It’s a bottleneck but IMO it seems like they’re blowing things out of proportion; I think if people just keep their expectations in check, everything will be fine. You can’t realistically expect everything to be a perfect conversion from Series X to Series S, I’m sure most games will be fine but it probably won’t be unexpected to see instances where some graphical features take more of a hit or where performance isn’t exactly the same… that doesn’t mean it’s end of the world scenarios but the thing is $300 ffs, a little compromise on some things doesn’t really seem all that wild. I doubt we’re going to see anything that will stop people from enjoying games.
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I think the comments from the 2-3 you are referring to come down to not understanding that this machine is intended for use with a 1080p TV. If someone asked them what next gen Xbox to get they would ask the person what their budget is. If that person had asked MS the same question, MS would ask that person what TV they have. These devs probably just don’t grasp the distinction here.
They think its designed to be cheap when in reality it is designed for 1080p TV’s, so their thinking is premised on it being a required baseline for assets when that is NOT the case at all. XSX is the baseline (or PS5 or PC) and you just take your XSX version and make it 1080p with lower res textures. If need be, trim some mip levels and lower FOV slightly and voila. Done.
Also, SFS won’t help for next gen games here since that is also being used in the presumed XSX 4k version. So the same benefit would be there for both of them. I could see a bandwidth issue due to RT needing lots of that, but not really seeing devs complain about that so much as the RAM amount. Maybe using ML to upres textures at runtime can help with RAM utilization, but it’d need to be planned for as a dedicated part of the dev process.
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The Series S is a console made for 1080p/1440p gaming at 60 FPS. The majority of the people complaining don’t seem to take that into account when talking about the memory or GPU. It has been scaled down accordingly to make that possible. 4K assets take a lot of power and memory bandwith; but there is another reason why there is not as much memory as they thought.
The SSD is supposed to play a bigger part with all that, and for the plateform holders to help keep the costs lower. SFS and Velocity architecture is the software that will help improve that aspect. That’s why, these veterans are skeptical right now, because they are not used to using SFS and the SSD as another part to help with the memory. Nvidia only just started implementing that with their new cards, and the new Navi should too. It is literally something pretty new that the developers will start using, so it will only get better as time goes on.
Developers were also skeptical before the Switch came out, and now you don’t really hear any complaints anymore.
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Games get designed for multiple console specs all the time. In this case Microsoft specifically created this console to be easy to scale down to for games coded for the Series X. Time will tell if they’ve done that in a smart way that doesn’t create undue headaches for developers. I trust that that is the case but we’ll see.
Let’s be real…if it was up to the developers there would only be 1 gaming machine. Period. No one likes more work. NO ONE. Some will continue to whine, but they will put in the work-like they have done for generations (PS3 Cell anyone?)- and happily take the $$$$ at the end of the day.
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I wouldn’t say no one likes more work. I bet there are people in the industry who thrive on solving problems. I’m talking about those innovators who come up with all sorts of crazy tricks. Xbox BC team for example, I bet there are a bunch there who just loved getting it work and basked in their accomplishment.
Now that you mention it (PS3) I don’t recall many complaints of poor devs or holding back games with that one even after the lesser/cheaper 360 was beating it in head to head tests. I do recall some lazy devs complaints though…
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Most of the devs commenting negatively on twitter seem to have beef with xbox. One of them I searched their past tweets mentioning Xbox and they had a ‘weekly Xbox snark’ tweet. And loads complaining about pretty much everything Xbox did. So yeah.
Way I see it is that there are some legitimate potential issues where as the gen goes on the resolution is scaled down on the series X to allow for more advanced features - then the Series S starts to be what, 720p? Additionally it’s fair that not all engines and scenarios will scale linearly with resolution so clearly some games might need bigger sacrifices. I do think it’s way overplayed and obviously because the S was earning universal praise and the usual malcontents have to find a way to tear it down. But there are issues in the future potentially. Still a hell of a deal for the money. And can’t really be criticised.
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I agree, there are many people who thrive on the challenges. I should have specified “more work” meaning the extra time and resources that it does take, during development, to scale down a game for a less powerful version. From what I’ve read, I believe many of the developers have started using the term “bottleneck” to describe the extra time/hours it adds to a development cycle, when I remember a time “bottleneck” was only used to describe a technical problem. I could be wrong- not in the industry or anything-just observing from the outside.
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One Battlefield developer has commented on these concerns and sees no problems with the Series S. Personally, I believe that customization depends more on the skills of the developers than on the hardware.
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Some of them were talking about expecting at least 100 gb of RAM, so of course they would be disappointed lol.
Anyways, I think this is normal and I consider these comments as early reactions rather than devs that have been working with the devkit for some time. Both ps5 and xbox series x|s are talking about making the ssd an extension of ram. This is not a normal configuration, never have been done in gaming (PC is now getting this tech too), and it will take some time until devs are used to it. So, early in this gen, lots of dev will need to deal with the lower ram of series S.
What I really read from their comments is that they do expect more visual drawbacks than only resolution. Reduced FPS, reduced quality of assets, less visual effects. Truly as “high” vs “medium” vs “low” graphical settings on PC games.
The way XSX is being presented I can’t really see games anymore being under native 4K on it anymore, maybe slightly below it but not by much. 4K and 60fps seems to be where XSX is going. Personally I would be in favor of a dynamic 4K if that means significantly more graphical bells and whistles in a RPG, especially more so if those strive for 60fps as well.
How about the PC bottleneck where developers are still going to have to account for 5400 RPM hard drives as someone’s main storage solution? PC versions of games aren’t going to require Xbox or PS5 SSD levels for a long time.
PCs are doomed, consoles held back, oh no…
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There were LOTS of complaints by devs about PS3 at the time.
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These devs are simply tweeting to me and Nvidia that I should never buy a 3090 when its obviously bottlenecked by a 3070. Mhmmmm.
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Hmmm I don’t remember many “this is going to hold games back” complaints when the PS3 was revealed. I wasn’t really looking for them exactly though.
It wasn’t being tweeted back then. It was more devs on forums or folks complaining to the gaming press about it behind the scenes and then percolating out publicly. It happened that way with PS4 actually too prior to its change in RAM.
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From what I understand a lot of Devs want the best possible specs in order to make development easier. Lower specs means more work needs to be put into optimization. If you have a fixed number of staff and a fixed Dev time, the work needed to produce the series S version does become a bottleneck. It is just a bottleneck in terms of production rather than from any limitation of the hardware itself. Development time has already been getting longer and that will probably increase next gen as Devs are encouraged to push for ever higher fidelity. I imagine Devs were hoping to reduce their workload by targeting the fairly similar specs of the PS5 and series X.
I don’t feel the thread name. A bit too much.
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I thought it was pretty well known around that time. Kutaragi really believed it that cell, to the point that he wanted to ship without a GPU till people internally at Sony proved it was a bad move. I knew the PS2 was also a pain due to the Emotion Engine, but I didn’t know there was a RAM situation on PS4.
Kutaragi was Playstation’s Don Mattrick. 
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