Current Generation Games Analysis Technical Discussion [2022] [XBSX|S, PS5, PC]

[HolySmoke]

Good use of the SSD. Would be worthwhile to compared against a last generation game that has been upgraded to PS5 to get an idea of streaming differences between generations.

Any particular ones in mind? I didn't think it would be as interesting as they shouldn't be reading any more data than before. Doom Eternal would probably be the best candidate but I don't own it on PS5.

I've tried FF7R on PC and it only reads ~1.3GB between launch and gameplay. I stopped playing after maybe 10 minutes and the total was still below 5GB. I doubt the PS5 version would be much different as both versions are effectively the same size.

The reason that Doom is interesting is that it streams 40GB+ during the first mission on PC (probably 20-30 minutes). It was by far the most IO intensive game I'd seen before those R&C and DS results and gives a bit of context to them.

Edit:

To clarify, I think that Doom mission takes around 30 minutes to play through which makes it similar to my DS run. So, the numbers would be 40GB vs 100GB over a similar amount of time.

 

[iroboto]

Any particular ones in mind? I didn't think it would be as interesting as they shouldn't be reading any more data than before. Doom Eternal would probably be the best candidate but I don't own it on PS5.

I've tried FF7R on PC and it only reads ~1.3GB between launch and gameplay. I stopped playing after maybe 10 minutes and the total was still below 5GB. I doubt the PS5 version would be much different as both versions are effectively the same size.

The reason that Doom is interesting is that it streams 40GB+ during the first mission on PC (probably 20-30 minutes). It was by far the most IO intensive game I'd seen before those R&C and DS results and gives a bit of context to them.

Edit:

To clarify, I think that Doom mission takes around 30 minutes to play through which makes it similar to my DS run. So, the numbers would be 40GB vs 100GB over a similar amount of time.

Hmmm.
Call of Duty/ Warzone
Spider Man
Destiny 2 maybe?

I thinking about high resolution texture packs for popular titles.

 

[Globalisateur]

Any particular ones in mind? I didn't think it would be as interesting as they shouldn't be reading any more data than before. Doom Eternal would probably be the best candidate but I don't own it on PS5.

I've tried FF7R on PC and it only reads ~1.3GB between launch and gameplay. I stopped playing after maybe 10 minutes and the total was still below 5GB. I doubt the PS5 version would be much different as both versions are effectively the same size.

The reason that Doom is interesting is that it streams 40GB+ during the first mission on PC (probably 20-30 minutes). It was by far the most IO intensive game I'd seen before those R&C and DS results and gives a bit of context to them.

Edit:

To clarify, I think that Doom mission takes around 30 minutes to play through which makes it similar to my DS run. So, the numbers would be 40GB vs 100GB over a similar amount of time.

Not sure about Doom but Demon's Souls does that without one framerate drop, all of that during gameplay and invisible to the player.

EDIT: Also it's highly compressed on PS5. We can estimate to about 200GB of actual assets.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Likely different people, its rare to go from engineer to artist or vice versa.

I strongly disagree, I'd estimate more than half of the people I work with have changed career at least once. I started out as an electrical engineer in aerospace and defence, then switched to programming then became the manager of a massive server farm and now I'm troubleshooting legislative and policy problems for Government. People have lots of fundamental transferable micro-skills that carry over to different jobs.

You may well be am artist or musician but that doesn't mean you cannot also be a great UI or gameplay designer, or learn to write code - because it's never been easier with modern high-level languages. I found learning 6510 assembly pretty easy and learning new languages a breeze because there are a lot of adaptable principles in all aspects of software and game development.

Back in the early games of video games days, almost all games were produced by one or two people who had to do everything. It's mostly time and scale that prevents that, not having a varied skillset.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Not sure about Doom but Demon's Souls does that without one framerate drop, all of that during gameplay and invisible to the player.

EDIT: Also it's highly compressed on PS5. We can estimate to about 200GB of actual assets.

That's not overly surprising given that averages out to a streaming rate that a HDD could handle with ease.

 

[DavidGraham]

My understanding is that Nvidia's DX11 uses software scheduling

Yeah, we've had this discussion before here on B3D, this is not true. NVIDIA doesn't use any more software scheduling than AMD.

Edit: this might explain what I'm trying to get at

This video is nothing more than some naive conjectures.

