General Next Generation Rumors and Discussions [Post GDC 2020]

[Nesh]

Tbh Sony always does this stuff, puts something a bit more exotic in their box and puts it in spotlight. On one hand, its great for PR and on the other, they always find a way to explore new horizons. What I think about SSD v TF stuff? I think both have enough in box to mitigate their deficits.

The problem I see is that Sony had terrible presentation yesterday. It was dry, boring and as soon as specs came out (very same minute), people were done with it. They saw 12 vs 10TF and that was it. Why? Because TF were always topic of discussion, ever since PS360 era and all the way till yesterday. Now, alot of first party devs and journalists more close to Sony are doing Sony a favor by hyping good features because the entire way of being mute about console and then presenting it in most boring way possible after your competitor goes on and on about flops was mistake. It set a wrong narrative for next gen.

I just urge people not to drink cool aid. These consoles will be very close and you will not see whole new worlds in PS5 version nor you will see fully raytraced game on XSX, and not on PS5. Its going to be close, closer then PS4 Pro and XBX, each with their own strengths.

The presentation IMO was great. Just unsuitable for the average joes, your typical gamers who cant understand shit. This was never mainly intended for their consumption anyways.
edit: I think the fault was preparing the crowd that it was intended for everyone

 

[AbsoluteBeginner]

The presentation IMO was great. Just unsuitable for the average joes, your typical gamers who cant understand shit. This was never mainly intended for their consumption anyways.

I think only great thing about presentation was Mark, everything else : bottom of a barrel. Dimmed room, amateurish presentation, fake audience, all talk no show. All that after your competitor has been shouting from the rooftops : TFTFTFTF.

IMO they should have had PSMeeting with few crazy tech demos, interviews with developers, general direction they are taking etc. and then big arch dive during GDC. Just like they did last time, perfection. This, especially when XSX is more powerful, makes little sense.

 

[Deleted member 7537]

I think only great thing about presentation was Mark, everything else : bottom of a barrel. Dimmed room, amateurish presentation, fake audience, all talk no show. All that after your competitor has been shouting from the rooftops : TFTFTFTF.

IMO they should have had PSMeeting with few crazy tech demos, interviews with developers, general direction they are taking etc. and then big arch dive during GDC. Just like they did last time, perfection. This, especially when XSX is more powerful, makes little sense.

Agreed, the target audience was no longer the developers. They should have done something shorter, communicate some key points and show some pretty staff. Or do a private presentation only to studios.

 

[Tkumpathenurple]

If PS5 can provide twice the content variety because it can stream twice as many assets, no dev is going to go t the cost to make twice as many assets on PS5 for a small part of the whole cross-platform audience they are targeting.

To pull an example out of my arse: it may result in something like greater variety of cars in GTA. Remember when you'd get in a car in GTA3, and suddenly, nearly all of the other cars would be the same model? Releases on other platforms did away with that, so we may see a less dramatic equivalent.

@Tkumpathenurpahl I am fine, thanks. Just very disappointed as you can see that they designed a flawed hardware because of BC requirements. That strategy was a failure on PS3, it was a failure on Wii U, I don't see why it should work on PS5. Just look at Switch and PS4 success, both recent designs without any kind of BC.

PS5 didn't need BC, and also, currently BC is broken on PS5 ! From their own statements, it's not working, that's ridiculous. All of that for 4% (or even less, like 2%) of games available.

And the yields are currently bad, frequency is too high:

https://www.chiphell.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=2201057&page=2&mobile=2#pid44551026

The Switch came after the failure that was the WiiU. Nintendo could afford to alienate all 12 people that bought that console. The PS4 severed ties to the PS3 whilst the XBoxOne did the same to the X360 (for a while.)

I think it would've been wildly risky to sever ties to the PS4 when the XSX was definitely not going to sever ties to the XBoxOne.

As for yields: I don't put stock in rumours. Any old Muppet can go on the internet and make claims. If it turns out to be the case, then I agree, Sony made the wrong choice by not spending a small amount more on 4 extra CU's and clocking them lower.

Sure all games will load faster on PS5, but that will be the only difference with a Xbox game. There won't be more details on the scene, the travels in open world games won't be faster on the PS5, because 3rd parties dev will develop for Xbox in mind and its 2GB/s (or lower if Lockhart is real) of streaming speed.

I think fast travel is one area that the PS5 will absolutely benefit. If you're hopping from one side of the map to the other, and assets have to be streamed in from storage, being able to stream them in twice as fast should pretty consistently result in half the waiting times.

Maybe it won't matter for the most part, but I love the instant retry feature in Super Meat Boy, and I'd welcome that in plenty of other games. I'd have really welcomed that in Spider-Man's stealth challenges.

