Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2022]
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Inuhanyou
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For my part, I do think series s hold back the other consoles in certain ways. But I think it's a good thing. In certain ways it keeps ambition from becoming a bit too high and turning games into slideshows like generations past.
Series s is strong enough as a baseline of next gen where things can be pushed beyond PS4 and Xbox one but not enough where its too far to be detrimental to the experience if that makes sense.
Altho it's also possible devs will eventually just ignore Xbox series s in general regarding prioritization and whatever performance it gets it gets
Series s is strong enough as a baseline of next gen where things can be pushed beyond PS4 and Xbox one but not enough where its too far to be detrimental to the experience if that makes sense.
Altho it's also possible devs will eventually just ignore Xbox series s in general regarding prioritization and whatever performance it gets it gets
Are they allowed to? I thought MS mandated games had to be XBSS alongside XBSX, that the family is inclusive.
It is going to be inclusive but lets say games become more demanding, I dont think they will be designing around the best experience for the XSS. They will of course support it, but the compromises will be more evident at some point as X will be the priority.
True.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Man, NSW sure held back Doom: Eternal. 
Primary dev. platform is always the limiting factor. Then they scale up or down from there for other platforms. Is any developer using XBS-S as the primary development platform?
Regards,
SB
Doom: Eternal released Mar. 2020 on PS/XB/PC and on NSW in Dec. 2020
Primary dev. platform is always the limiting factor. Then they scale up or down from there for other platforms. Is any developer using XBS-S as the primary development platform?
Regards,
SB
There is no reason for the first party Sony devs to be beholden to the XSS. So until we start seeing PS5 first party exclusive titles becoming tangibly more visually and technically advanced than your big budget AAA multiple platform console titles, the XSS is holding nothing back.
Sure. But when devs want to move on from last gen, what will be the lowest performance target they need to consider? Are they allowed to eschew XBSS and focus solely on PS5 level and above hardware if they decide that's good economics for their game, or will every game have to target XBSS and above?
Inuhanyou
Veteran
I don't mean that they will simply stop releasing on series s. Just that it's performance profile will not be looked at when optimizing games and they will be much less trying to be lenient on the cuts or performance sacrifices they have to make compared to series x and ps5
The feature set exists. It should be able to run most things. Unless there is a run to make RT only titles where no amount of reduction is enough to run the game; then perhaps that would be a case. But it just doesn’t feel like this generation is setup to do that well anyway.
And here we are again
They will just downscale everything until it runs. Only graphic wise it must be downscaled. Memory might get a problem but with less graphics-features less memory is needed. RT-features are not really needed on the consoles (esspecially on the lower-cost model) so this is nothing that hinders anybody. Yes there is the one game that uses RT lights and therefore uses low resolutions and many, many frames difference between the appearance of light, but I don't think that this will be the norm on the current gen. RT for this gen is just a nice to have but nothing that is really needed (as the hardware is just not powerful enough).
What I really find awful is how some games of the current gen look. Yes they look quite clean but the content doesn't look better as last-gen games (e.g. the new Batman game).
Gameplay wise it also doesn't hold back anything. Just look at the games we have now. I don't remember one game that wouldn't be possible (just gameplay wise) on the PS360 gen. Graphics got better, yes but for the most part the games didn't evolve to use the much higher memory pool. More memory was just spend on graphics and almost "nothing" for the worlds. I really don't see why this should suddenly change.
Yes the smaller memory pool makes optimizations more time consuming, but it should be possible. Just saying Witcher 3 on a Switch ....
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snc
Veteran
But its doesnt work this way for assets and textures, so either you do double work and make different for xss and xsx/ps5 or you cut the costs and do once for xss
Subtlesnake
Regular
snc
Veteran
Thats the point
You don't do double the work. The work for the lower-asset quality must be done if you want it or not. Else you would load higher res assets/textures into memory for things that are further away in the scene. You just decrease the LOD settings until it uses the lower res assets in front of the camera until it works. Most of the time this should already make the port possible. Sometimes you might also need a configuration-file to lower shadow-quality or shut some graphics features off.
Currently the biggest problem is still that the game engines do not really rely on the new streaming stuff but still load worlds, textures, ... in big chunks. Also on PCs it wasn't a problem to lower geometric detail with a slider.
Biggest problem I see is a multiplayer mode where geometric detail can be an advantage because it can hide a player in rare situations. E.g. in the good old days a moving pixel in Delta Force was all I needed to see to know where the other player is in the deathmatch mode.... but I guess that was just an edge-case for the time
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snc
Veteran
So why Ragnarok has exactly same assets on ps5 and ps4 if they could just create ps5 version and downscale it for ps4 ?
because the wanted to let the game shine on PS4
But those consoles have a "total" different architecture while xbss and xbsx are the same architecture, just one is just 1/3 as strong but is designed to handle a 1/4 the resolution.
Also you must calculate that e.g. 1080p vs 4k is already needing 4x the power to just calculate the same thing pixel-wise.
Edit: I totally forgot that normally there is a 60fps mode (vs the 30 on PS4) so that is where the 8x needed performance came from
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snc
Veteran
Not sure arch. is so important in terms of assets, imo mostly memory constraint.because the wanted to let the game shine on PS4
But those consoles have a "total" different architecture while xbss and xbsx are the same architecture, just one is just 1/3 as strong but is designed to handle a 1/4 the resolution.
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