Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2024]
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Frenetic Pony
Veteran
I'm not even into platformers much and I'm enjoying that the game is so well received. The "everything" AAAA game has gotten a bit miserable at this point.
EG If Star Wars Outlaws skipped the on foot shooter combat, or made it something different from a generic ultra dumb shooter, it'd be a better game. As it is the fun stealth and blasting around on a speeder bike is constantly interrupted by boring waves of enemies that you shooty shooty pow pow, and the game is remarkably worse for it.
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davis.anthony
Veteran
Maybe the lack of depth from the AO is part of the reason why you think it's art style is great 
This is the perfect game that represents what Playstation was and should be. Playstation 1 and 2 established themselves as the console for everyone. Both for family and the core gamers.
These consoles reached prices and form factor that fitted perfectly for the audience that wanted to have just fun. Playstation 1 had games like Crash Bandicoot. Playstation 2 had games like Jak. Astro Boy is reminding me of those games.
PS1 and PS2 were becoming affordable and welcoming. These consoles had both a good punch with the tech for the techies/core and a good punch in terms of price and form factor for the simple minded gamers/families.
Seeing Astro Boy on PS5, a console that is still priced as much or more than when it launched doesnt fit well. It is a missed opportunity that doesnt do Astro Boy justice and neither the Playstation brand.
Astro Boy is what Playstation was all about, but PS5 just doesn't allow this natural blend of casual, pure fun to be accessible and welcoming as much as PS1 and PS2 did.
PS5 presents itself as a compact yet sizeable premium device that asks for premium investment for serious gamers. Astro Boy asks to be on a Playstation that can go back to its original roots: A console that is evolving to be for everyone.
The hardware sales are a reflection of that. It is screaming for a price drop and better form. It is not a coincidence Switch is expected to surpass PS2 sales soon.
These consoles reached prices and form factor that fitted perfectly for the audience that wanted to have just fun. Playstation 1 had games like Crash Bandicoot. Playstation 2 had games like Jak. Astro Boy is reminding me of those games.
PS1 and PS2 were becoming affordable and welcoming. These consoles had both a good punch with the tech for the techies/core and a good punch in terms of price and form factor for the simple minded gamers/families.
Seeing Astro Boy on PS5, a console that is still priced as much or more than when it launched doesnt fit well. It is a missed opportunity that doesnt do Astro Boy justice and neither the Playstation brand.
Astro Boy is what Playstation was all about, but PS5 just doesn't allow this natural blend of casual, pure fun to be accessible and welcoming as much as PS1 and PS2 did.
PS5 presents itself as a compact yet sizeable premium device that asks for premium investment for serious gamers. Astro Boy asks to be on a Playstation that can go back to its original roots: A console that is evolving to be for everyone.
The hardware sales are a reflection of that. It is screaming for a price drop and better form. It is not a coincidence Switch is expected to surpass PS2 sales soon.
I could see a Pro version with added AO, maybe even RTAOMaybe the lack of depth from the AO is part of the reason why you think it's art style is great
Nintendo gets on pretty well without AO.
DavidGraham
Veteran
Consoles: 720p to 1080p for 60fps (with CPU related drops to 40fps), and 1080p to 1440p for 30fps. FSR2 upscaling.
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Charlietus
Regular
Damn, the series x has finally unleashed the extra CPU in the power brick. It's over 
snc
Veteran
I just hope they come back to ps4 roots and not starts to focusing on platformers
Ratchet and Astro Bot is enough davis.anthony
Veteran
720p in 2024 is crazy.
Bring back 1080p Plasma TV's and stop chasing pixel counts
And DF talking about CPU limitations in the consoles.
1. Game is super heavy on the GPU which is causing CPU clocks to drop on PS5.
2. The game is bandwidth bound and XSX has 25% more bandwidth.
Pick your poison.
snc
Veteran
I would never predict before this consoles generation that we slowly getting more and more games with lower internal resolution in performance modes than on ps4 ;d
Yeah it's nuts. I think this generation the console technological leap was not as much as previous gens, while devs are targeting hard on that missing console performance difference on PCs with more powerful GPUs/CPUs that are also supporting features such DLSS. Which is also missing on consoles.
