models for the broad strokes and generative AI
| for texture and lighting details. We're at diminishing returns
| for add polygons and better lighting, and generative AI seems
| to be better at improving from there--when it doesn't have to
| get the finger count right.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Teenage me from the 90s telling everyone that ray tracing will
| eventually take over all rendering and getting laughed at would
| be happy :)
| prox wrote:
| Hi teenage you! You did well :)
|
| The idea of the radiance cores is pretty neato
| ksec wrote:
| >radiance cores is pretty nea
|
| I still dont understand how it is different to Nvidia's RT
| Core.
| jsheard wrote:
| AFAICT it's not really different, they're just calling it
| something else for marketing reasons. The system described
| in the Sony patent (having a fixed-function unit traverse
| the BVH asynchronously from the shader cores) is more or
| less how Nvidia's RT cores worked from the beginning, as
| opposed to AMDs early attempts which accelerated certain
| intersection tests but still required the shader cores to
| drive the traversal loop.
| Sesse__ wrote:
| It's not, though. The use of RT in games is generally limited
| to secondary rays; the primaries are still rasterized. (Though
| the rasterization is increasingly done in "software rendering",
| aka compute shaders.)
| pixelpoet wrote:
| As you can tell, I'm patient :) A very important quality for
| any ray tracing enthusiast lol
|
| The ability to do irregular sampling, efficient shadow
| computation (every flavour of shadow mapping is terrible!)
| and global illumination is already making its way into games,
| and path tracing has been the algorithm of choice in offline
| rendering (my profession since 2010) for quite a while
| already.
|
| Making a flexible rasterisation-based renderer is a huge
| engineering undertaking, see e.g. Unreal Engine. With the
| relentless march of processing power, and finally having
| hardware acceleration as rasterisation has enjoyed for
| decades, it's going to be possible for much smaller teams to
| deliver realistic and creative (see e.g. Dreams[0]) visuals
| with far less engineering effort. Some nice recent examples
| of this are Teardown[1] and Tiny Glade[2].
|
| It's even more inevitable from today's point of view than it
| was back in the 90s :)
|
| [0] Dreams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI
|
| [1] Teardown: https://teardowngame.com/
|
| [2] Tiny Glade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jusWW2pPnA0
| nightfly wrote:
| I wonder if we'll ever get truly round objects in my lifetime
| though
| phkahler wrote:
| My old ray tracer could do arbitrary quadric surfaces,
| toroids with 2 minor radii, and CSG of all those. Triangles
| too (no CSG). It was getting kind of fast 20 years ago -
| 10fps at 1024x768. Never had good shading though.
|
| I should dig that up and add NURBS and see how it performs
| today.
| csmoak wrote:
| dreams on playstation and unbound on pc both use sdfs to
| allow users to make truly round objects for games
| poisonborz wrote:
| The industry, and at large the gaming community is just long past
| being interested in graphics advancement. AAA games are too
| complicated and expensive, the whole notion of ever more complex
| and grandiose experiences doesn't scale. Gamers are fractured
| along thousands of small niches, even in sense of timeline in
| terms of 80s, 90s, PS1 era each having a small circle of
| businesses serving them.
|
| The times of console giants, their fiefdoms and the big game
| studios is coming to an end.
| b_e_n_t_o_n wrote:
| idk, battlefield 6 came out today to very positive reviews and
| it's absolutely gorgeous.
| ksec wrote:
| It looks like Frostbite 4.0 is so much better than Unreal
| 5.x. I cant wait to see comparison.
| jimaek wrote:
| It's fine, but definitely a downgrade compared to previous
| titles like Battlefield 1. At moments it looks pretty bad.
|
| I'm curious why graphics are stagnating and even getting
| worse in many cases.
| b_e_n_t_o_n wrote:
| Have you played it? I haven't so I'm just basing my opinion
| on some YouTube footage I've seen.
|
| BF1 is genuinely gorgeous, I can't lie. I think it's the
| photogrammetry. Do you think the lighting is better in BF1?
| I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that BF6's lighting is
| more dynamic.
| jimaek wrote:
| Yes I played it on a 4090. The game is good but graphics
| are underwhelming.
|
| To my eyes everything looked better in BF1.
|
| Maybe it's trickery but it doesn't matter to me. BF6, new
| COD, and other games all look pretty bad. At least
| compared to what I would expect from games in 2025.
|
| I don't see any real differences from similar games
| released 10 years ago.
| ksec wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBzXLrJTX1M
|
| Battlefield 6 vs Battlefield 1 - Direct Comparison!
| Attention to Detail & Graphics! PC 4K
|
| The progress in 9 years do seems underwhelming.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Exploding production cost is pretty much the only reason
| (eg we hit diminishing returns in overall game asset
| quality vs production cost at least a decade ago) plus on
| the tech side a brain drain from rendering tech to AI tech
| (or whatever the current best-paid mega-hype is). Also,
| working in gamedev simply isn't "sexy" anymore since it has
| been industrialized to essentially assembly line jobs.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| I disagree - current gen console aren't enough to deliver
| smooth immersive graphics - I played BG3 on PS first and then
| on PC and there's just no comparing the graphics. Cyberpunk
| same deal. I'll pay to upgrade to consistent 120/4k and better
| graphics, and I'll buy the games.
|
| And there are AAA that make and will make good money with
| graphics being front and center.
| Ntrails wrote:
| >aren't enough to deliver smooth immersive graphics
|
| I'm just not sold.
