Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2020]

This video I suppose but 42 minutes long here it is the exact moment he told it.

EDIY:

38:50 and 39:45.

Mod Edit: EuroGamer video summary @ https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...the-changing-face-of-next-gen-at-3-45pm-today

 

I believe he stated the problem with the Xbox is that it is no longer an SDK specific to a console, but a gdk good for Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X and PC development. More to get a handle on apparently.

 

Brad Sams over at Thurott.com posted this back on July 6. Wonder how the GDK has changed since then?

https://www.thurrott.com/games/237476/the-latest-on-xbox-game-core

Tommy McClain

 

That would certainly be amusing if at some point in the future, PS5 games in the cloud were running on...Anaconda SOCs through Azure. Pure speculation starts around 31:10 when Sony's partnership with MS is brought up. That the hardware is so similar that "what if..."

Regards,
SB

 

But wouldn't that require the Anaconda SOC to have Tempest and the other stuff from the PS5 SOC? I don't think that's realistic.

 

Totally not realistic. But if (HUGE IF) they are putting their games on PC. And if (ANOTHER HUGE IF) they use MS's GDK to do so...

Will anyone noticed if their PS5 game that is streamed through PSNow isn't exactly the same as the PS5 version?

Regards,
SB

 

With PS5 custom I/O (and removal of bottlenecks) that's impossible right now with the current tech available on PC (PC, Xbox series).

 

MS and Nvidia have worked together to form a solution that's superior in terms of IO.

 

Calling it "superior" before anyone has seen it seems a bit premature to me. I guess you could argue that a 2080 series is going to be capable of greater decompression in the future than the PS5 now, but even that is somewhat speculative.

 

Nice analysis. I'm still bothered by the dithering/aliasing in the fur.

I wouldn't mind playing a game at 1080p if we get perfect AA and this level of quality (or a bit better).

 

I'm not sure why you keep calling it superior but whatever. The problem is that when is the actual real implementation of it? It will be a waste on PC anyway since for the foreseeable future they will still need to design PC games that can be run smoothly from HDD.

If we are talking about running ported PS games to be run from cloud, is it actually cost effective using PC hardware vs just using PS5 hardware? Probably not within the console lifetime.

 

Well, run any 4k game in a 1080p monitor and you just got yourself 4x SSAA on top of whatever AA the game already had for each original pixel. Probably going to clean most of the artifacts up enough for them to be imperceptible.

 

There's no reason games can't support it from day 1 to speed up load times which can obviously scale from the slowest HDD to the fastest NVMe.

In terms of high speed streaming changing a games design in ways that can't scale down to slower drives, I can't see many games doing that outside of a hand full of PS5 exclusives for at least the next few years because all multiplatform and xbox exclusives will need to support slower PC configs too. It might be the case that some games would implement Oblivion style load screens where systems with faster IO would not.

 

the wolf's fur impressed me the most. Are they using nVidia Hairworks?

 

You say impossible before any games are out. But we still don't know the impact of everything on each console.

If PS5 doesn't have something similar to SFS, then it's entirely possible that XBSX could stream in textures faster than PS5 just due to only having to stream in a fraction of the texture.

This leaves loading times as the main differentiator that PS5 should always be ahead in. But again. When streamed through PSNow, will someone notice if something loads in 0.5 seconds versus 1 second? 1 second instead of 2 seconds?

While different their audio capabilities are pretty similar. Even if Sony can do 1000 audio sources simultaneously while XBSX is in the 300-400 audio source range, how many developers will use 1000 audio sources and will it be noticeably different from 300-400 sources? Again...when streamed through PSNow, where people are already expecting a lesser experience than they would have on a console.

It's incredibly unlikely that Sony would do this, but it's certainly not impossible at streaming quality.

Regards,
SB

 

this is one of my favourite DF interviews, just because they talk face to face to a developer, and how they suffered to get there and stuff.