I would add
Thatâs an excellent addition, thank you. I understand being interested in how a game performs, but taking any discrepancy personally is a bridge too far and smacks of a martyr complex.
Also arenât most of the games where PS5 has the lead in performance kind of performing badly overall on all platforms; I kind of wish more people would focus on the games general performance and highlighting if a patch makes it better and fixes a problem then if one platform âcurrentlyâ has some sort of an edge.
Im not sure. I donât pay close enough attention. I watch them sparingly as the whole comparison thing wore thin for me a long time ago. I generally tune into certain ones because I am a tech enthusiast or Im interested in the game and because I appreciate the amount of work Digital Foundry puts into them.
Im old, so I came from a time when the same game might not even be the same game depending on which platform you got it for. Im hardened by the olden times.
I remember being flabbergasted because I rented Jurassic Park for the SNES and during lunch at school my buddy had got the genesis version. We started talking about the game and both of us thought we were lying to each other because what was being described didnât line up.
The wars we had about Megadrive vs. SNES AladdinâŚ
Its like people being unhappy about the Goldeneye Re-release. Like I get wanting it to be better, because it should be, but at the same time Im likeâŚdid you play it originally? It barely ran at all, and we loved every second of it.
It certainly is true for Wild Hearts. It has issues where the overall image on PS5 is not as good as Xbox, but PS5 has better performance than Xbox. And as always, Twitter runs with how itâs âsoâ much better on PS5. Of course, if they were to fix the image quality than sure, PS5 is better, but they could fix the performance on Xbox just as well.
Hogwarts seems to be one where PS5 took/takes the lead, I donât know where things stand now. Same as with Callisto.
well for wild hearts specifically it might be a bit before they improve it on xbox; there are PC players that are getting sub 20 fps on certain encounters so I think there focus is there atm.
as for the other 2 it could be optimization priority, they were both marketed by Sony and knew thats the platform where they would probably sell the most copies.
remember they had to delay the last gen versions of hogwarts to even get the ps5, PC and xbox series versions out the door i would guess they were short on optimization time.
I just think without much insight from high level developers, and it being something that no one working with these companies is likely to address publicly, there is no reason to speculate.
There are very few things that we know for certain:
Sony uses the same development environment for PS5 that they used for PS4, everyone knows how to use it, and PS is the lead platform for most games because of install base.
The PS5 matches the number of PS4 Pro CUs. Same count, more features, higher clocks, same dev env.
MS completely redid their development environment in conjunction with the pandemic and a tougher cross platform move technology wise (their architecture changed more from XB1 to Series)
Outside of those things, everything else is pure speculation. And Im no developer so I donât even feel justified in having thoughts or opinions about how a dev would go about spreading that work load to more CUs, how that works, or what is involved, but it must be harder than we think.
Another thing that hasnât been mentioned; as the barrier to entry for game development gets smaller (good thing), a side effect is that people who really know how to optimize and write optimized code (especially targeted at specific HW, but even in general) arenât seen to be as needed. Also, there just arenât as many of them proportionately in the field since itâs not a required skill. Throw in multiple platforms and PC, and things can get overwhelming when it becomes time to optimize and optimization wasnât inherently on the mind when the code was originally written.
In my past discussions with devs, they usually lead with the platform/dev environment that produces the results the quickest since iteration time in development is so valuable. I havenât had any conversations with devs on current gen platforms, so I donât know where they stand on that front.
DF kind of covered this topic in their latest direct podcast and noted some devs still had a slight preferce for the PS5 tools, but there werenât any complaints or issues around the Xbox tools like we saw around launch. They also pointed out how the DX12 support can be a double edge sword since it requires less work and thus less tailored code to get the game running on Xbox platforms.
The last point they made was about time and I think this is the most important aspect. At the end of the day, Xbox is asking devs to put in more work by introducing two consoles. How much extra work that adds is probably dependent on the type of game. The less demanding or smaller scope the game, the less of a problem itâll likely be. Thankfully itâs not like all the work or lessons learned from previous projects get thrown out, so even if early efforts might suffer in some ways, hopefully future projects will go smoother. No matter what, the extra QA work alone could add a good chunk of work for many projects.
Personally, I would have preferred Microsoft just release the X version, but I understand why they also released the S. Itâll be interesting to see how the generation goes on and how devs best utilize these systems. A lot of the unique features could really benefit the S, but whether or not they are used is likely dependent on how easily they can be incorporated into existing pipelines. 4A for example said they wonât be utilizing the mesh shaders (or PS5âs new geometry engine) because their existing geometry pipeline is mature and fits their needs. As usual, Iâm expecting 1st party titles to best utilize the hardware, thatâs why Iâm excited to see games like Forza, Fable, Avowed, SoD3, Hellblade 2, etc. running on consoles.
Saw this on the Scorn twitter account earlier today:
Some interesting tidbits:
"Regarding the integration for the Microsoft platforms, some additional steps were required that will be further discussed.
For their platforms, Microsoft distributes FSR 2.1 through a sample project which is not an Unreal Engine project. It is necessary to build the project for each platform so that shader permutation files would be generated. This is necessary because files differ depending on the GDK version used. We used the GDK version 220301. This required a change in the build script, found in the sample project so that it can find the correct path of the GDK when building shader permutations. To integrate the changes from the Microsoft sample project into the FSR 2.1 UE plugin we copied generated shader permutation files and merged Microsoftâs changes to ffx-fsr2-api.xbox"
âOn the Xbox Series X platform, we choose to use Quality mode which provided us with great image quality and a significant performance boost. Besides that, we also reclaimed 100-500 MB in various locations on the memory side due to the 2560 x 1440 input resolution of Quality mode.â
âThe implementation process took us less time than we initially thought it would, and this meant so much to us since we were already on a tight schedule in relation to the deadlines we had set. With FSR 2.1 implemented we were able to hit stable 60fps on all of the platforms even at 4K resolution. Since it delivers a significant performance boost with little or no image quality cost it delivered a huge benefit for our project.â
Really nice find. Always appreciate it when devs share GPU cost or saving information.
Very cool, even though i recently finished it, haha. But 1440p? Was it actually lower than that previously on X?
Christ. Koei Tecmo has to be currently one of the worst companies (techinacally speaking) in the world.
How in the world are you going to drop the ball so hard in tow consecutives games (in a row mind you) on the platform whose market o said games is bigger? You have killed the performance of Wo Long and wild hearts.
Ironically, square enix just killed it on steam with octopath traveller 2 lol
About Koei, Theyâre apparently delivering a gold standard PC port thanks to Gust, with Atelier Ryza 3 lol.
Sounds like Koeiâs other teams needs to learn from Gust 