|
| Do I really think that BG3 being slightly prettier than, say,
| Dragon Age / Skyrim / etc made it a more enticing game? Not
| to me certainly. Was cyberpunk prettier than Witcher 3? Did
| it need to be for me to play it?
|
| My query isn't about whether you can get people to upgrade to
| play new stuff (always true). But whether they'd still
| upgrade if they could play on the old console with worse
| graphics.
|
| I _also_ don 't think anyone is going to suddenly start
| playing video games because the graphics improve further.
| keyringlight wrote:
| Two aspects I keep thinking about:
|
| -How difficult it must be for the art/technical teams at
| game studios to figure out for all the detail they are
| capable of putting on screen how much of it will be
| appreciated by gamers. Essentially making sure that
| anything they're going to be budgeting significant amount
| of worker time to creating, gamers aren't going to run
| right past it and ignore or doesn't contribute meaningfully
| to 'more than the sum of its parts'.
|
| -As much as technology is an enabler for art, alongside the
| install base issue how well does pursuing new methods fit
| how their studio is used to working, and is the payoff
| there if they spend time adapting. A lot of gaming business
| is about shipping product, and the studios concern is
| primarily about getting content to gamers than chasing tech
| as that is what lets their business continue, selling
| GPUs/consoles is another company's business.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| > Do I really think that BG3 being slightly prettier than,
| say, Dragon Age / Skyrim / etc made it a more enticing
| game?
|
| Absolutely - graphical improvements make the game more
| immersive for me and I don't want to go back and replay the
| games I spent hundreds of hours in mid two thousands, like
| say NVN or Icewind Dale (never played BG 2). It's just not
| the same feeling now that I've played games with
| incomparable graphics, polished mechanics and movie level
| voice acting/mocap cutscenes. I even picked up Mass Effect
| recently out of nostalgia but gave up fast because it just
| isn't as captivating as it was back when it was peak
| graphics.
| adlpz wrote:
| Well this goes to show that, as some other commenter
| said, the _gamer community_ (whatever that is) is indeed
| very fragmented.
|
| I routinely re-play games like Diablo 2 or BG1/2 and I
| couldn't care less about graphics, voice acting or motion
| capture.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| > Absolutely - graphical improvements make the game more
| immersive for me
|
| Exactly. Graphics are not the end all be all for
| assessing games, but it's odd how quickly people handwave
| away graphics _in a visual medium_.
| kbolino wrote:
| Maximal "realism" is neither the only nor even
| necessarily the best use of that medium.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| When did I say anything like that? When did anybody in
| this thread?
| kbolino wrote:
| I don't know what these words mean to you vs. what they
| mean to me. But whatever you call the visual quality that
| _Baldur 's Gate 3_, _CyberPunk 2077_ , and most flagship
| AAA titles, etc. are chasing after that makes them have
| "better graphics" and be "more immersive", whatever that
| is, is not the only way to paint the medium.
|
| Very successful games are still being made that use
| sprites, low-res polygons, cel shading, etc. While these
| techniques still can run into hardware limits, they
| generally don't benefit from the sort of improvements
| (and that word is becoming ever more debatable with
| things like AI frame generation) that make for better
| looking [whatever that quality is called] games.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Wanting them to look good and saying they look way better
| on a PC does not mean what you described above.
| kbolino wrote:
| And _not_ caring as much about those things doesn 't mean
| I don't understand that video games are a visual medium.
|
| This is just _one type_ of graphics. And focusing too
| heavily on it is not going to be enough to keep the big
| players in the industry afloat for much longer. _Some_
| gamers care--apparently some care _a lot_ --but that
| isn't translating into enough sales to overcome the
| bloated costs.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| We are really straying from the initial point here IMO
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > it's odd how quickly people handwave away graphics in a
| visual medium.
|
| There is a difference between graphics as in rendering
| (i.e. the technical side, how something gets rendered)
| and graphics as in aesthetics (i.e. visual styles,
| presentation, etc).
|
| The latter is important for games because it can be used
| to evoke some feel to the player (e.g. cartoony Mario
| games or dreadful Silent Hill games). The former however
| is not important by itself, its importance only comes as
| means to achieve the latter. When people handwave away
| graphics in games they handwave the misplaced focus on
| graphics-as-in-tech, not on graphics-as-in-aesthetics.
| badpun wrote:
| For me, the better graphics, mocap etc., the stroger the
| uncanny valley feeling - i.e. I stop perceiving it as a
| video game, but instead see it as an incredibly bad
| movie.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > I don't want to go back and replay the games I spent
| hundreds of hours in mid two thousands, like say NVN or
| Icewind Dale (never played BG 2). It's just not the same
| feeling now that I've played games with incomparable
| graphics, polished mechanics and movie level voice
| acting/mocap cutscenes. I even picked up Mass Effect
| recently out of nostalgia but gave up fast because it
| just isn't as captivating as it was back when it was peak
| graphics.
|
| And yet many more have no such issue doing exactly this.
| Despite having a machine capable of the best graphics at
| the best resolution, I have exactly zero issues going
| back and playing older games.
|
| Just in the past month alone with some time off for
| surgery I played and completed Quake, Heretic and Blood.
| All easily as good, fun and as compelling as modern
| titles, if not in some ways better.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Being an old dog that still cares about gaming, I would
| assert many games are also not taking advantage of current
| gen hardware, coded in Unreal and Unity, a kind of Electron
| for games, in what concerns taking advantage of existing
| hardware.
