I agree that I felt the Pro was poorly designed in terms of its 4K credentials but also in terms of ease of development. From a development point of view you want mid-gen refreshes to have as minimal impact to developers as possible, but this was not necessarily the case with the Pro. The meagre increase in RAM and bandwidth did present issues to developers if they aimed at higher resolutions. Sony did want developers to use checkerboarding but it was not applicable in all case - look at ND not even using it - and better methods were available such as temporal injections.
You contrast this with the One X which simply had the raw horsepower to brute force higher resolutions and developers didn’t have to faff around with RAM restrictions or upscaling methods if they didn’t want to.
I felt Sony should have held off another year and then introduce the Pro, but perhaps they wanted the PS5 out in 2019 initially who knows.
For X1X it wasn’t just the horsepower, it was also the push for devs to actually do patches and the focus on stuff like HDR and smarter ways to deliver stuff like the 4k assets. It just felt weird for Sony as a 4k TV maker to not push native 4k and HDR as much. MS also had BC stuff designed to highlight X1X advantages too, plus automatically did a boost mode without needing devs to go in and make one via a patch. So X1X was very much a thoroughly well thought out box for 4k targets. They designed the whole experience top to bottom from content new and old, to the specs and dev experience all for that target. Pro wasn’t as well thought out at all in this regard.
XSX continues this, as does XSS imho. Ya set the TV ya wanna target and then cater everything towards that. I think despite the grumbling devs will be happy to have millions more ppl playing their games despite a bit of extra work.
Finally talked to my dev buddy online last night. First time since devs were speaking out. He made it simple. Devs are complaining about doing something they don’t want to do and some are reaching. There’s no situation where the S holds back the X. If anything suffers with multiple targets, its the low end target.
Lazy devs are lazy, what’s new? If I were a game dev(I’m a business application dev), I would feel so privileged that I wouldn’t care about things like this.
I was just going to mention before I read it how the two Series consoles are a continuation of the One X in terms of philosophy. The One X is the first console which was the first step on Phil’s philosophy for Xbox and it was such a good start. The One X is a really well designed console.
I believe the difference here is that any games made for Stadia are an outlier. Lol
Thing to keep in mind is that devs are a mix of very different people. The reason why one dev hates something is the reason another likes the challenge. It’s more work for sure but like my dev buddy said, it’s part of the job. Many people don’t like some aspects of their job.
I don’t like the term “lazy devs” because I don’t believe lazy people last in game development. It’s a demanding profession and I don’t know how you can last and be lazy. Rather than being lazy, I think its a challenging profession and some devs respond differently to new challenges.
The PS4 is IMO underrated in this regard. They had a ton of small optimizations that allowed it to compare favorably to even PCs released years later. A lot of bandwidth optimizations, a lot of extra little bits so the GPU and CPU were completely leveraged. Even if MS upped their CU count they wouldn’t have had these things.
Also I’d argue that Sony is doing a good job with the PS5 as well, despite MS doing an incredible job. The PS5 is how I’d create a console: a machine that is very different from a PC. PCs will always have the better visuals, so how do you beat it? Innovate on controller, the SSD, the audio, etc.
Microsoft is not differentiating their console from the PC, which is actually a great thing for PC gaming. All of the strides made in the Series design with its integration of DX12U will push PC gaming forward. This does include things like SSD and audio, it needs to be noted.
And while the Series consoles don’t give you many exclusive hardware features to pick them over a PC, they are in fact incredibly affordable PCs. No matter what anyone says, you can’t match the XSX under $1000.
I know I kind of bashed the PS4 Pro but I agree that the PS4 was a well designed system: Simple but about as powerful that Sony could have made it in 2013 at a reasonable price.
Developers seem happy with the PS5 and from what I can see it seems like the PS5 is well thought out. I would mention that I believe the PS5 should have gone wide with the PS5 instead of narrow, but for BC it seems like they didn’t havea choice.
I know it’s going off topic but do we know for certain that PS5 does not have additional support for Int 4+8? In regards to hardware support for VRS I don’t know why Sony hasn’t even briefly mentioned it, but I refuse to believe Sony would omit it since it is basically a ‘free’ performance uplift for games and it is a standard feature of RDNA 2.
