Current Generation Games Analysis Technical Discussion [2023] [XBSX|S, PS5, PC]

[Shortbread]

About AW2 on some older AMD and NV cards:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1715742105019031976

This doesn't make no sense, unless I'm misreading something here.

PS5 as far as we know, only supports primitive shaders, and the Series consoles support mesh shaders. So why the problem on those particular cards if the PS5 only supports primitive shaders?

Anyhow, it will be interesting performance comparison between PS5/Series if the Series consoles are fully utilizing mesh shaders.

 

[pharma]

About AW2 on some older AMD and NV cards:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1715742105019031976

It's good to see developers starting to use and experiment with latest tech advances. Game development takes a couple of years and doubt any developer wants to be stuck with last gen graphic fidelity and techniques when bringing future games to market.

 

[Scott_Arm]

This doesn't make no sense, unless I'm misreading something here.

PS5 as far as we know, only supports primitive shaders, and the Series consoles support mesh shaders. So why the problem on those particular cards if the PS5 only supports primitive shaders?

Anyhow, it will be interesting performance comparison between PS5/Series if the Series consoles are fully utilizing mesh shaders.

Do we actually know that the underlying hardware is different? Mesh Shaders is the DirectX naming, and PS5 doesn't use directx. AMD has primitive shaders as a hardware feature. Do we know that Mesh Shaders with dx12 on AMD are not implemented with the hardware level primitive shaders?

 

[Scott_Arm]

It's good to see developers starting to use and experiment with latest tech advances. Game development takes a couple of years and doubt any developer wants to be stuck with last gen graphic fidelity and techniques when bringing future games to market.

This kind of stuff was inevitable when ps4/xbox one support was dropped. Everyone has been clamouring for true next-gen games and then we get them and people are mad they don't run on Pascal gpus.

 

[pharma]

Do we actually know that the underlying hardware is different? Mesh Shaders is the DirectX naming, and PS5 doesn't use directx. AMD has primitive shaders as a hardware feature. Do we know that Mesh Shaders with dx12 on AMD are not implemented with the hardware level primitive shaders?

Is this true ....

Ultimately Nvidia's Mesh Shader approach gives more visibility to the hardware, it requires programmers to do more work, but they can get to a much lower level in how they make use of things, AMD's Primitive Shaders operates at the driver level with their in-driver shader transformation which makes it easier to some degree to implement (if you trust AMD's drivers) but is very limited when you compare it to full Mesh Shader support.

 

[Nesh]

Is this true ....

I am a little confused now. NVIDIA is mesh shaders. AMD is Primitive Shaders. But XBOX uses Primitive and Mesh Shaders while having an AMD GPU and PS5 supports only Primitive. Right?
Have devs used Mesh Shaders?

 

[Scott_Arm]

Is this true ....

I don't know. That's why I'm asking. It all comes down to how things are implemented in hardware. DX is an API and Nvidia, AMD implement those features differently. I have no idea if PS5 lacks the underlying hardware that would be needed to support Mesh Shaders. They don't use the DX api. The GNM api on playstation might not support an exact equivalent because it works closer to the actual hardware, but that doesn't mean it couldn't support the api. Unless someone has a real technical breakdown that can explicitly explain the differences in the gpus. I would expect the PS5 and Series X gpus to be very similar.

 

[DavidGraham]

About AW2 on some older AMD and NV cards:

They clarify more.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1715757492548870352

 

[Scott_Arm]

I am a little confused now. NVIDIA is mesh shaders. AMD is Primitive Shaders. But XBOX uses Primitive and Mesh Shaders while having an AMD GPU and PS5 supports only Primitive. Right?
Have devs used Mesh Shaders?

I think UE5 on pc uses mesh shaders for nanite in certain cases. I don't know if we've actually seen a game that's basically requiring mesh shader support. It sounds like even Alan Wake 2 might have fallback to vertex shader pipeline.

 

[Globalisateur]

This doesn't make no sense, unless I'm misreading something here.

PS5 as far as we know, only supports primitive shaders, and the Series consoles support mesh shaders. So why the problem on those particular cards if the PS5 only supports primitive shaders?

Anyhow, it will be interesting performance comparison between PS5/Series if the Series consoles are fully utilizing mesh shaders.

Hardware wise there is no difference between PS5 primitive shaders and Xbox mesh shaders. Both names are kinda the name of their respective API which is implemented by the same hardware units that we could maybe call NGG. That was kinda confirmed (not the NGG name though, but both consoles using the same hardware underneath) by some AMD guy some time ago in a presentation.

 

[pharma]

Have devs used Mesh Shaders?