|
| There is a reason there are so many complaints in social
| media about being obvious to gamers in what game engine a
| game was written on.
|
| It used to be that game development quality was taken more
| seriously, when they were sold via storage media, and there
| was a deadline to burn those discs/cartridges.
|
| Now they just ship whatever is done by the deadline, and
| updates will come later via a DLC, if at all.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Unreal and Unity would be less problematic if these engines
| were engineered to match the underlying reality of graphics
| APIs/drivers, but they're not. Neither of these can
| systematically fix the shader stuttering they are causing
| architecturally, and so essentially all games built on
| these platforms are sentenced to always stutter, regardless
| of hardware.
|
| Both of these seem to suffer from incentive issues similar
| to enterprise software: They're not marketing and selling
| to either end users or professionals, but studio
| executives. So it's important to have - preferably a steady
| stream of - flashy headline features (e.g. nanite, lumen)
| instead of a product that actually works on the most basic
| level (consistently render frames). It doesn't really
| matter to Epic Games that UE4/5 RT is largely unplayable;
| even for game publishers, if you can pull nice-looking
| screenshots out of the engine or do good-looking 24p
| offline renders (and slap "in-game graphics" on them),
| that's good enough.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Pretty much it.
| Uvix wrote:
| The shader stutter issues are non-existent on console,
| which is where most of their sales are. PC, as it has
| been for almost two decades, is an afterthought rather
| than a primary focus.
| MountainTheme12 wrote:
| No, that's not the reason.
|
| The shader stutter issues are non-existent on console
| because consoles have one architecture and you can ship
| shaders as compiled machine code. For PC you don't know
| what architecture you will be targeting, so you ship some
| form of bytecode that needs to be compiled on the target
| machine.
| Uvix wrote:
| Agreed. I didn't mean to say consoles' popularity is why
| they don't have shader stutter, but rather it's why
| implementing a fix on PC (e.g. precompilation at startup)
| isn't something most titles bother with.
| MountainTheme12 wrote:
| It's not just popularity, Epic has been trying really
| hard to solve it in Unreal Engine.
|
| The issue is that, because of monolithic pipelines, you
| have to provide the exact state the shaders will be used
| in. There's a lot of that, and a large part of it depends
| on user authored content, which makes it really hard to
| figure out in advance.
|
| It's a fundamental design mistake in D3D12/Vulkan that is
| slowly being corrected, but it will take some time (and
| even more for game engines to catch up).
| jayd16 wrote:
| You still don't get it. It's just not possible to ship a
| precompilation of every shader permutation for every
| supported hardware permutation.
| Uvix wrote:
| That's why I said "precompilation _at startup_ ". That
| has users compile for their precise hardware/driver
| combination prior to the game trying to use them for
| display.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Even this is just guesswork for the way these engines
| work, because they literally don't know what set of
| shaders to compile ahead of time. Arbitrary scripting can
| change that on a frame-by-frame basis, shader
| precompilation in these engines mostly relies on
| recording shader invocations during gameplay and shipping
| that list. [1]
|
| Like, on the one hand, you have engines/games which
| always stutter, have more-or-less long "shader
| precompilation" splashscreens on every patch and still
| stutter anyway. The frametime graph of any UE title looks
| like a topographic cross-section of Verdun. On the other
| hand there are titles not using those engines where you
| wouldn't even notice there were any shaders to precompile
| which... just run.
|
| [1] https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-
| engine/...
|
| > In a highly programmable real-time rendering
| environment such as Unreal Engine (UE), any application
| with a large amount of content has too many GPU state
| parameters that can change to make it practical to
| manually configure PSOs in advance. To work around this
| complication, UE can collect data about the GPU state
| from an application build at runtime, then use this
| cached data to generate new PSOs far in advance of when
| they are used. This narrows down the possible GPU states
| to only the ones used in the application. The PSO
| descriptions gathered from running the application are
| called PSO caches.
|
| > The steps to collect PSOs in Unreal are:
|
| > 1. Play the game.
|
| > 2. Log what is actually drawn.
|
| > 3. Include this information in the build.
|
| > After that, on subsequent playthroughs the game can
| create the necessary GPU states earlier than they are
| needed by the rendering code.
|
| Of course, if the playthrough used for generating the
| list of shadersdoesn't hit X codepath ("oh this
| particular spell was not cast while holding down shift"),
| a player hitting it will then get a 0.1s game pause when
| they invariably do.
| keyringlight wrote:
| If anything I think PC has been a prototyping or proving
| grounds for technologies on the roadmap for consoles to
| adopt. It allows software and hardware iterations before
| it's relied upon in a platform that is required to be
| stable and mostly unchanging for around a decade from
| designing the platform through developers using it and
| recently major refreshes. For example from around 2009
| there were a few cross platform games with the baseline
| being 32bit/DX9 capabilities, but optional 64bit/DX11
| capabilities, and given the costs and teams involved in
| making the kind of games which stretch those capabilities
| I find it hard to believe it'd be one or a small group of
| engineers putting significant time into an optional modes
| that aren't critical to the game functioning and
| supporting them publicly. Then a few years later that's
| the basis of the next generation of consoles.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Any search on game console reviews on YouTube will show
| otherwise, even though it isn't as bad as PC.
|
| Just a quick search,
|
| https://www.gamesradar.com/games/the-ps5-stutter-issue-
| is-re...
|
| https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/stutters-on-xbox-
| series...
| jayd16 wrote:
| You're saying a periodic VRR stutter is a shader compiler
| issue?
