I watch a few of the tech channels such as DF, NXGamer and RGT, and I have drawn my ideas of if they have a bias.
DF keep it straight down the line, but because MS has given them access to their new consoles Sony peeps think they are biased. But if you watch both the XSX and PS5 reveal videos they are very balanced to both of them. I will see them question wether VRS is on the PS5, not to say it isn’t, but saying that Sony hasn’t confirmed it. They even reached out to Cerny to clarify, and as far as I understand Cerny never replied.
Can’t get much more balanced than that.
RGT tries hard, but I think he has gotten some dodgy PS5 sources telling him stuff which he has taken on. In his XSX Hot Chips video he took it for granted that PS5 has ML, yet Sony havent confirmed it, and their Principle Software Engineer confirmed it didn’t.
NXGamer is pretty similar to RGT, and has a slight PS bias.
Obviously there are the full blown fanboy channels on each sid like Dealer, Colt etc on Xbox and MGX, Crapgamer and Foxy on the other side.
Who do people listen to for a non biased honest breakdown?
Am I the only one who thinks NX and RGT has a slight bias?
Now I’m not looking to rubbish these guys. We all have our bias, and I am sure if I had a channel it might be a little biased one way.
And by bias I dont mean making up false information, but it comes across like assuming for sure Sony had say VRS or Mesh Sharers, but not giving MS or the XSX the benefit of the doubt in similar situations.
I only really read and/or watch DF and NXGamer and I personally find them to be balanced. I do occasionally watch RGT but not that often to form an opinion.
I do prefer DF the most overall as their videos are normally well produced and they will criticise if the situation calls for it. I mean you could tell their disappointment with the Halo Infinite showing because they know the Series X is impressive from a technical perspective - even Alex complimented it and he is the PC ‘guy’ on the team - and wanted to know why it wasn’t being shown in the demo.
I’m looking forward to the digital foundry comparison videos when the systems launch. Right now most gamers think the PS5 and Xbox are virtually identical; it’s going to be a rude awakening for a majority of the internet to discover just how much of a graphics advantage Xbox actually has over the pS5. People that were getting their gaming news from those bias sources will be quiet blind sided.
I am not totally convinced about that. I mean there will be a difference but there honestly shouldn’t be a vast difference between the two consoles going by the specs. Although, if the PS5 for some inexplicable reason doesn’t have VRS and further support for ML then I could see the differences being more pronounced.
Yeah I think the difference, if there is much, wont be coming from the extra 2tflops, but from VRS, Mesh Sharers and ML. If Sony doesnt have those, it’s going to be a long gen for their fanboys.
The other issue is that we dont know how much the PS5 is going to downclock with it’s variable frequency set up.
Cerny said it will only drop in those worst case scenario games, which is kinda when you want the horse power.
RGT ignores explicit factual information presented to him if it doesn’t favor an outcome he wants to push. I myself gave him direct confirmation from Sony’s own Principal Graphics Engineer that PS5 has no machine learning hardware in it but he kept asserting that it must be there since it seemed hard for him to imagine.
He also had a video about ‘DLSS on PS5 patent’ a lil while back where he had the English translated patent on the screen and the words therein completely ruined the argument he was making (the patent language is explicitly about a camera-based device, not a console). He seemingly just straight up translated it, didn’t like what it said and so he ignored what it said in black and white and pushed his theory that it was DLSS for PS5, lol.
NX has a slight Sony bias I think, but he knows his stuff on the tech level. DF imho has no discernible bias and also knows their stuff.
I only watch Digital Foundry. Started watching them early this gen, perhaps even last gen but im not 100% sure on that. I am 100% looking forward to their teardowns on the retail units when they get them and all their head to head comparisons for the multi-platform titles because honestly, I don’t believe that it will be close whatsoever and in some cases, it will probably be a total slaughter.
As for just people in general, I watch Dealer Gaming, Rand Al Thor 19 and Colt Eastwood for Xbox and haven’t really watched a lot of PlayStation focused YouTubers lately because whichever console I go with as my primary, it’s simply the one I focus on the most.
I have watched MBG for the last year or so and I know he switched from Xbox to PlayStation but the thing I have realized is that those who favor PlayStation tend to bash Xbox any chance they get while those who favor Xbox tend to bash PlayStation a lot less in comparison.
Hasn’t Cerney confirmed the PS5 does have mesh shaders but they call them something else? I am sure it was at the Road to PS5 event.