 

[techuse]

In BFV Nvidia has lower performance when CPU limited than AMD when using DX11. This has been confirmed by several outlets over the years.

 

[DavidGraham]

In BFV Nvidia has lower performance when CPU limited than AMD when using DX11. This has been confirmed by several outlets over the years.

Which outlets?

 

[Allandor]

EDIT: Also it's highly compressed on PS5. We can estimate to about 200GB of actual assets.

Please not that compression thing again. PCs can use the best available compression tech as they just use software decompression.
Also what does count for you as decompressed data? Is a texture decompressed after it is out of its archive format even though it is still "compressed" via a readable (for the GPU) texture compression format?
If not must we decompress everything into bitmaps before it counts as uncompressed?

Games tend to get really big if we don't use any compression tech at all. 200gb are nothing if you decompress everything.
But just let's assume you mean the pure data compression.

 

[PSman1700]

Any particular ones in mind? I didn't think it would be as interesting as they shouldn't be reading any more data than before. Doom Eternal would probably be the best candidate but I don't own it on PS5.

I've tried FF7R on PC and it only reads ~1.3GB between launch and gameplay. I stopped playing after maybe 10 minutes and the total was still below 5GB. I doubt the PS5 version would be much different as both versions are effectively the same size.

The reason that Doom is interesting is that it streams 40GB+ during the first mission on PC (probably 20-30 minutes). It was by far the most IO intensive game I'd seen before those R&C and DS results and gives a bit of context to them.

Edit:

To clarify, I think that Doom mission takes around 30 minutes to play through which makes it similar to my DS run. So, the numbers would be 40GB vs 100GB over a similar amount of time.

Doom Eternal was ahead of its time (ahead of the SSD hype perhaps) with the streaming from storage tech, aswell as no loading at all on pc with nvme solutions. Not counting star citizen as its more a tech demo than a game.

Any particular ones in mind?

Test R&C some more, in special what is happening during portal/level swapping, because as you said, i expected much larger numbers there.

 

[Karamazov]

Test matrix demo

 

[Globalisateur]

Please not that compression thing again. PCs can use the best available compression tech as they just use software decompression.
Also what does count for you as decompressed data? Is a texture decompressed after it is out of its archive format even though it is still "compressed" via a readable (for the GPU) texture compression format?
If not must we decompress everything into bitmaps before it counts as uncompressed?

Games tend to get really big if we don't use any compression tech at all. 200gb are nothing if you decompress everything.
But just let's assume you mean the pure data compression.

Sure but AFAIK there are no compression rules on PC. Devs can do whatever they want.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

Not withstanding DSoup being a true renaissance man, I think these days going from engineer to artist is pretty rare. Unlikely, IMO.

 

[Clukos]

I'd say there's plenty of overlap between tech artists and graphics programmers, especially in game dev it's pretty hard to define what these roles mean

 

[Remij]

We need DirectStorage news damnit! lol

 

[function]

Yeah, we've had this discussion before here on B3D, this is not true. NVIDIA doesn't use any more software scheduling than AMD.

It's interesting to know about the scheduling (i.e. no real difference), but it's definitely true that Nvidia DX11 can gain more from more CPU cores, and that this does come with some degree of overhead (even if slight). So if you can gain more performance with additional CPU cores, it must be true that you can therefore lose some of those gains if you lose CPU (or the ability to exploit that CPU).

I've done some lazy Googling and found a "new to me" Intel developer presentation on DX11, where they go into some detail investigating this.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/u...es-of-directx-11-multithreaded-rendering.html

Interestingly, there are indeed cases where you can lose some of the advantages of Nvidia's approach. Intel say that dividing work by "chunks" (best scaling with cores) rather than by passes, can mean work that is order dependant (they use the example of semi-transparent objects) means that deferring can lose efficacy.

"The multithreaded rendering method that divides rendering tasks by Chunk can achieve a significant performance improvement, and the performance is not affected by the number of passes and increases with the increase of the number of CPU cores. The shortcoming is that for certain situations that require orderly rendering (such as rendering semi-transparent objects), the strategy of distributing Chunks is limited, and it is easy to lose the load balance among the threads, thereby affecting the performance scalability."