| jayd16 wrote:
| You know the hardware for console so you can ship
| precompiled shaders.
|
| Can't do that for PC so you either have long first runs
| or stutter for JIT shader compiles.
| Uvix wrote:
| Long first runs seem like an unambiguous improvement over
| stutter to me. Unfortunately, you still get new big games
| like _Borderlands 4_ that don 't fully precompile
| shaders.
| kbolino wrote:
| Depending on the game and the circumstances, I'm getting
| some cases of 20-40 minutes to compile shaders. That's
| just obscene to me. I don't think stutter is better but
| neither situation is really acceptable. Even if it was on
| first install only it would be bad, but it happens on
| most updates to the game or the graphics drivers, both of
| which are getting updated more frequently than ever.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Imagine living in a reality where the studio exec picks
| the engine based on getting screenshots 3 years later
| when there's something interesting to show.
|
| I mean, are you actually talking from experience at all
| here?
|
| It's really more that engines are an insane expense in
| money and time and buying one gets your full team in
| engine far sooner. That's why they're popular.
| jayd16 wrote:
| They're both great engines. They're popular and gamers will
| lash out at any popular target.
|
| If it was so simple to bootstrap an engine no one would pay
| the percentage points to Unity and Epic.
|
| The reality is the quality bar is insanely high.
| gyomu wrote:
| It is pretty simple to bootstrap an engine. What isn't
| simple is supporting asset production pipelines on which
| dozen/hundreds of people can work on simultaneously, and
| on which new hires/contractors can start contributing
| right away, which is what modern game businesses require
| and what unity/unreal provide.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Just get a PC then? ;) In the end, game consoles haven't been
| much more than "boring" subsidized low-end PCs for quite a
| while now.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| PC costs a lot and depreciates fast, by the end of a
| console lifecycle I can still count on developers targeting
| it - PC performance for 6+ year hardware is guaranteed to
| suck. And I'm not a heavy gamer - I'll spend ~100h on games
| per year, but so will my wife and my son - PC sucks for
| multiple people using it - PS is amazing. I know I could
| concoct some remote play setup via lan on TV to let my wife
| and kids play but I just want something I spend a few
| hundred eur and I plug into the TV and then it works.
|
| Honestly the only reason I caved with the GPU purchase
| (which cost the equivalent of a PS pro) was the local AI -
| but in retrospect that was useless as well.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Oh yeah it's great to play PS4 games while the thing runs
| with the noise of a vacuum cleaner.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > by the end of a console lifecycle I can still count on
| developers targeting it
|
| And I can count on those games still being playable on my
| six year old hardware because they are in fact developed
| for 6 year old hardware.
|
| > PC performance for 6+ year hardware is guaranteed to
| suck
|
| For new titles at maximum graphics level sure. For new
| titles at the kind of fidelity six year old consoles are
| putting out? Nah. You just drop your settings from
| "ULTIMATE MAXIMUM HYPER FOR NEWEST GPUS ONLY" to "the
| same low to medium at best settings the consoles are
| running" and off you go.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > current gen console aren't enough to deliver smooth
| immersive graphics
|
| They were enough since PS4 era to deliver smooth, immersive
| graphics.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| I'll take the other side of this argument and state that people
| are interested in higher graphics, _BUT_ they expect to see an
| equally higher simulation to go along with it. People aren 't
| excited for GTA6 just because of the graphics, but because they
| know the simulation is going to be better then anything they've
| seen before. They need to go hand in hand.
| jesse__ wrote:
| That's totally where all this is going. More horsepower on a
| GPU doesn't necessarily mean it's all going towards pixels on
| the screen. People will get creative with it.
| pornel wrote:
| Advancements in lighting can help all games, not just AAA ones.
|
| For example, Tiny Glade and Teardown have ray traced global
| illumination, which makes them look great with their own art
| style, rather than expensive hyper-realism.
|
| But currently this is technically hard to pull off, and works
| only within certain constrained environments.
|
| Devs are also constrained by the need to support multiple
| generations of GPUs. That's great from perspective of
| preventing e-waste and making games more accessible. But
| technically it means that assets/levels still have to be built
| with workarounds for rasterized lights and inaccurate shadows.
| Simply plugging in better lighting makes things look _worse_ by
| exposing the workarounds, while also lacking polish for the new
| lighting system. This is why optional ray tracing effects are
| underwhelming.
| goalieca wrote:
| Nintendo dominated last generation with switch. The games were
| only HD and many at 30fps. Some AAA didn't even get ported to
| them. But they sold a ton of units and a ton of games and few
| complained because they were having fun which is what gaming is
| all about anyways.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| That is a different audience than people playing on
| pc/xbox/ps5. Although arguably each console has a different
| audience, so there is that.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > That is a different audience than people playing on
| pc/xbox/ps5.
|
| Many PC users also own a switch. It is in fact one of the
| most common pairings. There is very little I want get on PC
| from PS/Xbox so very little point in owning one, I won't
| get _any_ of the Nintendo titles so keeping one around
| makes significantly more sense if I want to cover my bases
| for exclusives.
| amazari wrote:
| So this is AMD catching up with Nvidia in the RT and AI
| upscaling/frame gen fields. Nothing wrong with it, and I am quite
| happy as an AMD GPU owner and Linux user.
|
| But the way it is framed as a revolutionary step and as a Sony
| collab is a tad misleading. AMD is competent enough to do it by
| itself, and this will definitely show up in PC and the competing
| Xbox.
