A Generational Leap in Graphics [2020] *Spawn*

5.5 is 25% better than 4.4. We have seen others games with up to 9x improvement (from PS4 to PS5) when GPU limited.
- The last guardian: PS4 1080p ~20fps to PS5: 1890p ~60fps, that's up to 9x (and using BC)
- Spiderman remastered has about 7-8x more perf on PS5 using the 60fps mode (so RDNA2 features).
Another Indie game I don't remember the name has up to 8x perf improvement using BC on PS5.

 

All this cross gen/back compat performance and RDNA2 Vs GCN , console Vs PC talk suggests people are struggling to define what they expect from a generational leap in graphics other than bigger numbers.

 

Really interesting article, thanks for the link. I found this part particularly interesting:

"The CPU of the PlayStation® 4 is an AMD Jaguar with 8 cores. It is obviously slower than some recently-released PC hardware; but the PlayStation® 4 has some major advantages, such as very fast access to the hardware. We find the PlayStation® 4 graphics API to be much more efficient than all PC APIs. It is very direct and has very low overhead. This means we can push a lot of draw calls per frame. We knew that the high number of draw calls could be an issue with low-end PCs.

One other big advantage is that all the shaders can be compiled off-line on PlayStation® 4, meaning the loading of shaders is nearly instantaneous. On PC, the driver needs to compile shaders at load time: this cannot be an off-line process because of the wide configurations of GPUs and drivers that need to be supported.

During the development of Detroit: Become Human on PlayStation® 4, artists could design unique shader trees for all materials. This resulted in an insane number of vertex and pixel shaders, so we knew from the beginning of the port that this will be a huge problem."

I'm surprised draw calls are still so relatively expensive on the PC. I thought one of the major reasons for DX12 and Vulcan was to vastly decrease the expense of draw calls. Or is that just DX12? Or is it the case that they are vastly decreased vs DX11/OGL but still very expensive vs PS4? Which begs the question just how bad was DX11!

In regards to the shader compilation I would guess this is the reason for HZD's compilation at start up. For games that are designed from day 1 for the PC, developers can optimise to avoid the pitfalls of long shader compilation steps, making it possible. to complete in the background during gameplay or at reasonable length loading screens. But a game developed exclusively for consoles with no accommodation for the PC would have no need to implement such optimisations and so when it comes to porting it to the PC, there are some fundamental aspects of the engine which make shader compilation something that has to be done up front.

Personally, I don't mind it but I can understand their reticence to this approach given that the step could take up to 20 minutes on a low end PC.

 

In fact I started a thread on exactly my fear of this becoming a bigger issue going forward:

https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...pc-about-to-become-a-bigger-bottleneck.61929/

 

Is it possible Arkham Knight PC was doing it in realtime or something?

 

4x resolution does not equal 4x the performance. Resolution doesn't scale that way with performance. Check basically any game in this review, for the most part the 3080 is about the same performance at 4K as the 2070S is at 1440p. 4K is 2.25x the resolution of 4k, but look at the GPU's relative performance at the same resolution... the 3080 isn't even close to 2.25x the 2070S performance.

 

If that's in 'prioritize resolution' mode (which I believe locks at 4k), that's extremely impressive. I've seen videos of the Series X in this mode with vsync unlocked where it gets over 100+fps. Prioritize performance is perhaps another matter, where the res is variable - but even there it doesn't look like it drops under 4k that often.

This is basically 3080 level performance, but of course depends on the settings the PS5/SX versions are using, 3080 at 4k are with ultra in the benchmarks I've seen - has there been any comparisons done yet between the PC and next-gen console versions in terms of graphics settings? Either way, ridiculously good performance.

 

Perhaps, but you can see Arkham Knight doing its shader compiling when you start it up after a new driver and look at CPU usage % through Rivatuner, it will be pegged at 100% for a minute or so (shader compiling is usually a task that scales well across threads). Arkham Knight's stuttering was due more to how it handled streaming in textures. If it was purely a CPU bottleneck with shader compiling then much faster CPU's would be able to eliminate it, but that was never really the case.

Digital Foundry seemed to be able to get a locked 60 even on a Core I8-8400 in one of the videos they did on it well after launch, but myself and others I've seen have never been able to replicate that.

 

this was running in BC mode at ps4 pro settings, i think the next gen update that dropped on december 4th caps the framerate at 60fps or 120fps depending the mode, and they cranked up the details and lighting to be more in line with the PC version, but to what extent i don't know.

 

How are you calculating Spiderman:RM having 7-8x more perf using the 60fps mode exactly?

 

Ah ok, that's an entirely different matter then.

 

executeIndirect is (was?) supposed to assist in drawcalls and results in some early benchmarks years ago showed it having a big benefit. However, up until now only Xbox consoles and Nvidia GPUs had hardware support for it, and even now it might come down to other factors I wouldn't even be knowledgeable of personally, to ponder the question if executeIndirect is even being fully leveraged by most developers on PC.

