Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]

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I was not aware of this, did they do an interview somewhere? Got a link?
I don't have a link but I remember reading* this also. It also makes sense. The Tourist runs at 6k on Series X and 8k on PS5, and PS5 has higher pixel fill rate. We are talking about resolutions no other shipping console game runs at and the most obvious on paper advantage of PS5.

*I might not have read it. It might have been an anecdote from a DF direct.
 
I don't have a link but I remember reading* this also. It also makes sense. The Tourist runs at 6k on Series X and 8k on PS5, and PS5 has higher pixel fill rate. We are talking about resolutions no other shipping console game runs at and the most obvious on paper advantage of PS5.

*I might not have read it. It might have been an anecdote from a DF direct.

The Tourist released as a launch title November 10, 2020 for Series consoles and then 10 months later September 9, 2021 on PS5. Development tools at launch and much of the first year were rough for Xbox. The devs also stated they rewrote the engine for the PS5s low level graphics APIs.

It seems like there is a different level of effort involved between the two versions.
 
I'm not sure if discussions of how the XBO's DX11 based API compare to the PS4's are really that relevant to the Series consoles. Everything is DX12 these days and even the article above references that being much better and suggests it's more in line with GNM.
Not really related to the discussion but I'm just going to say it. DX12 sucks. Its actually pretty awful all things considered. Not a fan.
 
Series X has weird memory and PS5 has weird clocks. Unless Microsoft are making different tools for Series S and Series X then two consoles shouldn't make any difference to the tools.
It shouldn’t; it’s just takes longer for MS to get their kits out. A single piece of hardware kit to profile 2 systems.
 
Not really related to the discussion but I'm just going to say it. DX12 sucks. Its actually pretty awful all things considered. Not a fan.

The results we see on the PC in some DX12 titles are a result of how low level it is and how much control it gives over to the developer... exactly the things that are being praised in the PlayStation API's further up the thread.

If you were to put a PC tailored GNM API on the PC it would suffer just as much as DX12 in the hands of inexperienced developers.
 
I'm not trying to overstate. I'm trying to explain why PS development can be faster than XB development even using the same IDE.
I think a notable item comes down to OS differences here. Xbox has an extra step that it still needs to create a container for the game to run in. With SN its going direct to PS5.


The results we see on the PC in some DX12 titles are a result of how low level it is and how much control it gives over to the developer... exactly the things that are being praised in the PlayStation API's further up the thread.

If you were to put a PC tailored GNM API on the PC it would suffer just as much as DX12 in the hands of inexperienced developers.
And very hard to get shader compilation stutter on console.

The scope differences between GNM vs dx12 are massive in scale. There’s no comparison on what dx12 must accomplish versus GNM for a single platform.
 
First time I hear about SN and VS. Can anyone educate me?
VS does the coding.

But you need to examine how performance is on the PS5 hardware and to load your game (and assets, audio etc) there for testing. You use SN tools once need to work with the hardware.
 
First time I hear about SN and VS. Can anyone educate me?
VS is MS's Visual Studio. That's where you write the lines of code and it has functions to facilitate that. To make the code run, you need to 'build' it, translating the high-level human-readable code into lower-level machine-compatible code. SN is the company (and collection of systems including third parties) that manages that for Sony. These tools track performance and track down issues, but they integrate within Visual Studio so you can run them from that interface instead of needing another program.
 
VS is MS's Visual Studio. That's where you write the lines of code and it has functions to facilitate that. To make the code run, you need to 'build' it, translating the high-level human-readable code into lower-level machine-compatible code.
Mate, this is to most miserable description of VS I've ever seen! o_O I can only assume that you worked somewhere where it wasn't really setup properly.

First time I hear about SN and VS. Can anyone educate me?
VisualStudio is the core IDE (integrated development environment) used by most software developers, it's used by Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony for their consoles SDKs. As Shifty unenthusiastically explained, it's the principle interface where you write code, but it's incredibly extensible and from this one interface you can connect to your team's shared code, audio, visual and other assets libraries along with support documentation for middleware libraries. You can compile, target and deploy code to connected or remote hardware and have that code provide debug information to VS-connected tools to profile performance by monitoring various hardware utilisation.