| esperent wrote:
| I think we don't have enough details to make statements like
| this yet. Sony have shown they are willing to make esoteric
| gaming hardware in the past (cell architecture) and maybe
| they'll do something unique again this time. Or, maybe it'll
| just use a moderately custom model. Or, maybe it's just going
| to use exactly what AMD have planned for the next few year
| anyway (as you say). Time will tell.
|
| I'm rooting for something unique because I haven't owned a
| console for 20 years and I like interesting hardware. But
| hopefully they've learned a lesson about developer ergonomics
| this time around.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >Sony have shown they are willing to make esoteric gaming
| hardware in the past (cell architecture)
|
| Just so we're clear, you're talking about a decision that
| didn't really pan out made over 20 years ago.
|
| PS6 will be an upgraded PS5 without question. You aren't ever
| going to see a massive divergence away from the PC everyone
| took the last twenty years working towards.
|
| The landscape favors Microsoft, but they'll drop the ball,
| again.
| esperent wrote:
| > you're talking about a decision that didn't really pan
| out made over 20 years ago.
|
| The PS3 sold 87m units, and more importantly, it sold more
| than the Xbox 360, so I think it panned out fine even if we
| shouldn't call it a roaring success.
|
| It did sell less than the PS2 or PS4 but I don't think the
| had much to do with the cell architecture.
|
| Game developer hated it, but that's a different issue.
|
| I do agree that a truly unusual architecture like this is
| very unlikely for the next gen though.
| dataangel wrote:
| they were hoping Cell would get more widespread use
| though, which it did not
| llbbdd wrote:
| It sold well, but there are multiple popular games that
| were built for the PS3 that have not come to any other
| platform because porting them is exceptionally hard.
| jiehong wrote:
| I see this as a test ground for the next thing on PC.
|
| Why not also give a mini AMD EPYC cpu with 32 cores? This way
| games would start to be much better at multicore.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I think this is probably on the docket. Epic seems to be in a
| push to offload a lot of animation work to more cores. The
| industry is going that way and that was a big topic at their
| last conference.
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| A new PS console already?
|
| PS5 will be remembered as the worst PS generation.
| cwbriscoe wrote:
| That would still be PS3 for me.
| kotaKat wrote:
| I wonder how many variants of the PS6 they'll go through before
| they get a NIC that works right.
|
| As someone working at an ISP, I am _frustrated_ with how bad Sony
| has mangled the networking stack on these consoles. I thought BSD
| was supposed to be the best in breed of networking but instead
| Sony has found all sorts of magical ways to make it Not Work.
|
| From the PS5 variants that just hate 802.11ax to all the gamers
| making wild suggestions like changing MTU settings or DNS
| settings just to make your games work online... man, does Sony
| make it a pain for us to troubleshoot when they wreck it.
|
| Bonus points that they took away the Web browser so we can't even
| try to do forward-facing troubleshooting without going through an
| obtuse process of the third-party-account-linking system to sneak
| out of the process to run a _proper_ speedtest to Speedtest /Fast
| to show that "no, it's PSN being slow, not us".
| viktorcode wrote:
| This video is a direct continuation of the one where Cerny
| explains logic behind PlayStation 5 pro design and telling that
| the path forward for them goes into rendering near perfect low
| res image then upscaling it with neural networks to 4K.
|
| How good it will be? Just look at the current upscalers working
| on perfectly rendered images - photos. And they aren't doing it
| in realtime. So the errors, noise, and artefacts are all but
| inevitable. Those will be masked by post processing techniques
| that will inevitably degrade image clarity.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| It only takes a marketing psyop to alter the perception of the
| end user with the slogans along the lines of "Tired of pixel
| exactness, hurt by sharpness? Free YOUR imagination and embrace
| the future of ever-shifting vague forms and softness. Artifact
| stands for Art!"
| LtdJorge wrote:
| I'm replaying CP2077 for the third time, and all the
| sarcastic marketing material and ads you find in the game,
| don't seem so sarcastic after all when you really think about
| the present.
| bigyabai wrote:
| If you think _those_ are uncanny, wait until you hear the
| ads in GTAV.
| nxobject wrote:
| Pepperidge Farm remembers the days of "Pisswasser, this
| is beer! Drive drunk, off a pier!"
|
| And, luckily enough, craft beer in the US has only gotten
| better since then.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I don't know, I think it's conceivable that you could get much
| much better results from a custom upscale per game.
|
| You can give much more input than a single low res frame. You
| could throw in motion vectors, scene depth, scene normals,
| unlit color, you could separately upscale opaque, transparent
| and post process effect... I feel like you could really do a
| lot more.
|
| Plus, aren't cellphone camera upscalers pretty much realtime
| these days? I think you're comparing generating an image to
| what would actually be happening.
| wtallis wrote:
| > I think it's conceivable that you could get much much
| better results from a custom upscale per game.
|
| > You can give much more input than a single low res frame.
| You could throw in motion vectors, scene depth, scene
| normals, unlit color, you could separately upscale opaque,
| transparent and post process effect... I feel like you could
| really do a lot more.
|
| NVIDIA has already been down that road. What you're
| describing is pretty much DLSS, at various points in its
| history. To the extent that those techniques were low-hanging
| fruit for improving upscaler quality, it's already been tried
| and adopted to the extent that it's practical. At this point,
| it's more reasonable to assume that there _isn 't_ much low-
| hanging fruit for further quality improvements in upscalers
| without significant hardware improvements, and that the
| remaining artifacts and other downsides are _hard problems_.