Mesh Shading Enables 1.8 Billion Triangles in Justice MMO, Running at 4K@60 on an RTX 3060Ti; 'It's the Mainstream of Future Games'

Chinese MMORPG Justice is the first game to implement Mesh Shading, which enables 1.8 billion triangles running at 4K@60 on an RTX 3060 Ti.

wccftech.com

 

[iroboto]

This doesn't make no sense, unless I'm misreading something here.

PS5 as far as we know, only supports primitive shaders, and the Series consoles support mesh shaders. So why the problem on those particular cards if the PS5 only supports primitive shaders?

Anyhow, it will be interesting performance comparison between PS5/Series if the Series consoles are fully utilizing mesh shaders.

On the PC side there are only mesh shaders. Primitive shaders isn’t supported on Dx. With console you can use whatever is provided.

 

[iroboto]

Hardware wise there is no difference between PS5 primitive shaders and Xbox mesh shaders. Both names are kinda the name of their respective API which is implemented by the same hardware units that we could maybe call NGG. That was kinda confirmed (not the NGG name though, but both consoles using the same hardware underneath) by some AMD guy some time ago in a presentation.

I disagree with this; hardware support is different between RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 listed here:

How mesh shaders are implemented in an AMD driver

In the previous post I gave a brief introduction on what mesh and task shaders are from the perspective of application developers. Now it’s time to dive deeper and talk about how mesh shaders are implemented in a Vulkan driver on AMD HW. Note that everything I discuss here is based on my...

timur.hu

• On RDNA2 and newer, per-primitive output attributes are also supported.

There are other items under the hood as well I think, which largely leads yo why primitive shaders were abandoned. But basically you want fewer calls on AMD.

 

[Dictator]

Hardware wise there is no difference between PS5 primitive shaders and Xbox mesh shaders. Both names are kinda the name of their respective API which is implemented by the same hardware units that we could maybe call NGG. That was kinda confirmed (not the NGG name though, but both consoles using the same hardware underneath) by some AMD guy some time ago in a presentation.

I think primitive shaders Lack amplification Stage, right? Not the same thing?

I talked with Remedy TD at Gamescom about their Mesh Shader usage, they are not using amplification stage for AW2, but they have experimented with it for Nanite like stuff in the future.

 

[techuse]

If they are using mesh shaders it’s completely fine they dropped official support for older GPUs. I would only view it as a poor decision if they arbitrarily required DX12U compliancy without using the features.

 

[Frenetic Pony]

Mesh Shading Enables 1.8 Billion Triangles in Justice MMO, Running at 4K@60 on an RTX 3060Ti; 'It's the Mainstream of Future Games'

Chinese MMORPG Justice is the first game to implement Mesh Shading, which enables 1.8 billion triangles running at 4K@60 on an RTX 3060 Ti.

wccftech.com

Just some cheap game taking Nvidia marketing money. Nvidia loves doing this and have a huge pot for it, these games rarely turn out well.

Speaking of devs taking Nvidia marketing money (notice how the AMD cards arbitrarily stop at a 6800xt on the RT recommended specs). Anyway PS5 devs have lower level access than PC, so a lot of mesh shader stuff can be emulated there with primitive shaders while it can't on PC. I do suspect the high polycount is why RT is so expensive here compared to elsewhere. Needing to move around that many triangles in a BVH is going to be super expensive, and isn't going to help actual ray traversal times either when it comes to it. UE5 does the smart thing and makes the RT scene much simpler while reserving it for GI(diffuse/specular) instead of shadows.

There are some research papers on ultra high poly tracing and bvh building: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cgf.14868 and https://graphics.cs.utah.edu/research/projects/ray-tracing-hw-adaptive-lod/ but these are new and aren't even in production yet for various reasons.

 

[techuse]

Mesh Shading Enables 1.8 Billion Triangles in Justice MMO, Running at 4K@60 on an RTX 3060Ti; 'It's the Mainstream of Future Games'

Chinese MMORPG Justice is the first game to implement Mesh Shading, which enables 1.8 billion triangles running at 4K@60 on an RTX 3060 Ti.

wccftech.com

Years later and I still cant find any actual gameplay footage of this. Does this game exist outside of these marketing materials?

 

[Scott_Arm]

Years later and I still cant find any actual gameplay footage of this. Does this game exist outside of these marketing materials?

A lot of Chinese games feel like vapourware. Big tech demo trailers and then maybe they just bomb on release but I never hear about them again.

 

[DavidGraham]

Just some cheap game

Years later and I still cant find any actual gameplay footage of this. Does this game exist outside of these marketing materials?

It's a popular Chinese MMO title, it's exact name is Justice Online, developed by NetEase and released in 2019 as a subscription based MMO, it was going to be released as an English version in late 2022, but the plan got delayed. You won't find many videos of it outside of China's social media sites.

 

[Below2D]

The tweets about Alan Wake II not supporting RDNA1 and Pascal-based GPUs and earlier were deleted.