I should check with Series X... This FSR2 implementation may be capable of 4K effect image quality from 1440p. But 30 FPS? Not. 40 FPS option is required.
By the way, this is technically the most detailed game of this generation, especially in terms of the amount and appearance of the animated character models shown on the terrain.
By the way, this is technically the most detailed game of this generation, especially in terms of the amount and appearance of the animated character models shown on the terrain.
Hmm... DLSS = FSR, in avarage costumer view. PC is not better in this term... Because Most games not have nativ 4K/60FPS, maybe on 2000$ system...
davis.anthony
Veteran
It wasn't.
PS3 was 251 Gflops total for RSX on paper (40 Gflops vertex and 211 Gflops pixel) - But as vertex and pixel were separate back then it was likely much lower in the real world.
PS4 was 1,840 Gflops so it was around 7.3 faster on paper (But likely 10x faster in reality)
PS5 is 10,200 Gflops (but variable) so it's around 5.5x faster on paper.
PS5 is also expected to run games at much higher resolutions than PS4 (Even though an it seems a lot these days are below 1080p) and that resolution bump instantly eats away at raw performance.
If 1080p was it and 4k didn't exist it would have been a half decent performance increase.
davis.anthony
Veteran
That comment makes no sense, there has NEVER been a 'generation' on PC where the best of the best has been able to run every game at maximum resolution (of the time) at 60fps.
hmm.720p in 2024 is crazy.
Bring back 1080p Plasma TV's and stop chasing pixel counts
And DF talking about CPU limitations in the consoles.
1. Game is super heavy on the GPU which is causing CPU clocks to drop on PS5.
2. The game is bandwidth bound and XSX has 25% more bandwidth.
Pick your poison.
1. is likely occuring, but it's not likely to drop framerate by 25%. A compute bottleneck has never had that type of drop. If anything resolution would drop on DRS.
2. 25% bandwidth difference would not result in a 25% framerate difference, as going through the pipeline 25% more, is significantly more bandwidth than increasing the resolution by 25%.
While I suspect there is some combination of things happening, you're likely seeing just a much better optimized version for series consoles. In particular, possibly some very heavy usage of executeindirect for gpu based rendering, effectively skipping as much CPU as possible. Which would do better to explain how Series X is able to keep that framerate up. The PS5 should be capable of this in their own way, but how they approach executeindirect is different from DirectX, as per the UE slides, so this could be a larger factor here if they couldn't do that.
Series S is running well here, but only GPU bound.
In the final segment they compare a comparable PC CPU to PS5, getting the same result. But Xbox Series X beating both by a large margin. executeIndirect optimization isn't quite large in the PC space, it may as well be non-existent this generation until work graphs are released. So this is why I think they are getting good response from it on xbox consoles however, and it would also mean that it's possible the PS5 version isn't running some form of executeindirect.
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Agree with most of this as PS5 is obviously way too expensive right now and it will hurt Sony overall (they can afford to loose a bit of money on each console sold).
But the only game that came close to the quality of Nintendo platformers on a Playstation was Jak & Daxter 1. AstroBoy actually surpasses Jak 1 and eclipses all others "platformers" that have been released on a Sony console. Most western developers never could replicate Nintendo levels of fun and quality of gameplay. What Doucet did (is doing since the first PSVR Astrobot game) is really special on a Playstation console. Litteraly unique and unheard of.
The other game that reminds me Nintendo quality is Kena, a game that reminds me Zelda in many ways... and the difficulty, lack of balance, of the first Zeldas on NES unfortunately! they'll probably improve that with their next game. I really loved playing Kena on PS5!
davis.anthony
Veteran
It's not really comparible though, the 3600 on PC will enjoy higher clocks, lower latency memory and more bandwidth.
PS5 would have the advantage of having more CPU cores to throw at the game, lower level optimisation and a less intensive OS with no real background sucking apps.
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