Rosario Leonardi confirmed no ML capabilities of any kind was added to the PS5 (he said it had no ML at all when asked about it). He said they took what AMD gave em basically and added only a couple small tweaks for audio processing. The INT stuff was added by MS beyond what AMD offered em, confirmed by Goosen.
As for VRS, note that MS doesn’t use AMD’s version, they rolled their own. That makes me think AMD’s option was ready in time for the console makers to use it. Recall btw that PS5 is not ‘standard, feature complete RDNA1’. It’s ‘in the middle b/t RDNA1 and RDNA2’ according to Leonardi.
Isn’t he PlayStation’s chief engineer? I remember that story breaking and he said he was tired or something and got confused. I know Goosen said they added ML support but ever since the Xbox One days I am always hesitant to believe Microsoft when they say they added something when it is just standard.
How can I forget, Microsoft loves to shout about their patented VRS . I guess we shall soon see, although I will still be flabbergasted if they don’t have hardware VRS.
Rosario is a PS5 Principal Graphics Engineer. The tweet he had about ML he deleted, likely due to getting in trouble. It was mid July when he posted that and deleted it, so right around same time Gavin leaked his DM about the RDNA thing.
Like you I am not a game dev, although my works requires me to interact with many devs. But my long years of working has taught me a few things… I like working and picking up a good salary. When I was young (into my forties), I thought things had to be done my way, I was the guy with the PhD, I knew all the tech stuff. Then I became a manager, and suddenly responsible for a team of 20 architects, I was not only responsible for the tech stuff and also people responsible. Managing budget, who gets a salary increase and more importantly, who didn’t. I need to get budgets for the team. Suddenly work wasn’t fun anymore. I moved on, found a good position as a individual contributor. The lesson I learnt, and have mostly kept in good staid, is let others worry about projects and getting funds and the politics involved, and make myself very useful with solving problem, That’s the only reason I get paid a very good salary.
Saw this point brought up on RE and it seems a good one to address the whole ‘will XSS hold back XSX games’ narrative.
The Witcher 3 and Doom were designed ground up for current gen consoles. They were not hindered in their design one possible hint of an iota by the existence of the Switch. Long after they released on current gen PSX/Xbox consoles, the games were eventually ported to Switch and performed quite surprisingly well after optimization. The scope/ambition/design of these X1/PS4 titles objectively could not possibly have been held back by the fact it also ended up running on the Switch. Neither title was known to lack ambitious game design either (to say the least).
So, definitively, XSS shouldn’t hold back XSX game design potential. Anything XSX can do in the ballpark of “faux-k”, XSS can do in the ballpark of “1080pr”. Folks might contend that Switch ports required whole new dev teams to accomplish. Sure. And maybe devs next gen don’t wanna dedicate whole teams to an XSS version. But they don’t need to. Unlike for the Switch ports, here devs can dial things back easily and if stuff runs poorly the target audience playing XSS on their 1080p TV’s likely won’t notice nor care anyhow. It is going to be quite clear that XSS is for 1080p and XSX is for 4k.
Yep pretty much what the dev told me yesterday. “Holding back” from a design standpoint doesn’t really make sense. These games are already being built to scale above the Series X and below the Series S due to PC. A developer who’s been making assets (graphics) for games for 2 decades said he makes high, medium and low versions of the assets. They’re already doing this. There will be extra work optimizing for Series S. If there is an issue with the GPU/memory long term, the Series S version will suffer. Has no impact on Series X. He couldn’t make sense of that claim or even come up with an edge case that’s realistic.
I find it super interesting how willing people are to come out and talk about the negatives about the Xbox Series Consoles but not talk about the positive things… It feels like we’ve only heard bad things. PS5 on the other hand seems to have only had positive things said about it, although mostly from first party.
It makes me think maybe MS isn’t allowing devs to talk about their console with NDA’s. Not only that but when a dev talks about Xbox in a bad light there are other devs coming out calling them out. It’s all very interesting and I think it’s politics because look how big it got that Series S is holding back next gen. The narrative has been set for that console now because a single dev spoke out on twitter.
I can gurantee you now the Sony press event will go on about this and how the PS5 is a true next gen console trying to play on that devs comments. Just look how big it got.
. I guess we shall soon see, although I will still be flabbergasted if they don’t have hardware VRS.