A good IDE is worth its weight in gold.
 
I'm keeping it simple for the purposes of understanding the relationship between the IDE and the other tools. When you start considering the complexities and interplay of the toolchains, it's harder to see what's what and doesn't help with the understanding about why Sony's devtools are faster to work with.
 
I'm keeping it simple for the purposes of understanding the relationship between the IDE and the other tools. When you start considering the complexities and interplay of the toolchains, it's harder to see what's what and doesn't help with the understanding about why Sony's devtools are faster to work with.
Fair enough, but the way you describe VS could be used to describe vi! :runaway: How any IDE is setup, but particularly VS in modern times is 95% about how it's been configured and what it does for the programmer. A bare bones install is barely better than contextual formatting editors like GoldED from the 1980/90s. But I've used VS where you could make tiny tweaks to massive codebases, deploy compilation to local hardware configured specifically to do nothing by compute codebases near-instantly, return the binary and deploy to whatever target hardware you are working with.

A well setup VS, with investment in making a regressive code-compile-run-debug cycle as near transparent as possible, is a sight to behold. What I don't understand is what Sony are doing so well that Microsoft cannot. Or just have not. If not, why not
 
A well setup VS, with investment in making a regressive code-compile-run-debug cycle as near transparent as possible, is a sight to behold. What I don't understand is what Sony are doing so well that Microsoft cannot. Or just have not. If not, why not

Sony changed a lot less in their SDK moving from PS4Pro to PS5. Microsoft changed a metric ton of things in their SDK when switching from XDK to GDK (unified development for last-gen, current-gen, and PC).

Lack of Abstraction? Microsoft has more layers in their APIs. Sony has less layers in their APIs. It remains to be seen if or how that will have an impact on Next-Gen Sony PlayStation 6 or Microsoft Xbox Next consoles with current-gen PS5 / XBSX|S or last-gen PS4 / XBO games.

I don't expect as much pain for Microsoft when next-gen comes out, assuming they won't have vast differences in GDK 2026 (or whenever it releases).



Also, please don't bring up VI! Everyone should only know enough of it to get a better editor up and running if you have to adjust makefiles or config files. ;)
 
VisualStudio is the core IDE (integrated development environment) used by most software developers, it's used by Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony for their consoles SDKs.

Is that also true when working on a full featured middleware engine like Unreal? How much raw code are devs actually writing when the engine provides a renderer, scripting language and physics out of the box?
 
Is that also true when working on a full featured middleware engine like Unreal? How much raw code are devs actually writing when the engine provides a renderer, scripting language and physics out of the box?
You absolutely can produce projects from Unreal Engine 4 or 5 without writing a single line of code, but it's going to be quite limited to what Unreal supports out of the box.
 
The results we see on the PC in some DX12 titles are a result of how low level it is and how much control it gives over to the developer... exactly the things that are being praised in the PlayStation API's further up the thread.

If you were to put a PC tailored GNM API on the PC it would suffer just as much as DX12 in the hands of inexperienced developers.

We’re missing a key part of the story. It would be helpful if the same devs who championed low level apis years ago gave their take on how close DX12 comes to achieving that vision. I don’t think I’ve seen a single studio admit that DX12 is hard yet the results haven’t been great.

On the other hand console devs have a long track record of wrangling low level apis and exotic hardware. Maybe they’re just better at it.
 
We’re missing a key part of the story. It would be helpful if the same devs who championed low level apis years ago gave their take on how close DX12 comes to achieving that vision. I don’t think I’ve seen a single studio admit that DX12 is hard yet the results haven’t been great.

On the other hand console devs have a long track record of wrangling low level apis and exotic hardware. Maybe they’re just better at it.
But sometimes they are the same people, and they manage to produce a performant application on one platform and not on another.
 
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