I have no idea what GoW is doing, but if transparency is involved it could conceiveably be hurting NXGamer's frame rates because he's not getting the benefits that NVidia's driver normally delivers. And this wouldn't necessarily show as CPU as a bottleneck depending on how it being sampled, averaged etc. Even though a faster CPU might boost frame rates.

I mean, accurate rendering of dense vegetation through fog has to involve some degree of "orderly rendering", doesn't it? Could it be a factor?

Perhaps AMD wouldn't be faring any better in absolute terms (I admit I don't know) but I'm more convinced than ever that something about his CPU is holding the 2070 back, because his results don't do it justice IMO.

This video is nothing more than some naive conjectures.

Perhaps, but some of them turned out to be correct.

 

[function]

I strongly disagree, I'd estimate more than half of the people I work with have changed career at least once. I started out as an electrical engineer in aerospace and defence, then switched to programming then became the manager of a massive server farm and now I'm troubleshooting legislative and policy problems for Government. People have lots of fundamental transferable micro-skills that carry over to different jobs.

You may well be am artist or musician but that doesn't mean you cannot also be a great UI or gameplay designer, or learn to write code - because it's never been easier with modern high-level languages. I found learning 6510 assembly pretty easy and learning new languages a breeze because there are a lot of adaptable principles in all aspects of software and game development.

Back in the early games of video games days, almost all games were produced by one or two people who had to do everything. It's mostly time and scale that prevents that, not having a varied skillset.

While everything you say is true, my experience of watching my friends' and allumni's careers in gaming and SFX is that they quickly found something after graduation and then they specialised around that.

e.g. Artist -> Environment artist -> Senior E.V. -> Lead E.V.

And a huge part of this is simply money and security. The better they get, the more they earn, the more their family spends, the more they feel they need to earn. Plus the kudos is probably something you end up feeling you want. All great blokes, but I don't see most of them making radical shifts in what they do ... other than perhaps management.

Starting again, lower down, in something new is a step that people often don't take even though they could. So big respect for what you've done and continued to do.

That's why Indies are kind of cool. They turn their hand to lots of things because of passion. And because they're broke.

 

[iroboto]

While everything you say is true, my experience of watching my friends' and allumni's careers in gaming and SFX is that they quickly found something after graduation and then they specialised around that.

e.g. Artist -> Environment artist -> Senior E.V. -> Lead E.V.

And a huge part of this is simply money and security. The better they get, the more they earn, the more their family spends, the more they feel they need to earn. Plus the kudos is probably something you end up feeling you want. All great blokes, but I don't see most of them making radical shifts in what they do ... other than perhaps management.

Starting again, lower down, in something new is a step that people often don't take even though they could. So big respect for what you've done and continued to do.

That's why Indies are kind of cool. They turn their hand to lots of things because of passion. And because they're broke.

In my experience with interviewing with Ubisoft, they discredited all my indie work. If it ain’t AAA it ain’t experience. Regardless of how long I had in programming experience the furthest they were willing to go for me was tools development in c#.

Should I have been hired at Ubisoft, I was many years away from any relevant job where the coined term “dev” is used.

As you say, if I took that route I think I would still be working tools, maybe at a senior role perhaps moving into engine tools? But likely never graphics. Building importers etc likely wouldn’t help with graphics.

 

[function]

In my experience with interviewing with Ubisoft, they discredited all my indie work. If it ain’t AAA it ain’t experience. Regardless of how long I had in programming experience the furthest they were willing to go for me was tools development in c#.

Should I have been hired at Ubisoft, I was many years away from any relevant job where the coined term “dev” is used.

As you say, if I took that route I think I would still be working tools, maybe at a senior role perhaps moving into engine tools? But likely never graphics. Building importers etc likely wouldn’t help with graphics.

Someone once said something like this to me: "Everyone wants good tools. But no-one wants to write them".

It seems to be that the bigger the team and the bigger the stakes the more that proven specialisation is valued, and the less flexibility there is in moving between roles.

 

[Allandor]

"Everyone wants good tools. But no-one wants to write them".

I wouldn't say, no one wants to write them, it is more that no one wants to pay for them so devs normally don't get the time to write the tools if there is not a benefit (normally in form of money). The problem is not only to write a tool, it is also to maintain it, so it will always be on the current state. This costs much time (e.g. money for your boss) so most times your boss will say "no".