| shaggie76 wrote:
| This reminds me of the PlayStation/2 developer manual which, when
| describing the complicated features of system, said something
| like "there is no profit in making it easy to extract the most
| performance from the system."
| curiousWaste wrote:
| Both raytracing and NPUs use a lot of bandwidth and that is
| scaling the least with time. Time will tell if just going for
| more programmable compute would be better
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Maybe Sony should focus on getting a half-respectable library out
| on the PS5 before touting the theoretical merits of the PS6? It's
| kind of wild how thin they are this go around. Their live service
| gambles clearly cost them this cycle and the PSVR2 landed with a
| thud.
|
| Frankly after releasing the $700 pro and going "it's basically
| the same specs but it can _actually_ do 4K60 this time we
| promise" and given how many friends I have with the PS5 sitting
| around as an expensive paper weight, I can't see a world where I
| get a PS6 despite decades of console gaming. The PS5 is an
| oversized final fantasy machine supported by remakes /remasters
| of all their hits from the PS3/PS4 era. It's kind of striking
| when you look at the most popular games on the console.
|
| Don't even get me started on Xbox lol
| ErneX wrote:
| It has plenty of games not including cross gen games and
| remasters. Compared to the PS4 the output has been completely
| fine.
|
| But it's a fact development times continue to increase. But
| that's not a Sony thing it's happening to every publisher.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| It really doesn't though. The library stacked against PS4's
| doesn't even compare unless you want to count cross platform
| and even then PS4 still smokes it. The fact that Helldivers 2
| is one of the only breakout successes they've had (and it
| didn't even come from one of their internal studios) says
| everything. And of course they let it go cross platform too
| so that edge is gone now. All their best studios were tied up
| with live service games that have all been canceled. They
| wasted 5+ years and probably billions if we include the
| missed out sales. The PS4 was heavily driven by their close
| partner/internal teams and continue to carry a significant
| portion of the PS5's playerbase.
|
| If you don't need Final Fantasy or to (re)play improved PS4
| games, the PS5 is an expensive paperweight and you may as
| well just grab a series S or something for half the price,
| half the shelf space, and play 90% of the same games.
|
| Let me ask you this: should we really be taking this console
| seriously if they're about to go an entire cycle without
| naughty dog releasing a game?
| ErneX wrote:
| I disagree, it has plenty of great 1st party exclusives and
| even 3rd party.
|
| And I own every console.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| What are the exclusives?
|
| We don't need to flex about owning every console. I own
| basically every one as well except PS5. I kept waiting
| and waiting for a good sale and a good library just like
| PS4. The wait has not rewarded me lol
| ErneX wrote:
| It's not a flex at all, just for reference.
|
| I get every console at launch, so I went from PS4 to Pro
| to PS5 to Pro.
|
| At launch I really enjoyed Demon's Souls, which I never
| played in PS3, fantastic game. Then came out Returnal
| probably my favorite 1st party game so far, really
| looking forward to its sequel Saros next year.
|
| I also played Ragnarok, GT7 (with PSVR2 is fantastic),
| Horizon 2, and yes, all these came out also for PS4 but
| are undoubtedly better on the PS5. I'd just get a PS5
| just because of the fast loading, it's awesome.
|
| There's also Spider-Man 2, Ratchet, Death Stranding 2,
| Ghost of Yotei, and I'll probably leaving others but
| there's plenty of great 1st party exclusives. There's
| also a bunch of great 3rd party exclusives as well.
|
| I don't game on PC though, used to when I was younger but
| I prefer to play on consoles now and use the computers
| for work and other things.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| All of these are available on PC and/or Xbox. Several are
| PS4. Not a single one is exclusive.
|
| I understand these things don't bother you but you can't
| say it has plenty of exclusives when it literally does
| not. You just aren't bothered by that fact and that is
| fine. But it makes me question what I would be buying
| when I have more affordable ways of playing all of these
| games since again, they have virtually no exclusives and
| their best studios have dropped little to nothing due to
| their failed gamble with live service.
|
| The PS3/PS4 had several single player titles that you
| could only play on PlayStation and were made specifically
| for them. They weren't resting on the laurels of previous
| releases and just giving them a new coat of paint. They
| had bigger, better, more exclusive libraries. The PS4 in
| particular had clear value. No one had to argue for it.
| The library is considered one of the best.
|
| I am a big proponent of consoles believe it or not but
| frankly the PS5 is a head scratcher for me at the end of
| the day. Especially for the (now increased) price.
| ErneX wrote:
| Majority of those games came out 1st on PS, they are
| releasing some of them later on PC and that's fine.
|
| Like I said, since I don't want to play on PC the best
| option for me it's to play them on the latest PS
| hardware, that a game also comes out elsewhere doesn't
| detriment my experience.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Again it's not about your preference. My initial comment
| was "they don't have exclusives," which you contested,
| then shifted to "well it doesn't bother me."
|
| I'm not debating preference. I'm saying they don't have a
| robust library for the PS5 compared to previous hardware
| and they lack exclusives, yet here they are hyping the
| PS6. If you are happy with your PS5 then great! Many
| people are. But the library is thinner and depends on old
| titles. That is just reality.
|
| Why should I expect the library to be better next
| iteration when they've farted their way through the last
| 5+ years and seem to have no interest doing otherwise?
| MYEUHD wrote:
| > All of these are available on PC and/or Xbox.
|
| That's not correct. God of war Ragnarok an Ghost of Yotei
| are not on PC / XBox. But they will probably eventually
| make it to PC.
