Can't wait to see what Housemarque are doing. Still play Super Stardust after 13 years; and while they said they've moved on from arcade stuff, they know how to do solid, satisfying gameplay mechanics.
General Next Generation Rumors and Discussions [Post GDC 2020]
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There are so many great games that I have never played that I couldn't ever bring myself to replay older games. The only things I do replay are Civ and Total War games, mostly because playthroughs are always very different from one another and they have no real competition out there.
Same thing with movies and series. Long gone are the days where I rewatched Star Wars and Indiana Jones every day on weekends and vacations. There's just so much good new content I don't know where to turn.
cheapchips
Veteran
I'm mostly the same on replaying titles. There are games I've missed on PC that I've picked up years after, mostly due to discounts. More of that in the console space can only be a good thing.
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Deleted member 11852
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Never got into Civ but Total War has eaten years of my life. I yearn for a Rome and Medieval remaster with modern controls.
there are classics that are just always good and I enjoy replaying them. I beat Zelda every year in a couple of hours around Christmas just like I did as a kid. I still watch lord of the rings and the original star wars trilogy, maybe not every year but every couple of years. Most of the new movie are trash and the ones that are decent or good don't have as much re-watchability (doubt this is a word) for me. Maybe its cause I was older when I saw them. I know people who only play Skyrim or invest huge hours into something like Skyrim.
There are plenty of games out there that I don't need to play again because the new ones are just as good or better. I don't need madden 2004 because there is madden 2020 (although I don't play sports titles) I don't need an older forza either. But there are plenty of games out there that I like to replay or continue playing with friends. The halo reissues are a big deal because a lot of people enjoyed htem and there wasn't a good way of playing them until now
I'm not sure that the console advantage is as great as it used to be in that context.
PS4/PRO where you can say has less abstraction performs as you would expect compared to the equivalent PC, just with custom settings which you may not get on pc.
Their just able to target the configuration better, but I don't see the console writing to the metal advatage anymore. Probably because the advatage will only end up being margin of error nowadays.
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Deleted member 11852
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It definitely isn't, over the generations the gameOS has become thicker as it has to juggle more varied demands, i.e. people wanting to dip out fo a game to upload pictures and video, not to mention a greater variable of minor hardware specification differences
To a degree this is still a thing on PS4.
4A Games: "On PS4, most GPU commands are just a few DWORDs written into the command buffer". Seriously, WTF?
HBRU
Regular
Same will be for many years to come as games still have to run on ps4/one... hope a bit more in Sony committed making some pure PS5 games. What concerns me even more is the lack bandwidth in the new consoles in respect to TF... Doing the math comparing the GBps/TF... if OneX is 100, Ps4PRO is 95, XSX is 85 and PS5 is just 80... I consider OneX the most balanced system so probably the real world TF of PS5 most of the time will be around 8.5 and so the ratio will again be 95/100... as stated many times we will see for much time just 60 fps PS5 games vs 30 fps PS4pro.
Even if you take the 4pro out of the equation the PS4 equivalent PC performs simular. So it's not about having to support a lower model.
@DSoup has given a few reasons why in his post above this.
Also need to remember that consoles are a lot more complicated than they used to be, so loosing couple percent of performance for an easier time to develop for them or allowing slight changes in hardware for cost reduction etc is worth while.
and the funny thing is it probably doesn't net a huge overall win in performance when having to do it that way.4A Games: "On PS4, most GPU commands are just a few DWORDs written into the command buffer". Seriously, WTF?
Nothing that won't be lost in slightly badly written code due to being low level or badly optimized loop or something.
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Many? Every other generation, games have been happy to migrate and the old consoles are supported for perhaps 2 years after new console release, with a very quick downturn. Some multiplats will still target old-gen, but I expect most new AA/AAA titles to be next-gen only unless there's been some sea-change in buying and playing habits.
Is that same resolution, settings and framerate?
Is that a one of case or general indication of the state of play? Is it only his setup so could be driver related.
Not going to say your wrong about your friend, but I also wouldn't use one game on one PC as a wider proof of the situation.
Consoles have advantages by being a fixed closed platform, I'm not disputing that at all. Some can even result in performance improvement, but it's nothing like it used to be in that regards. Which was always my point.
