General Next Generation Rumors and Discussions [Post GDC 2020]

I just randomly started playing again mgsv. And this really shows where fast streaming in big openworld game could come in. This would be difficult to cache in any machine barring ram disk containing game install. Imagine if the binocular zoom in could bring in full and unique 4k assets in real time? No more copy paste textures/trees. Zoom is pretty slow so it would lend itself very well for streaming. I know mgsv is not technical/graphical master piece but this is stuff I wish would never happen again.

Why would it be difficult to cache that if you're able to cache a full third of your entire game content? That would suggest that a third of your entire game content would be visible to the player within a second or two at any given time. Is that realistic?

Take the MGS5 example and think of the size of the map, does what you can view through the binoculars at any given time give you access to more than a third of the entire game content?
 
Why would it be difficult to cache that if you're able to cache a full third of your entire game content? That would suggest that a third of your entire game content would be visible to the player within a second or two at any given time. Is that realistic?

Take the MGS5 example and think of the size of the map, does what you can view through the binoculars at any given time give you access to more than a third of the entire game content?

The world is super open. You can go on top of a hill and use binoculars to look pretty much anywhere. Including all kinds of detail assets for specific bases/enemies/cars/trucks etc. Everything is moving around, enemies patrol in foot/with vehicles etc. You can't guess what the player is doing and to cache you pretty much would have to have everything in ram. Especially so if you consider that streaming solution could bring in hero assets versus some lower level lod. It gets worse if games start to use unique assets for trees, enemies etc. instead of recycling same two trees.
 
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The world is super open. You can go on top of a hill and use binoculars to look pretty much anywhere. Including all kinds of detail assets for specific bases/enemies/cars/trucks etc. Everything is moving around, enemies patrol in foot/with vehicles etc. You can't guess what the player is doing and to cache you pretty much would have to have everything in ram. Especially so if you consider that streaming solution could bring in hero assets versus some lower level lod. It gets worse if games start to use unique assets for trees, enemies etc. instead of recycling same two trees.

I've got the Phantom Pain which is a much smaller game than Ground Zeroes and there's no way that you have line of site over more than a third of the entire map at any given time, with or without binoculars. And that's before you consider interiors.
 
I've got the Phantom Pain which is a much smaller game than Ground Zeroes and there's no way that you have line of site over more than a third of the entire map at any given time, with or without binoculars. And that's before you consider interiors.
But there are games where your binocs and other visual enhancement tech can see literally kilometres away. There are a few games they can do it well but for the most part you are looking at the lowest LOD models and rubbish textures.
 
I've got the Phantom Pain which is a much smaller game than Ground Zeroes and there's no way that you have line of site over more than a third of the entire map at any given time, with or without binoculars. And that's before you consider interiors.

I mean this as a concept. As I acknowledged in my original post mgsv is not that big technical achievement. Why limit games? Why not allow bringing in cutscene level assets when applicable. That binocular view would allow rendering insane quality level if assets were available.

The pc ram argument falls flat in practice. Based on steam statistics more than 50% of steam clients have less than 16GB of ram, only 8% has more ram than 16GB. Get 90% of market to upgrade significantly more ram or just buy ssd that matches resolution being played? Pretty much any reasonable ssd should be able to stream 1080p assuming data streamed scales with resolution. 4k is 4x data and 4x ssd speed to fill comparative quality assets.

I have decent ssd in my pc. I wish it was used to the fullest extent possible.
 
I mean this as a concept. As I acknowledged in my original post mgsv is not that big technical achievement. Why limit games? Why not allow bringing in cutscene level assets when applicable.

I would imagine that the primary reason cut scene quality assets aren't used in normal gameplay is because they're too expensive to render, not because of IO limitations. It's usually things like the player character, NPC's and lighting which get improved for cutscenes.

That binocular view would allow rendering insane quality level if assets were available.

It's not the quality that matters in this respect, it's how large the assets are. Unless you can have instant access to over a third of your game content within seconds at any given point in the game then there's no reason why 36GB of RAM shouldn't be sufficient to pre-cache anything that's needed (assuming an average game size of 100GB) outside of fast travel. The assets that you need immediate access to can be insane quality and still fit into 36GB worth of RAM. Consider that the entirety of Horizon Zero Dawn is about 40GB, and that's the whole game, not just what's available to you in the next say 10-20 seconds. If your immediate environment in the game is taking up more than a third of your total game content because the assets are such high quality, then there isn't going to be much variety in the game is there!

The pc ram argument falls flat in practice. Based on steam statistics more than 50% of steam clients have less than 16GB of ram, only 8% has more ram than 16GB. Get 90% of market to upgrade significantly more ram or just buy ssd that matches resolution being played? Pretty much any reasonable ssd should be able to stream 1080p assuming data streamed scales with resolution. 4k is 4x data and 4x ssd speed to fill comparative quality assets.

