Games Analysis |OT| Time To Argue About Pixels And Frames!

1 Like

Watching now, Betteridge’s law of headlines seems to hold – their answer is “No.” :rofl:

Alex adds the caveat that there is additional time commitment for devs to get a Series S version working, which could be seen as holding them back.

Rich concludes that the Series S is “essential” for providing access to gaming in the current economic environment.

John wishes it had a disc drive. :laughing:

5 Likes

Based on the question, Alex is pretty much on the money.

We know that TC was asked to provide support for memory management for The Matrix demo. Now that demonstrates that Series S is not a hard barrier but it does require more finesse.

2 Likes

This is fair and is on MS to keep improving their dev tools and expand support teams and find ways to make stuff easier for developers, specifically smaller studios who attempt AAA level games, because I remember someone from Remedy pointing out that those type of developers will be affected the most with the demand for more optimization, iteration, and QA testing, etc which are costly stages not all can afford in proper capacity.

Yeah, totally agree with Alex on the biggest bottleneck is going to be time. It’s of course easier to work on two SKUs instead of three and it makes sense for devs to put more time or effort on the larger consoles since consumers for those platforms would care more about performance or IQ. Even with that said, when the system is given the proper time and attention, the cut backs are generally smart and the end results still look excellent for the hardware. The Matrix demo is a perfect example of this.

2 Likes

What would be “harder”, developing on Series S as baseline target and then upscaling to SX/PS5 or developing for SX/PS5 as baseline target and then downscaling to Series S?

To put it in the words of the CEO:

If a Series S version would take no effort, that “would be worrying because what it is telling us is that we’re not pushing the envelope from a technology standpoint.”

or

“we don’t provide the ‘easy to program for’ console that (developers) want, because ‘easy to program for’ means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is, what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?”

1 Like

My guess would be scaling up would be easier than scaling down based on similar conversations I’ve seen from devs. I wouldn’t be surprised if most studios target high end and scale down though. Devs aren’t dumb and I’d think they would have a good road map to how to scale their assets and settings across all platforms. In the case of MS 1st party titles, there’s a chance that they’ll end up supporting PC specs that are lower than the Series S in ways (along with spec higher than the Series X on the opposite end). So scalability would be a priority anyways.

I do hope DF are correct in that the Series S might push devs to better utilize the unique features in the Series consoles to reach better performance.

3 Likes

Right, like offloading decompression tasks and freeing compute, and memory management efficiency through SFS and the XVA featureset. I’ve read that the claims about SFS (memory duplication for texture assets) are legit but it doesn’t have proper tools from MS so it’s complicated to utilize, MS should focus there on improving the tools/APIs to upstart developer adoption.

Also the ML hw component, could that possibly be used for image quality improvements in tandem with something like FSR?

We will have to wait and see. He also made a somewhat interesting point that it may even force developers to leverage more the features of the console.

1 Like

A plague tale got a patch Today

The performance is improved across the platforms

PS5 is now above 30 in demanding scenes and Xbox series X is even more close and consistent to 40 after the patch

Alex says this game is generally GPU bound both on console and PC

1 Like

It wasn’t locked 40fps in 120hz mode before?

There are always some heavy scenes

In one scene PS5 was below 30 fps, it is now above 30

In the same scene Series X was ~35, it is now 40

2 Likes

Very nice to see.

I haven’t begun with the game yet, busy with Pentiment now. So who knows, maybe round the time I get to start with it they have optimized it even more.

From the DF coverage

3 Likes

Series X is 23% faster then PS5

The interesting thing about the chart above is that it’s not showing the entire story with the Series X since v-sync is locking the frame rate to 40fps. So without an unlocked frame rate, we’re unable to see if the gap would be any wider. When looking at the pre-patch versions, they noted the difference was 25%, so it could be closer to that if it were not for the 40fps cap.

I wonder if future patches will bring more performance gains

Weird. Why upscaled on X?

They likely prioritized the ps version as so many other devs do.