But I'm just speaking of all this in a specific MS/PC terms; there's other ways to handle drawcalls as you've illustrated on console with games like Horizon on PS4, Sony and other APIs like Vulkan have their own ways of doing drawcall management. I dunno if any one or the other can be considered superior to the other, though there's ways of implementing it that can be more or less beneficial to a design (Xbox One technically speaking had some really good ideas like ESRAM (something Infinity Cache is spiritually in line of and greatly improved upon) and Kinect, but poor implementation of those ideas).

 

I think people that are saying the PS5 and XSX are under-powered are going to be eating their words later. There are going to be some amazing looking (and playing) games coming to these systems.

High-end PCs are always going to be more powerful. You may as well be saying the Sun rises in the East. It's obvious.

Consoles punch above their specs usually though and I don't think this generation is going to be any different.

 

Yeah it's a good thread, I've followed it from the start. I'm still of the opinion that I don't really care though. If devs can't find a way to hide the compilation during gameplay or load screens (and from the above link it certainly seems like they have options if they plan for it from the start) then I'm more than content to have a 5-10 min compilation on first run. Yes you have to do it again with every driver update or patch, but in reality the number of patches or driver updates most people experience during the playtime of a typical game is going to be largely irrelevant.

 

They do, but not until later in the generation when developers have had a chance to get to grips with them as far as I can see. For the first year or two, it seems to be pretty much a 1:1 comparison. However the PC's increased performance though new hardware occurs much faster than the consoles increased performance through optimisation. So while optimisation eats into the gains that each successive GPU generation brings, the gap continues to grow ever wider until a new generation of consoles launch, and everything resets.

 

Streaming. Im talking about SSD drives replacing fast GDDR5/6 ram. Im not saying the SSD drive cannot mitigate for the lack of VRAM, im just saying it cant take account for all of it. If that theory would be true, they could aswell have stick with 8GB ram 'because the SSD'. Dont forget either that the PS4 has a rather low bandwith to play with also, where the SSD has to help out?

Again, theres a reason some compare only cross gen titles? I think native games designed around the systems gives a better picture of what the systems can do, as you always like to point out. That would be Shadowfall and 1886 for the PS4, demon souls/rift apart for the PS5.
Also, your forgetting that PS3 and 4 where on more different architectures then PS4 and 5 are. Besides that cross gen porting wasnt as great as it is nowadays, witht focus more heavily on that.

Yes, exactly. Its also almos two years older and basically a 2012 midranger at that.

I too have no idea why cross gen games are so hot in this discussion right now. obviously, cross gen wasnt such a thing back then, and people are totally forgetting that PS3 and PS4 where on totally different architectures. If game A was done for say PS3 in mind and ported to PS4, that could explain the harder to optimize for case.

CP2077 really has some impressive nvme streaming tech going for it on pc, so yes, if games are designed around the pc, it has nor problem doing these things.

This, was thinking the same thing. As a pc gamer and upgrading alot (before atleast), this came to mind but didnt or couldnt explain it as well.
Anyway, when comparing graphical leaps, its generally best to compare games developed and designed around the system, not old games/cross gen titles.
The avoidance of this is telling me enough.

Its rainbow six siege, i dont its impressive but thats me. Its going into diminishing returns territory there. For example both my 1070 and 2080Ti can do 500fps in counter strike source. Try to do the same with another game, take watch dogs or something, and see where performances go.

Hm, not under-powered, consoles never are. They get mid range hardware and devs optimize for it. What i am saying is that the leap isnt as great as we are used to. Thats a different thing to under-powered. A 2070 system is not underpowered either.

A 3060Ti is more powerfull, but thats considered high-end i guess. No idea where people place hardware anymore.

Its a topic for concerned people. Im not concerned, with direct storage, NV and probably AMD, together with MS finding solutions that will fix those issues. NV promised direct access to the SSD/GPU, at speeds higher then any console. I have no doubt thats possible if they want to.

True they have always done so. But the pc has gotten much better in that regard though, in special since consoles have become more and more alike pc's. Optimization has been really bad before, like 15 to 20 years ago. Looking at last generation, its quite amazing that say a 7870 still can even run modern AAA titles ported badly.
Remember the days when MGS2 got ported to PC.

 

I expect future games to look better than CP77 regardless whether they are PC or console based.

IQ improvements aren’t strictly hardware performance-based. A big reason for that is consoles where devs find more elegant solutions to pull more performance out of the fixed-hardware platforms over time.

Given all the bugs and glitches and the way even new Nvidia cards struggle, CP77 comes off as a straight brute force endeavor.

 

From 1080p 30fps to native 4K (mostly native or near native) at 60fps on PS5. The first gameplay they showed was a whole mission at (locked) native 4K 60fps.

 

Great post.

I think the "My GPU is bigger" talk is essentially a case of "I put my PC together so I'm an Engineer".
Linus Tech Tips syndrome.