Is UE4 indicative of the sacrifices devs will have to make on consoles next gen?

Exactly, this is most likely a multi platform engine that could for all we know be running on hardware faster then what's in PS4.

It is impressive looking though.

 

So with 8GB instead of 4Gb then we will get shadows? Even with 3Gb GDDR5 free we have more than most PC card have.

Please, the extra RAM will not make it match a faster VGA card.

Look at the impact of 3Gb vs 6Gb on PC games:

http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/sapphire_hd7970_6gb_vaporx_ghz/7.htm

- Nothing added on games right now

Don't get me wrong. I love the extra 4Gb since it opens up more options but I would guess that it won't do any miracles on the first waves of games.

There is a reason why only high-end cards gets the extra RAM, stuffing it on middle range cards makes no sense.

So i donät expect the extra RAM to do any wonders but itgives Sony extra room for OS expansions. (Maybe more apps running in backgroudn and such).

 

You can't compare PC games optimized to run on 1GB TO 2GB of VRAM and say "See, look the extra VRAM does nothing!"

VRAM typically makes a difference in the effects you can add when you look at PC titles. It's also intuitively obvious you have more space for textures.

As for the UE4 demo, we don't even know what silicon or spec they were targeting, nor how much effort they put into optimizing it. I'm sure they can add most of what we saw in the PC demo.

 

I doubt it..... They can more then likely add the textures but the DOF, SSAO, GI and all the stuff?

They wanted 2Tflop minimum for the Good Samaritan and they got les then that.

I honestly can't believe that people on this forum are expecting a ~1.8Tflop GPU with 150Gb/s of bandwidth for GPU ( The other 20Gb/s for the CPU and such ) operations to keep up with demos running a GTX680 that has ~3Tflop and 192Gb/s of bandwidth.

We all knew that they would not be shipping with high end PC hardware and that they would be slower then PC in a lot ways and now that we know the specs and have seen some of the cut backs some people are surprised, why?

 

192 GB/s versus 176 isn't much of a difference.

I'm most worried that the difference here is that voxel cone tracing has been disabled and the art assets weren't updated to reflect the difference. That's the most next gen feature of UE4 IMO and probably the most GPU flops intensive.

Having the GPU and CPU so close together may open up opportunities for optimization with the ps4 that could bring it back despite the lack of GPU horsepower, but I guess only time will tell. I guess this feature's time may not have come just yet; even on the 680 it looked like the voxelization was pretty coarse.

 

Well it is because the GPU in PS4 will never get 176Gb/s, as I said you can take at least 20Gb/s off that for the CPU and other chips....

 

I thought only lighting would take a hit cause they dropped that voxel goodness, but it seems everything was downgraded quite noticeably. There should still be room for optimizations but you'd think they would polish a short demo for the ps4 reveal. I think GDC will be the last chance for them to demonstrate their new real time GI (if they even have a replacement) and polish the engine in general. It's very important this engine comes out great cause a lot of studios will be using it.

 

I think its simply a case of rushed port, or the engine has not been optimized for the ps4; the lighting was really flat, even compared to certain current gen games, texture work was terrible, again, even compared to current gen. DoF was missing, of course the ps4 can do DoF etc. If you compare it to other ps4 games shown, it becomes really obvious that it was rushed. Simple as

 

Really? Killzone was nothing special, and the Capcom demo hasn't even been confirmed to even be running a PS4, there's a chance it was running on faster hardware.

There's an awful lot of effects going on in that elemental demo and the GPU simply does not have the pixel pushing power to render them like the original GTX680 card that was used does.

Simple as.

 

Look at the original demo pic, really look at it. Now tell me that you believe that the ps4 cannot render that scene.

 

They can target fixed hardware and have to the metal access. I don't think it's crazy to think they can approach parity over time.

 

No it can't..... Maybe you try watching it in 1080p instead of looking at the pictures.

PS4's GPU has the same shader model, more memory and as its based on a PC GPU architecture there's nothing preventing them from doing pretty much a straight port of the demo.

It's just a pure lack of grunt under the hood.

 

Oh over time definitely, but at the same precision and quality is another matter altogether.

 

PS4 can't dedicate it all to graphics alone, the 680 can.

I still think people are making way to much of a demo. We don't have any idea of the comparative effort put into the versions.

 

The Good Samariton demo was said to need around a 2.5Tflop GPU to run at max settings at 1080@30fps.



This is largely the same engine and requirements for this Elemental demo so why so surprised that a 1.8Tflop GPU has had to have things removed or cut down?

Coding to the metal will help them get closer to ustilising that 1.8Tflops but it will still be a 1.8Tflop GPU that is ~30% short of what's required.

 

I think people are forgetting that UE4 is a multi-platform engine.

 

How many 680 units sold so far ? If the PS4 sell sigificantly more, it will be more worthwhile to optimize for it aggressively. It's not merely a question of hardware.

When they allocate more time and resources to optimize for PS4 and Durango, they will exploit the hardware much more aggressively. The code will be tailor made to fit.

 

By the time PS4 actually releases how many Tflops will midrange cards be pushing?

And by the time developers actually start to optimise there game engines how fast will PC GPU's be by then?

I don't think they have any advantage over PC because they're using midrange hardware this time round instead of the best of the best....

 

The programming model is different.

The console advantages will be there, but probably not enough to offset the top of the line, super duper PC GPU in all cases. For midrange ? Hard to say... Let Epic and the game dev decide.

Why so anxious ? It's not the first time console devs surprise people.

 

So, why do people keep comparing consumer level hardware to top of the line PC hardware? Talk about pointless...