The discussion was spawned from the question of what PC you would have to buy today to match or exceed next gen console performance, so the percentage of PC's on the market now which meet that criteria is a separate topic. Naturally most won't and the vast majority of PC's on the Steam Hardware Survey won't be playing next gen games without an upgrade anyway so it's a bit of a moot point. But next gen games certainly can state minimum RAM requirements if they deem it necessary to be able to deliver the same experience on PC as is provided on consoles, and it certainly wouldn't be unreasonable for those requirements to be much higher than they are for current gen games. Anyone not meeting those requirements would simply have to reduce their memory requirements by doing things like reducing texture resolution and draw distance - or suffer pop in and poor performance.

I have decent ssd in my pc. I wish it was used to the fullest extent possible.

I totally agree. And for PC's that do have super fast IO then delivering an experience like that available on the consoles may be possible with much lower amounts of RAM. But more RAM is an alternative that's likely to meet most game requirements, and for the majority of people will be cheaper.

Also don't forget that DRAM is much lower latency and higher bandwidth than even the PS5's SSD so there are benefits to be had from pre-caching in DRAM over more direct reliance on the SSD too. Ideally a high end system next gen will have both options.
 
But there are games where your binocs and other visual enhancement tech can see literally kilometres away. There are a few games they can do it well but for the most part you are looking at the lowest LOD models and rubbish textures.

Agreed there will be some pretty niche use cases that can't be resolved with more RAM but I expect them to be rare. Any game that gives you the ability to instantly view or travel to any area of the map at any given time with no loading screens wouldn't fit into the more RAM paradigm. But outside of fast travel virtually no games do that.

I could imagine something like a superman game where you can fly high enough above the game world to see the entire map, but then instantly use super vision to zoom into any area below right up to the highest LOD's. That'd actually be pretty cool too!
 


No e3 means videogame platforms were free to do what they do best, delay, delay, and just when you thought they couldn't any more, delay again.

We might not get the prices until November. Why not? Better yet, just preorder PS5 and you'll find out the price when we charge you in January 2021. Because we wanted to delay more.
 
No e3 means videogame platforms were free to do what they do best, delay, delay, and just when you thought they couldn't any more, delay again.

We might not get the prices until November. Why not? Better yet, just preorder PS5 and you'll find out the price when we charge you in January 2021. Because we wanted to delay more.

And we may not get that PS5 Tear Down until it's on "Will It Blend" or some other YouTube viral video.
 
I would imagine that the primary reason cut scene quality assets aren't used in normal gameplay is because they're too expensive to render, not because of IO limitations. It's usually things like the player character, NPC's and lighting which get improved for cutscenes.



It's not the quality that matters in this respect, it's how large the assets are. Unless you can have instant access to over a third of your game content within seconds at any given point in the game then there's no reason why 36GB of RAM shouldn't be sufficient to pre-cache anything that's needed (assuming an average game size of 100GB) outside of fast travel. The assets that you need immediate access to can be insane quality and still fit into 36GB worth of RAM. Consider that the entirety of Horizon Zero Dawn is about 40GB, and that's the whole game, not just what's available to you in the next say 10-20 seconds. If your immediate environment in the game is taking up more than a third of your total game content because the assets are such high quality, then there isn't going to be much variety in the game is there!



The discussion was spawned from the question of what PC you would have to buy today to match or exceed next gen console performance, so the percentage of PC's on the market now which meet that criteria is a separate topic. Naturally most won't and the vast majority of PC's on the Steam Hardware Survey won't be playing next gen games without an upgrade anyway so it's a bit of a moot point. But next gen games certainly can state minimum RAM requirements if they deem it necessary to be able to deliver the same experience on PC as is provided on consoles, and it certainly wouldn't be unreasonable for those requirements to be much higher than they are for current gen games. Anyone not meeting those requirements would simply have to reduce their memory requirements by doing things like reducing texture resolution and draw distance - or suffer pop in and poor performance.



I totally agree. And for PC's that do have super fast IO then delivering an experience like that available on the consoles may be possible with much lower amounts of RAM. But more RAM is an alternative that's likely to meet most game requirements, and for the majority of people will be cheaper.

Also don't forget that DRAM is much lower latency and higher bandwidth than even the PS5's SSD so there are benefits to be had from pre-caching in DRAM over more direct reliance on the SSD too. Ideally a high end system next gen will have both options.

Granite, one of the best VT solutions, actually uses current frame data to predict the texture requirements for the next few frames. How? Because there is obligatory coherence between tiles of two succeeding frames outside of radical change in view frustrum meaning that the texture delta between two frames is necessarily small.
 
....I've heard on the whispers of the wind that MS is the victor in the bidding war for Warnerbros Games....
if true that's a fairly large number of studios they have to make content each year for XGP.

I haven’t really played much of their games so I’m not sure what to expect. But talent is limited out there so I suppose this was a big get for them. If true
 
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