Tkumpathenurple
Veteran
Would the loading of levels necessarily prohibit some amount of DMA streaming though?
Given that you've pointed this out, I'm actually quite surprised by just how few games I've played of late aren't open world.
True, and I am only going from the picture, not the actual video footage. I'm not even sure what video that picture's from.
My thinking is that quick camera cuts can often result in some amount of pop in. It happened a couple of times during cutscenes in The Evil Within 2. Given the enormous improvement of current generation IO, pop in to that extent is probably going to be nonexistent. But it might be existent to the extent that, in some circumstances, only "high quality" assets have time to be streamed in, rather than "very high quality" assets.
And in order to even see this, it's required a screenshot coupled with 12,000% magnification. No-one normal is ever going to notice it. No developer is going to spend time optimising such an unimportant part of a fleeting image.
But the improvement "comes for free" due to higher SSD bandwidth on the PS5.
I don't think memory size is the culprit here, because the PS5 has the same amount of memory. Perhaps there's a small difference in available memory, given that we don't know how much of the PS5's is available to developers. But since that's a complete unknown, it's completely untestable.
And even the notion of lower quality assets for the Series S doesn't feel satisfactory here. At the very most, I'd expect only the Series S to have the more blocky bulb. But the Series X - with its greater amount of memory - is being effected, as is the PC with its much greater DDR->GPU bandwidth.
The game doesn't require more than 10GB of VRAM, true, but it requires 26GB of memory in total if we count DDR & GDDR. Of the DDR, how much is used as a streaming pool for the GDDR? Enough that the XBox Series consoles with their DMA'able SSD would have cause to swap out and stream some assets from the SSD?
It's a way in which current generation consoles are going to make it difficult for us to make comparisons with PC requirements.
If 10GB of VRAM are the requirement for Ultra, that fits within the Series X's higher bandwidth pool. So I think we can safely rule out any issue with VRAM.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think this is some absolute hardware limitation other than SSD bandwidth. I don't think the XBox Series consoles are cursed to suffer slightly more blocky lightbulbs for the entire generation. I don't think we've seen anything to indicate the PS5 has superior geometry processing capabilities or anything of the sort. I don't think any advantages of the consoles (and thusly their differing advantages/disadvantages) are really going to be tapped within their first 6 months.
My thinking is just that the developers got the image to a satisfactory point, and ensured there weren't any appreciable differences between platforms as pertains to the parts of the game people actually look at, such as character models. But an extra few GB/s of SSD bandwidth may still inadvertently bring benefits to parts of the image that are (rightfully) deemed low priority by the engine.