In regards to the clocks I am fascinated by it. As you say, developers would want the max clocks in situations where the game is taxing the hardware, but it seems like they will have to decide which component gets down clocked to keep the power envelope within limits during scenarios where the game is really hammering the hardware. I guess they are banking on games not normally being GPU and CPU bound at the same time - it is usually one or the other.
He confirmed primitive shaders, which have been around for awhile. Mesh Shaders are newer tech which was recently added to Nvidia cards, and RDNA 2 will have it via Direct X.
Thats how I understand it anyways.
DF does a great job of remaining pretty neutral. They all have their own preferences, Alex loves PC gaming for example, but I think they do a great job being objective. I’ve seen both Xbox and PS fans calling them biased, so that means they are doing something right.
NX Gamer seems to also be pretty neutral but I think any preference to Sony is mostly due to their games pushing boundaries more often.
I think RGT just has some poor sources and doesn’t study his topics all too well. He didn’t know the OS in the XSX takes up 2.5GB of memory for example.
I don’t think any of them are malicious but have their personal experiences influence their view of things. Really no different than many of us gamers.
The PS5 has a geometry engine with primitive shaders. They seem to be very similar to the mesh shaders in RDNA2 and Turing architectures, but we need to find out more to really see how they compare.
For RGT, he seems entirely unaware of the DF interview with Goosen that mentioned that info about the OS reserve. I’d say he just forgot it but I gave him info from 4 different parts of that DF article and he seemed totally oblivious to any of it. Really, really strange behavior.
I think RGT has gradually become what some of the other channels has; click farms that tell viewers what they want to hear.
I think NX might just be taken in a bit by the slick art style of some Sony games and that can perhaps color how he perceives the technical prowess. A lot like how many ppl ignore Gears 5 when talking about top tier tech graphics, probably due to its art style being stylized and not aiming for the filmic look.
DF and NXGamer are pretty objective and do a good job in general. DF have more broad and entertaining videos, but they also have more resources than NXGamers one man show. The only thing I dislike about NXG is this technobabble he sometimes does. The rest (Foxy, RGT) have simply no idea what they are talking about and are obviously fishing for clicks and drama.
Eh, I’m sure one will load 10 seconds faster than the other and one will have a few more blades of grass than the other. Won’t be a big difference imo, just like this gen. I am fairly confident if you showed a random game to someone, without the obvious clues like buttons icons removed. 99% of the people would have no clue which system it was running on.
As for bias? Eh, with all of these public figures in games journalism, they will get called bias towards one piece of plastic one day, then the next day the opposite. People obviously all have preferences, there is no denying that but I would assume most of these guys that you are talking about are professional enough to put those aside and in their case, just focus on the hardware specs.
Both machines are beasts, people will play great looking games on both. I think we should just leave it at that.
DF and DF only. The others come with a ton of salt. I will listen to RGT and NXG but I always try to figure out what they think vs what they know. The rest exist but have to be parsed through.
The idea that there isn’t legitimate bias present in some of these cases is pretty silly. Ya might not mind if ya don’t take their clips seriously as is, but that is far from the suggestion you are making here. I can say from personal experience interacting with RGT just this morning that he seems to straight up ignore direct info from Andrew Goosen and Rosario Leonardi in favor of his gut instincts, which are sometimes not even informed.
Ex. 1: He thought having rapid packed math of any form like FP16 automatically meant ya had machine learning hardware akin to XSX. That’s like claiming PS4 Pro can do ML inference, which it can’t. When he saw Goosen explaining exactly this in his DF interview, RGT just repeated his stance.
Ex. 2: He took the liberty of translating a patent into English that he had heard might refer to DLSS on PS5, but when the text said it was explicitly DLSS for a camera (“a device for capturing images”) he just ignored every time that kept getting noted in the patent. Then he went on to claim PS5 could likely do DLSS.
When you won’t accept explicitly clear, direct info from Sony’s Principal Graphics Engineer and MS’s Chief Xbox Architect, or when ya refuse to acknowledge the black and white text that he himself had translated and replace the interpretation with some goofy narrative, something is rather wrong. There is objective bias at that in his case, at the very least.
I think you are being far too reductionist here. I personally expect a rather big tech advantage for Xbox this gen, based on stuff XGS is doing that nobody is really talking about or thinking about for some reason atm.
The beauty of digital foundry is that they really leave there personal opinions out of it and just report the facts. When they do say there preference they keep it sperate and not in a biased way.
Nxgamer does some good stuff but his bias is really, his defence of the TLOU2 downgrade was hilarious.