|
| Why do you think that releasing games on the PC (a year
| or two after the PlayStation release) is a bad thing? It
| means you don't need to buy a PlayStation to play their
| first-party titles, assuming you're a patient gamer. It
| also means Sony makes more money from the bigger PC
| market. Win-win
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Ragnarok is definitely on PC. I saw it on Steam again
| like a week ago.
|
| You're correct about Yotei, so yes 1 (likely timed)
| exclusive. I think my overall point clearly stands still.
| dvrj101 wrote:
| > the new architecture is focused on more efficient running of
| the kinds of machine-learning-based neural networks
|
| so fake frames generation ?
| bigyabai wrote:
| Yes, duh. It's a console, resolution scaling is the #1 foremost
| tool in their arsenal for stabilizing the framerate. I can't
| think of a console game made in the past decade that doesn't
| "fake frames" at some part of the pipeline.
|
| I'll also go a step further - not every machine-learning pass
| is frame generation. Nvidia uses AI for DLAA, a form of DLSS
| that works with 100% input resolution as a
| denoiser/antialiasing combined pass. It's absolutely excellent
| if your GPU can keep up with the displayed content.
| wiseowise wrote:
| How about actually releasing games? GT7 and GOW Ragnarok are the
| only worthwhile exclusives of the current gen. This is
| hilariously bad for 5 year old console.
| shurikdima wrote:
| This. I would also add Returnal to this list but otherwise I
| agree, It's hard to believe it's been almost 5 years since the
| release of PS5 and there are still barely any games that look
| as good as The Last Of Us 2 or Red Dead Redemption 2 which were
| released on PS4
| Pulcinella wrote:
| I would agree with this. A lot of PS5 games using UE5+ with
| all it's features run at sub 1080p30 (some times sub
| 720p30)upscaled to 1440p/4K and still look & run way, way
| worse that TLOU2/RDR2/Death Stranding 1/Horizon 1 on the PS4.
| Death Stranding 2, Horizon 2, and the Demon's Souls remake
| look and run far, far better (on a purely technical level)
| than any other PS5 game and they all use rasterized lighting.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Ratchet and Clank is a good one too.
| ErneX wrote:
| Digital Foundry just released a video discussing this:
|
| https://youtu.be/Ru7dK_X5tnc
| sunjester wrote:
| Why? Hasn't it only been 5 years according to the public? Stop
| being greedy.
| wejick wrote:
| Funny that I thought the biggest improvement of PS5 is actually
| crazy fast storage. No loading screen is really gamechanger. I
| would love to get xbox instant resume on Playstation.
|
| Graphic is nice but not number one.
| jesse__ wrote:
| Pretty sure they licensed a compression codec from RAD and
| implemented it in hardware, which is why storage is so fast on
| the PS5. Sounds like they're doing the same thing for GPU
| transfers now.
| wtallis wrote:
| Storage on the PS5 isn't really fast. It's just not stupidly
| slow. At the time of release, the raw SSD speeds for the PS5
| were comparable to the high-end consumer SSDs of the time,
| which Sony achieved by using a controller with more channels
| than usual so that they didn't have to source the latest NAND
| flash memory (and so that they could ship with only 0.75 TB
| capacity). The hardware compression support merely
| compensates for the PS5 having much less CPU power than a
| typical gaming desktop PC. _For its price_ , the PS5 has
| better storage performance than you'd expect from a
| similarly-priced PC, but it's not particularly innovative and
| even gaming laptops have surpassed it.
|
| The most important impact _by far_ of the PS5 adopting this
| storage architecture (and the Xbox Series X doing something
| similar) is that it gave game developers permission to make
| games that _require_ SSD performance.
| jesse__ wrote:
| So, you're saying they built a novel storage architecture
| that competed with state-of-the-art consumer hardware, at a
| lower price point. Five years later, laptops are just
| catching up, and that at the same price point, it's faster
| than what you'd expect from a PC.
|
| The compression codec they licensed was built by some of
| the best programmers alive [0], and was later acquired by
| Epic [1]
|
| I dunno how you put those together and come up with "isn't
| really fast" or "not particularly innovative".
|
| Fast doesn't mean 'faster than anything else in existence'.
| Fast is relative to other existing solutions with similar
| resource constraints.
|
| [0] https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/about/ [1]
| https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/epic-acquires-
| rad-...
| wtallis wrote:
| Their storage architecture was _novel_ in that they made
| different tradeoffs than off the shelf SSDs for consumer
| PCs, but there 's absolutely no _innovation_ aspect to
| copy and pasting four more NAND PHYs that are each
| individually running at outdated speeds for the time.
| Sony simply made a short-term decision to build a
| slightly more expensive SSD controller to enable
| significant cost savings on the NAND flash itself. That
| stopped mattering within a year of the PS5 launching,
| because off the shelf 8-channel drives with higher speeds
| were no longer in short supply.
|
| "Five years later, laptops are just catching up" is a
| flat out lie.
|
| "at the same price point, it's faster than what you'd
| expect from a PC" sounds impressive until you remember
| that the entire business model of Sony and Microsoft
| consoles is to sell the console at or below cost and make
| the real money on games, subscription services, and
| accessories.
|
| The _only_ interesting or at all innovative part of this
| story is the hardware decompression stuff (that 's in the
| SoC rather than the SSD controller), but you're
| overselling it. Microsoft did pretty much the same thing
| with their console and a different compression codec.
