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Growing pains for an API that was first released seven years ago? When it is going to stop growing??
Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]
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davis.anthony
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From one of the worlds largest software developers too!Growing pains for an API that was first released seven years ago? When it is going to stop growing??
Lol!Growing pains for an API that was first released seven years ago? When it is going to stop growing??
Most companies did not move to dx12 until this generation. Last Gen many were just emulating dx11 on dx12. We are seeing now dx12 only releases and that means the true migration has begun, but that also means a lot of stumbles!
No, we shouldn’t have to put up with it. From a consumer perspective you are correct. It really boils down to poor project management.
However. Finding out very late in the process your game sucks is very painful to back track on. And that’s where the majority of the issues stem from. Selling you a shitty game isn’t great either.
The consumer will ultimately make the choice.
We can sympathize though. Back in the day when the games couldn’t be patched they could not afford the luxury of making the customer wait. Or that we largely did not have the scope of games that we have today. I would ask developers to consider peeling back games entirely into game design like we did before, giving much more time to story and level design. So that they aren’t having to go back and change things. So that if you do run out of time or money, the result is just slightly weaker graphics and effects, textures, animations etc. at least you don’t need to do full rework. This is likely wrong however. Game development is an iterative process, optimization occurs at the end.
The reality is, this is why we need gaming tech journalism, more now than ever. So kudos on you highlighting DFs role here, because yes, bringing that awareness benefits consumers and the work they did around Callisto Project and RE, they are likely the catalyst to the changes we saw.
It’s an interesting pivot, I recall people saying DF will have nothing to talk about once we move to every game being DRS and consoles will be boring to talk about. . But they have lots to talk about
. This particular topic being more important than pure console stats: Many game shipped are clearly broken. They really are doing critical work hereGrowing pains for an API that was first released seven years ago? When it is going to stop growing??
Well to be fair, DX12U landed in 2020, and that Agility SDK only launched in something like 2021. That DX12 Pix profiler has been steadily developed over the last few years, and on the roadmap page is described as being "far from finished". The list of things to be added / improved in pretty interesting:
Roadmap
PIX is far from finished: we have a long list of things we’d like to improve and add. This list is both incomplete and uncommitted, so no guarantee that we’ll actually ever do all these! But we wanted to share it anyway, to give you some idea of where we are likely to go next, […]
devblogs.microsoft.com
There's also the issue that DX12 has to cover a lot of PC combinations and two reasonably different Xbox consoles. And until [recently] DX11 was for many the primary (or only) API in use.
And as a chum of mine told me, their lead platform is Playstation. Why? Nothing to do with power. It's that it's easier to get stuff up and running owing to dev environment, and also because early on the dev kits themselves were a bit more mature and more stable. They're busy people, and they need to get stuff done!
It's really easy to attribute to hardware what might very well be a software issue - somewhere in application or the stack supporting it.
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The tldr;
It’s true that developers can be much safer with respect to their games, in exchange for more time optimizing the releases.
But you’re trading up for mediocre experiences in exchange to rock solid performance out of the gate.
If you don’t push the limits of what your studio is capable of, you’re unlikely to succeed in making anything worthwhile. And if you push, you having a much higher risk of failure.
These 2 unfortunately go hand in hand.
PS5 was the base version and the API are different enough to not be straightforward to port to Xbox. This is probably not use in this title but PS5 use Primitive shader natively and Xbox Series X use it as Mesh shader. RT implementation is different, go read the Matrix Awakens SIGGRAPH paper and probably many other stuff.
The console aren't far from each other and it seems the Xbox Series version need some patchs.
The console aren't far from each other and it seems the Xbox Series version need some patchs.
Management can definitely be lazy, resulting in unfinished products with issues which are released in less than ideal states.
Sure but to reiterate Remij’s main point, why should we care if they’re pushing the limit or not? As consumers we should demand both innovation and quality for our hard earned dollars and not make excuses for companies when they don’t deliver. Do any of us get points for “pushing the limit” if we don’t get things done at work?
At its core this is a management problem. Studios should be realistic about how ambitious they can be given the resources and skillsets available while delivering a quality end product. When they overreach and run out of time or money it’s likely a project mgmt failure (or greed in the case of trying to squeeze unrealistic output out of finite resources).
I think it’s unavoidable. Games are a winner takes all type of environment. There are a few winners and many losers. So people
Push to move themselves into a category of winners.
I dunno, the culture would need to change, all video games compete for your time, if they aren’t doing something that won’t pull you away from the games and things you are currently doing, then no one will buy your product anyway.
