There’s multiple reasons. One is that it has been admittedly by people in the development side said that a combination of inflated development cycles and the pandemic have simply delayed the onset of full-on next-gen games.
And I also gotta mention there’s no one demo/proof of concept because it’s not a single concept, it’s simply new and advanced hardware capabilities that can mean different things to different games/devs. It’s nothing new and nothing magical, it’s always been the case with new generations.
I understand the way Sony chose to focus their hardware marketing on the SSD, and there might have been some overblowing in there because Sony have always made silly marketing tactics like that, but it’s not all a lie. The improved and expanded memory and fast storage capabilities for data streaming of the new generation will in fact make possible for world scopes not possible on previous hardware, as I think the reason Starfield took long to realize by BGS is this reason. On top of the CPU which was a huge bottleneck on last-gen, it’s a now much more advanced CPU across all consoles and it’s showing beyond just better visuals/fps in how Series S is able to run Flight Simulator, a very advanced high-end PC game, because it has an advanced CPU and memory capabilities. That game simply would not run on XB1 and they have tried.
No one has claimed that you necessarily need new hardware to have new ideas and game concepts. Of course impressive and new game design ideas can come on any hardware as well, for example I’d say Breath of the Wild is a much more impressive interactive open world game than anything on PS5/XSX and it’s running on mobile hardware.
Thats all just scope. I agree on that. Thats why i specifically talked about game design concepts. 2 years in and there are none in published games or in trailers of games for the next 2 years.
I checked a twitter thread on it and some claim that while it looks sharper now and more smooth performance, the visual fidelity has degraded. Apparently this can be a effect of super resolution, is what they are saying.
I hope not, because visually it looked fine as it was and the only performance issues were in a certain area only as DF showed too. But I can’t judge for myself until tomorrow.
That’s good! I’ll go check it out tomorrow. I haven’t played it in months, so I’m not sure if I’ll see a difference immediately. But it should be interesting to see DF revisit it.
The decompression is handled through a dedicated hardware block on Xbox Series X/S right? So hypothetically it would be decompression without CPU or GPU usage?
Yeah, deflate is a hardware component on Series consoles. And it goes directly to GPU memory. On PC, even with Direct Storage 1.1, it goes first to main memory and then over PCI to GPU memory where it is decompressed with GPU compute shaders. Microsoft said to me they are working on improving that inefficiency.
First job at Unity should be winning back the faith of their dev community. And it seems a lot of these new features will still be in Preview even next year. I don’t know why a game with big production values would bet on Unity.
Nice improvement overall with sharper IQ and less ghosting.
Series S dynamic resolution is lowered in both ends but gains some frames in specific scenarios.
FSR 2.1 is a bigger improvement in Quality/RT mode than Performance mode since it works better at lower frame-rates. Still IQ is sharper even in Performance mode.
Overall I’d say that FSR 2.1 looks pretty awesome. Can’t wait for the devs to use all the tools available to them (especially on the Series consoles), interesting times ahead.
IIRC it’s pretty much the same for SX and PS5 yeah.
Still it’s good news that the IQ is improved also in 60fps even if it isn’t that obvious like it is in 30fps. Can’t wait for teams like The Coalition, id, Playground and 4A games to show us what they can achieve with the Series consoles. I am betting that we’ll see some amazing looking games this generation.