| (Also, the fact that Kraken is a very good compression
| method for running on CPUs absolutely _does not_ imply
| that it 's the best choice for implementing in silicon.
| Sony's decision to implement it in hardware was likely
| mainly due to the fact that lots of PS4 games used it.)
| Your own source says that space savings for PS5 games
| were more due to the deduplication enabled by not having
| seek latency to worry about, than due to the Kraken
| compression.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| The hardware 3D audio acceleration (basically fancy HRTFs) is
| also really cool, but almost no 3rd party games use it.
|
| I've had issues with Xbox instant resume. Lots of "your save
| file has changed since the last time you played, so we have to
| close the game and relaunch" issues. Even when the game was
| suspended an hour earlier. I assume it's just cloud save time
| sync issues where the cloud save looks newer because it has a
| timestamp 2 seconds after the local one. Doesn't fill me with
| confidence, though.
| Sincere6066 wrote:
| "Uh oh, I don't like that sound of that..."
|
| _clicks article_
|
| "Project Amethyst is focused on going beyond traditional
| rasterization techniques that don't scale well when you try to
| "brute force that with raw power alone," Huynh said in the video.
| Instead, the new architecture is focused on more efficient
| running of the kinds of machine-learning-based neural networks
| behind AMD's FSR upscaling technology and Sony's similar PSSR
| system."
|
| "Yep..."
|
| Sigh.
| chrisjj wrote:
| Indeed. It is a "rethink" only for a very small value of
| /think/.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Graphics could stand to get toned down. It sucks to wait 7 years
| for a sequel to your favorite game. There was a time where
| sequels came out while the games were still relevant. We are
| getting sequels 8 years or more apart for what? Better beard
| graphics? Beer bottles where the liquid reacts when you bump into
| it? Who cares! | Game
| | Release Year |
| |-------------------------------------------|--------------|
| | GTA III | 2001 |
| | GTA Vice City | 2002 |
| | GTA San Andreas | 2004 |
| | Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus | 2002 |
| | Sly 2: Band of Thieves | 2004 |
| | Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves | 2005 |
| | Infamous | 2009 |
| | Infamous 2 | 2011 |
|
| We are 5 full years into the PS5's lifetime. These are the only
| games that are exclusive to the console. | Game
| | Release Year |
| |-------------------------------------------|--------------|
| | Astro's Playroom | 2020 |
| | Demon's Souls | 2020 |
| | Destruction AllStars | 2021 |
| | Gran Turismo 7 | 2022 |
| | Horizon Call of the Mountain | 2023 |
| | Firewall Ultra | 2023 |
| | Astro Bot | 2024 |
| | Death Stranding 2: On the Beach | 2025 |
| | Ghost of Yotei | 2025 |
| t-3 wrote:
| I can't help but think that Sony and AMD would be better off
| developing a GPU-style PCI-card module that has all their DRM and
| compute and storage on the board, and then selling consoles that
| are just normal gaming PCs in a conveniently-sized branded case
| with a PS card installed. If the card was sold separately at
| $3-400 it would instantly take over a chunk of the PC gaming
| market and upgrades would be easier.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| There sure is a lot of visionary(tm) thinking out there right now
| about the future of gaming, But what strikes me is how few of
| those visionaries(tm) have ever actually developed and taken a
| game to market.
|
| Not entirely unlike how many AI academics who step functioned
| their compensation a decade ago by pivoting to the tech industry
| had no experience bringing an AI product to market, but they
| certainly felt free pontificate on how things are done.
|
| I eagerly await the shakeout due from the weakly efficient market
| as the future of gaming ends up looking like nothing anyone
| imagineered.
| bugfix wrote:
| So we're getting a new console just to play AI-upscaled PS4 and
| PS5 "remasters"... and I suspect it'll probably come without any
| support for physical media. The PS5 will be my last console.
| There's no point anymore.
| musicale wrote:
| Nintendo is getting it right (maybe): focus on first-party
| exclusive games and, uh, a pile of indies and ports from the PS3
| and PS4 eras.
|
| Come to think of it, Sony is also stuck in the PS4 era since PS5
| pro is basically a PS4 pro that plays most of the same games but
| at 4K/60. (Though it does add a fast SSD and nice haptics on the
| DualSense controller.) But it's really about the games, and we
| haven't seen a lot of system seller exclusives on the PS5 that
| aren't on PS4, PC, or other consoles. (Though I'm partial to
| Astro-bot and also enjoyed timed exclusives like FF16 and FF7
| Rebirth.)
|
| PS5 and Switch 2 are still great gaming consoles - PS5 is cheaper
| than many GPU cards, while Switch 2 competes favorably with Steam
| Deck as a handheld and hybrid game system.
| kristopherleads wrote:
| I really dislike the focus on graphics here, but I think a lot of
| people are missing big chunk of the article that's focused on
| efficiency.
|
| If we can get high texture + throughput content like dual 4k
| streams but with 1080p bandwidth, we can get VR that isn't as
| janky. If we can get lower power consumption, we can get smaller
| (and cooler) form functions which means we might see a future
| where the Playstation Portal is the console itself. I'm about to
| get on a flight to Sweden, and I'd kill to have something like my
| Steam Deck but running way cooler, way more powerful, and less
| prone to render errors.
|
| I get the feeling Sony will definitely focus on graphics as
| that's been their play since the 90s, but my word if we get a
| monumental form factor shift and native VR support that feels
| closer to the promise on paper, that could be a game changer.
| tonis2 wrote:
| Soon real games will be 10 pixels, and everything else is
| upscaled
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