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@DSoup and the funny thing is it probably doesn't net a huge overall win in performance when having to do it that way. Nothing that won't be lost in slightly badly written code due to being low level or badly optimized loop or something.[/QUOTE]
If you read the full interview, it nets a huge performance gain:
4A Games: "Oles Shishkovstov: Let's put it that way - we have seen scenarios where a single CPU core was fully loaded just by issuing draw-calls on Xbox One (and that's surely on the 'mono' driver with several fast-path calls utilised). Then, the same scenario on PS4, it was actually difficult to find those draw-calls in the profile graphs, because they are using almost no time and are barely visible as a result." and "On Xbox One it easily could be one million times slower because of all the bookkeeping the API does."
I have no doubt that the egregious example that 4A Games cites has long been addressed by Microsoft's but fundamentally, any API is going to add overhead compared to just shoving data into GPU registers. The downside is those GPU registers need to work exactly on future hardware or you need to virtualise those registers and remap them to a fat API that ensures behaviour is the same as far as game code goes.
If you read the full interview, it nets a huge performance gain:
4A Games: "Oles Shishkovstov: Let's put it that way - we have seen scenarios where a single CPU core was fully loaded just by issuing draw-calls on Xbox One (and that's surely on the 'mono' driver with several fast-path calls utilised). Then, the same scenario on PS4, it was actually difficult to find those draw-calls in the profile graphs, because they are using almost no time and are barely visible as a result." and "On Xbox One it easily could be one million times slower because of all the bookkeeping the API does."
I have no doubt that the egregious example that 4A Games cites has long been addressed by Microsoft's but fundamentally, any API is going to add overhead compared to just shoving data into GPU registers. The downside is those GPU registers need to work exactly on future hardware or you need to virtualise those registers and remap them to a fat API that ensures behaviour is the same as far as game code goes.
There's a difference between measurable overhead and perceivable overhead though. The question is how much in-game gains low(er) level access gets you. If it ends up the difference between 720p and 1080p, it's perhaps worth doing. If it's the difference between 30fps with a 4% framedrop in busy scenes, versus 30fps with a 15% framedrop in busy scenes, it might not be and the use of fatter APIs to improve library BC is probably worth it.
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Deleted member 11852
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Feeling like a broken record here, but if people read the article there's no need to guess or assume realworld ramifications, look at 720p vs 1080p differences and comparing the performance of a higher-level DirectX to Sony's über-low level GNM was the focus of interview from devs who had used both. Digital Foundry ask all the questions you would expect and the devs answered honestly based on their experience of bringing their games to current gen consoles.
We're not talking one game here. We're talking every single title on XB1 versus PS4. In DF face-offs, how badly does XBO compare especially factoring in the lower power? Now if the consoles were the same 1.8 TFs, what would the actual difference in games be?
This is a choice quote from that interview: "In general - I don't really get why they choose DX11 as a starting point for the console."
The reason is because it aids BC. Some people don't care about BC games; others do. There's a sliding scale of how much high-level APIs impact current-gen game performance versus the value of being able to play games on future hardware and each gamer's preference is going to sit somewhere on that scale. The less the API impacts games, the more gamers are going to value the BC opportunities it provides (and non-gimped next-gen hardware trying to maintain BC).
You can be sure that iOS users are very happy that games weren't hitting the hardware on their last iPhone and break on their new one.
Advances in APIs are bringing down the overheads too, so there's even more to think about when considering the impact of 'fat' APIs over low-level hardware accesses in terms of impacting games and enabling future platform compatibility.
This is a choice quote from that interview: "In general - I don't really get why they choose DX11 as a starting point for the console."
The reason is because it aids BC. Some people don't care about BC games; others do. There's a sliding scale of how much high-level APIs impact current-gen game performance versus the value of being able to play games on future hardware and each gamer's preference is going to sit somewhere on that scale. The less the API impacts games, the more gamers are going to value the BC opportunities it provides (and non-gimped next-gen hardware trying to maintain BC).
You can be sure that iOS users are very happy that games weren't hitting the hardware on their last iPhone and break on their new one.
Advances in APIs are bringing down the overheads too, so there's even more to think about when considering the impact of 'fat' APIs over low-level hardware accesses in terms of impacting games and enabling future platform compatibility.
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Deleted member 11852
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Yes, because as 4A Games point out, draw calls - which is how your rendering graphics - sits behind a much fatter and slower API on Xbox than PS4. Why would Xbox One's draw calls only impact one game? How is everybody else calling DirectX?
DirectX as a whole is not getting thinner or smaller, functions are getting more complex to provide flexibility to the game/app and because of numerous exploits that have appeared over the years, many of which exploit buffer overruns and passing 80x86 code via garbage data, lots of the APIs now have added code that prevents limits this. Which APIs have you seen where the overheads have dropped? Unless you're opting out of the APIs which manage memory for you, sure, but now you're managing the memory.
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