My God, I'm having visions of being able to fast travel in the Witcher 3 without having to go and make a brew.

 

[Nesh]

I think only great thing about presentation was Mark, everything else : bottom of a barrel. Dimmed room, amateurish presentation, fake audience, all talk no show. All that after your competitor has been shouting from the rooftops : TFTFTFTF.

IMO they should have had PSMeeting with few crazy tech demos, interviews with developers, general direction they are taking etc. and then big arch dive during GDC. Just like they did last time, perfection. This, especially when XSX is more powerful, makes little sense.

Time will come for that too. But yes it was far more exciting how they arranged to reveal the PS4 for the masses.

 

[PSman1700]

The problem I see is that Sony had terrible presentation yesterday. It was dry, boring and as soon as specs came out (very same minute), people were done with it. They saw 12 vs 10TF and that was it. Why? Because TF were always topic of discussion, ever since PS360 era and all the way till yesterday. Now, alot of first party devs and journalists more close to Sony are doing Sony a favor by hyping good features because the entire way of being mute about console and then presenting it in most boring way possible after your competitor goes on and on about flops was mistake. It set a wrong narrative for next gen.

Their presentation got as many likes as dislikes so i think they will notice. Negative comments get filtered but they cant keep up.

To pull an example out of my arse: it may result in something like greater variety of cars in GTA. Remember when you'd get in a car in GTA3, and suddenly, nearly all of the other cars would be the same model? Releases on other platforms did away with that, so we may see a less dramatic equivalent.

That problem got fixed for the most after GTA4 already, the PS2 versions of GTA were much more impacted also compared to the windows and xbox og versions (ram limitation?).

 

[pjbliverpool]

Regarding the Sony SSD. Something to consider.

MS is putting their tech on the PC.
No word on Sony doing the same.
Sony is, apparently, going to begin releasing their games on PC as well. (Almost certainly after a delay, but that doesn't matter to this point.)
So MS's tech becomes the default best case scenario on PC?
How do you design a game around requiring these theoretical streaming assets that require the Sony SSD tech and then release it on PC?
If it truly is something spectacular beyond what MS is offering, they would still have to take this into account.

Surely the best case scenario for PC's at the time of the next gen consoles launch is a 7GB/s PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive accessing the system via DirectStorage? I don't know whether PC's would have access to to any kind of texture decompression given what MS/Sony are stating about the decompression processing requirements but even without it we're looking at something pretty close to PS5 speed and a fair bit faster than XSX aren't we?

In terms of scaling down to slower systems wouldn't using lower resolution textures significantly reduce the streaming performance requirements? Texture detail scaling is already standard in most PC games.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

To pull an example out of my arse: it may result in something like greater variety of cars in GTA.

even if PS5 is capable of that (twice as much variety) thanks to streaming, it still won't happen in cross-platform titles due the cost in creating twice as much stuff for PS5. No dev is going to double their art costs for platform that's perhaps 50% of the total game's audience.

 

[Nesh]

even if PS5 is capable of that (twice as much variety) thanks to streaming, it still won't happen in cross-platform titles due the cost in creating twice as much stuff for PS5. No dev is going to double their art costs for platform that's perhaps 50% of the total game's audience.

What about level of detail? Surely there is a chance the stuff will be the same but the LOD might be of higher quality?

 

[Tkumpathenurple]

even if PS5 is capable of that (twice as much variety) thanks to streaming, it still won't happen in cross-platform titles due the cost in creating twice as much stuff for PS5. No dev is going to double their art costs for platform that's perhaps 50% of the total game's audience.

But I'm not suggesting the PS5 has double the assets created for it, just as the PC version of GTA3 didn't have additional cars created for it. But rather - and to stick with my GTA hypothetical - when you turn around, rather than just seeing multiple instances of the same van, you will instead see the same quantity of vehicles, but half of them will be vans and half will be cars. Because the assets can be loaded in more quickly.

 

[bgroovy]

Where is the information about the base clock? I've only seen the max 2.23Ghz..

I think Cerny said there was a lower limit, but that's not a "base clock" in the traditional sense.

Even dropping to 2100MHz (which is crazy clock btw) will result in ~9.6TF chip. It's clear PS5 SOC is pushed to brink, and 3Dilettante has talked about SOC having issues with boosting clocks for both CPU and GPU before yesterday's conference.

The question is, if you are maxing out the AVX on the CPU and causing the GPU to throttle, does that even matter? You're probably CPU limited in that scenario anyway.

The XB1 using DDR3 had nothing to do with TV TV SPORTS TV.
Microsoft went the safer route for achieving 8GB system RAM. GDDR5 wasn't a safe route to achieve that, during the console's conception.

