Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2024]
- Thread starter Shifty Geezer
- Start date
Yep. Back in the 8th gen, you had the GTX 1060 that doubled the PS4’s GPU performance for only $250, or 62.5% of the PS4’s retail price 32 months after its release.
Now it’s been 38 months and the 4070S is $600. Console prices have increased by 25% but GPU prices by 140% for the same hardware.
Yes, I am. Consoles not receiving price cuts isn't that shocking since they started off at only $500. That's only a 25% increase from the launch prices of the PS4 10 years ago. PC graphics cards, however, saw their prices double or more in the high-end.
If Sony and Microsoft had followed the price trends of the GPU market, we'd have $900 consoles now.
Consoles are sold at a loss, GPUs aren't.. and can't be...
The PS5 hasn’t been sold at a loss for like a year.
And lol if you think that NVIDIA didn’t jack up their prices out of sheer greed.
Edit: More than a year. Over 2 years
https://www.thegamer.com/standard-ps5-break-even-profit-june/
NVIDIA could sell the 4070S for $300 and probably still make a decent profit. Those prices are just a ripoff after they realized people were willing to pay top dollar even for mid-tier products.
Don't get me wrong.. they absolutely did, and I've complained about it on this very forum.. but we have to be realistic here. Consoles can adapt to fluctuating markets better than GPUs can (or better than manufacturers are willing to allow) because the more consoles they sell, the more people are locked into their ecosystem and spend money there, ultimately profiting from them. That obviously isn't the case with PC components.
Markets adapt to what customers are willing to pay. The market shown during the pandemic that there are a lot of people out there willing to pay insane prices for GPUs. Everything shifted up a rung, essentially. Consoles remained at the same price, outside of scalpers.. Consoles can afford to sell for less... but they generally cannot raise prices to beyond what people perceive as acceptable for a video game only device.. which is around $500.
I've asked this question before too. AMD simply follows Nvidia's lead and seemingly has no interest in truly disrupting the market.
Nvidia's pricing effectively more than doubled just from 2020 to 2022 alone. The current GPU market was created by sheer greed, absolutely, and taking advantage of completely warped consumer pricing expectations after the last cryptomining boom.
It didn't need to be this way, but consumers have given in, and so the days of great value GPU's are literally gone forever now. Precedent is set and there's no going back.
AMD rips off too but this discussion was borne from the talks about the 4070S compared to the PS5.
I would have liked for DF to make a comparison with the 4060/Ti instead of the 4070S. More alarming than the price hike is the fact that dies are cut from the biggest ones more than ever. A 4060 isn’t even much better than a PS5 but a 1060 blew the regular PS4 out of the water and even convincingly beat the PS4 Pro. Imagine a 4060 faster than the PS5 Pro. I guess that’d be more like a 5060 though based on the timeline.
Edit: Also, I think the general discourse tends to undersell ray tracing. Rich's comparisons mainly focused on rasterization I believe (Cyberpunk in performance mode, Immortals of Aveum, TLOU Part II, A Plague Tale: Requiem, Alan Wake 2). I think only Frontiers of Pandora had RT in the suite of games he tested. If you enable it, then the performance differential is quite a bit higher than a 100% advantage in favor of the 4070S. You're probably looking at a 120-150% uplift on average and if the PS5 could take path tracing, it'd be 200%. So I guess on that front it's not all bad but even on a 4070S, ray tracing isn't that amazing, and current games are still largely built traditionally so rt isn't always impressive outside of the usual suspects like Cyberpunk and Alan Wake 2.
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Palworld isn’t on last-gen machines. It’s UE5 as well I believe.
Uh, yes it is... It's on Xbox One.. and is even shown and tested in the video.
It is on last-generation machines, but I doubt it is taking advantage of any current-generation features on any platform. I'm enjoying it a great deal, but the game is rough. That said, I noticed that all of the Xbox Series footage was captured using the 1.0.0 version of the game, while all of the last-gen captures used a newer version. None of them are using v1.1.1. Not saying that things have improved much but I was surprised by that.
Oh, I thought it was just on the Series consoles and PC.
I thought Palworld was using UE5, but then I read the blog by Pocket Pair's CEO which talked about UE4. But the game does not look like UE4, so I checked the binary file and see something like "++UE5+Release-5.1-CL-0" in its binary's product version string, so I guess it's UE5 after all.
To be fair PS5 is almost $90 cheaper than it was when it released. In Nov 2020 $500 was about $590 in Dec 2023 USD. $400 PS4 in Nov 2013 would be $415 in Dec 2016.
Edit as noted below PS4 slim launched in Sept 2016 for $300. So the PS4 had reduced in price a bit more than PS5 3 years after release. It's pretty close in terms of inflation adjusted dollars.
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PS4 slim was launched in Sept 2016 for $300.
blog.playstation.com
PlayStation Meeting 2016: Introducing PS4 Pro and the Slimmer, Lighter PS4
More than three and a half years ago, I stood on stage in New York to unveil PlayStation 4, which captured our vision for the future of gaming. That vision placed the gamer at the center of the PlayStation ecosystem and empowered developers to create transformative experiences. This afternoon I...
blog.playstation.com
DavidGraham
Veteran
The DF crew argues the importance of stand alone engines, amidst an increase in the rate of reliance on UE5 engine among AAA and AA developers.
A critical point was made that most UE5 engines came with stuttering problems, while most games with stand alone engine shipped with no stuttering whatsoever.
A critical point was made that most UE5 engines came with stuttering problems, while most games with stand alone engine shipped with no stuttering whatsoever.
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