Nah, the Xbox API is not remotely as performant as the PS5’s api and that’s been well documented. Other than that, I do agree with everything else you said. Time was the limiting factor. That being said, it’s not surprising. Why should devs who are time constrained waste time putting effort into the Xbox version of any game? Xbox always moves the least amount of software. PS5 >= Nintendo >>> Xbox when it comes to software sales. Especially now that Microsoft has conditioned their user not to buy games with gamepass. I expect this trend to substandard Xbox releases to continue and Microsoft only have themselves to blame. Seriously baffling decisions.
It has?
Ahh links? Curious to read. Sony is extremely guarded about anything developer wise, so I’m surprised anyone would openly talk about it
Riddlewire
Regular
I think video game customers would be a bit more tolerant of problem issues in released games if we got thorough and constant communication from the development team, either on social media or an official website.
"Yes, we acknowledge this performance shortfall." "Yes, we acknowledge this specific graphical problem." "Yes, we are working on a patch to fix these issues."
This isn't a common thing at all. Plenty of medium and smaller developers just sail on with radio silence. In those circumstances, I think it's perfectly legitimate and justified for paying customers to rage against the devs online, including cruel mockery of their hairstyles and fashion choices.
"Yes, we acknowledge this performance shortfall." "Yes, we acknowledge this specific graphical problem." "Yes, we are working on a patch to fix these issues."
This isn't a common thing at all. Plenty of medium and smaller developers just sail on with radio silence. In those circumstances, I think it's perfectly legitimate and justified for paying customers to rage against the devs online, including cruel mockery of their hairstyles and fashion choices.
The money comes from players buying the games. There's nothing shady here, the ps5 has sold a ton more units.so ps5 version had more time=more money where does money come from
Not to wade too far into this potential dumpster fire (
) but it's worth calling out that it's not like we've lost games with a more scaled back scope and development team and budget entirely or anything. They absolutely exist still, and deserve more attention than they tend to get IMO! Part of this is that the scale of the games that tend to get the most press attention ("AAA") has increased so massively that the problem itself is an order of magnitude more complicated than it ever was in the past. At a basic level, the amount of code and content (some of which you as a developer control and some of which you don't) has increased by at least an order of magnitude across the entire stack, and with it the potential for problems.None of this is to make broad excuses; each game has its own unique issues and priorities and timelines and so on. But I do think it's worth noting that there are lots of games that do intentionally scale back on the complexity and often hit a much more polished launch state. If that is the stated priority, I highly encourage people to look beyond just the hyped AAA games. And of course if you want a more polished AAA experience it's generally good advice to just wait 6 months or something. Again, not making excuses, but pointing out there are lots of options as a consumer now and that's the best way to communicate your priorities. Can definitely confirm that none of the people who you think need to hear the whining read this forum
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Not to wade too far into this potential dumpster fire (
None of this is to make broad excuses; each game has its own unique issues and priorities and timelines and so on. But I do think it's worth noting that there are lots of games that do intentionally scale back on the complexity and often hit a much more polished launch state. If that is the stated priority, I highly encourage people to look beyond just the hyped AAA games. And of course if you want a more polished AAA experience it's generally good advice to just wait 6 months or something. Again, not making excuses, but pointing out there are lots of options as a consumer now and that's the best way to communicate your priorities. Can definitely confirm that none of the people who you think need to hear the whining read this forum
I've been banging the drums that AA and even high indie surpass AAA often WRT gameplay (this would include such things as smooth stutter free camera movement, for example). When you don't have to push graphics so hard in order to get a high "Metacritic" score or a deadline for a 10's of millions USD budget, you can spend more time refining your gameplay experience.
Of course, that isn't in itself a magic bullet, as it still requires a developer that is good, however, without the same time, budget, publisher an ROI concerns as a hyped AAA title, a AA developer generally has much more time they can devote to non-"best of class"-graphics and thus you end up with quite often a superior experience.
Regards,
SB
Open world sandbox play is probably the biggest killer for most studios to tackle. It’s just enormous amount of content and scale, alongside a huge number of challenges to resolve.
If games moved away from sandbox open world I believe more companies would have an easier go at releasing things in a more polished state.
If games moved away from sandbox open world I believe more companies would have an easier go at releasing things in a more polished state.
100%. I stopped playing multiplayer FPS’s a while ago and that’s where you get the most benefit from a day one purchase. For single player games it’s usually a good idea to wait as long as possible and buy in when bugs are squished and all DLC is available. It seems people are already taking your advice, see Callisto for example. If only people would stop preordering based on hype these companies may actually see releasing unfinished games as an unacceptable option.
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