I mean, they were only dead set on that much RAM because of their TVTVSPORTSTV vision...

Another metric is the flops performance of all 8 PS4 Jaguars, as Cerny said that's what would be required. That in turn is equivalent to how much CPU on next-gen consoles?

That would be like 100GFlops, yeah? So we can say Tempest adds between 100-285GFlops of power for audio. Either way that's a lot more than SHAPE if that was 15GFlops.

 

[ultragpu]

One thing I'm more sure of is, the very slight amount of CPU advantage in XSX would make absolutely fuck all difference in 4k gaming since everything is GPU capped.
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-3700x/17.html

 

[Remij]

But I'm not suggesting the PS5 has double the assets created for it, just as the PC version of GTA3 didn't have additional cars created for it. But rather - and to stick with my GTA hypothetical - when you turn around, rather than just seeing multiple instances of the same van, you will instead see the same quantity of vehicles, but half of them will be vans and half will be cars. Because the assets can be loaded in more quickly.

Let's hope devs are more ambitious than that

 

[Xbat]

So what kind of pros are there to higher clocks and narrow compared to lower and wider?

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Sure all games will load faster on PS5, but that will be the only difference with a Xbox game. There won't be more details on the scene<snip>

If devs stick with the same approach as they do now, yes. But if they adopt a procedurally-adaptive approach to filling game worlds with object clutter based on how much the CPU, GPU and I/O can muster, you may see cases where PS5 worlds just have more in. Nothing important, but just visual noise to flesh out environments.

the travels in open world games won't be faster on the PS5, because 3rd parties dev will develop for Xbox in mind and its 2GB/s (or lower if Lockhart is real) of streaming speed.

You're suggesting that from now on all cross-platform open world games will only be as large, diverse and dense as XSX can manage without any loading times?!? Nobody is building games like that now, why will they start?

There will always be saves, loads, re-loads and fast travel and the need to load gigabytes of data off the drive is inevitable. What about Lockhart? And while the PCMR crowd like to talk as though everybody has an octacore i7/i9 CPU, dual-2080Tis, 32Gb of RAM and raid-SSDs, the reality is very different.

If PS5 can provide twice the content variety because it can stream twice as many assets, no dev is going to go t the cost to make twice as many assets on PS5 for a small part of the whole cross-platform audience they are targeting.

I agree, but many devs will have large asset libraries already. Creating assets just for PS5? No. Throwing a bunch ready-to-go assets into the pool of random objects to populate a game world? Maybe.

 

[Xbat]

It's also not the worst thing ever that first party devs can have a diffrentiator that makes there games stand out. That is if it does make the big difference I expect it to make but the question is Sony's storage solution performant enough.

 

[AbsoluteBeginner]

Hopefully we will not have to endure 6-7 years of "this is only possible on XYZ console" like in PS360 time. I am sure PS5's SSD is going to be balls to the wall amazing, but I have trust in MS's ability to figure out bottlenecks and if 2x the speed of SSD would result in completely different experience (which I think won't be the case).

Will devs ever say "Wow, 8GB/s of SSD gives us ability we could never achieve with 4.8GB/s"? I doubt it. I also doubt 2TF of extra GPU and RT performance will result in much more then slight reduction in settings and resolution, practically impossible to distinguish at ~3m.

 

[London Geezer]

Hopefully we will not have to endure 6-7 years of "this is only possible on XYZ console" like in PS360 time. I am sure PS5's SSD is going to be balls to the wall amazing, but I have trust in MS's ability to figure out bottlenecks and if 2x the speed of SSD would result in completely different experience (which I think won't be the case).

Will devs ever say "Wow, 8GB/s of SSD gives us ability we could never achieve with 4.8GB/s"? I doubt it. I also doubt 2TF of extra GPU and RT performance will result in much more then slight reduction in settings and resolution, practically impossible to distinguish at ~3m.

It's clear that the "jump" this next gen is that both will use SSDs. Period.
One will be faster, but in terms of new experiences, both will benefit from the order or magniture faster IO. Just like they will both benefit from the new GPU features, and especially the extra CPU, which is a god send.
Can't wait for the noise to subside and for both of them - but especially Sony, who seems all over the place - to start showing off games so we can focus on that.

 

[ultragpu]

So what kind of pros are there to higher clocks and narrow compared to lower and wider?

Higher poly count models, denser environment geometry from what I've heard.

 

[AbsoluteBeginner]

I am wondering about front end vs BW available in PS5 and XSX cases. In PS4 Pro example, it had considerably better pixel fillrate but XBX eats its launch every time on higher res. With 143Gpx v 117Gpx you would expect Sony to have more BW, yet it has considerably less, even per TF.