Next Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [pre E3 2019]

Yeah. Just wondering if there was a legitimate reason or leak pointing towards a $399 PS5.

 

If not, feel free to make your own on pastebin. That's what all the cool kids are doing these days.

 

Because Sony cares. They have opted to swallow $100 to $200 of the costs to hit that mark.

 

Some patterns are stronger with others. $399 was the killer price point of this gen, with XBO coming in at $499.

The $399 resonates with people. Understandably, it’s cheaper!

Sony have not gone over $399 this gen either. Which may be a sticking point for some.

 

Pftt.... so did $299 at one point.

PS360 got over that hurdle with framing effect.

consumers should understand multi-sku well enough by now.

/borken recktrd


/fleas

 

Looking at that person's bio I'd say he probably knows about Spiderman running on the 8GB PS4 and wouldn't be impressed at its "extreme amounts of texture and other content" as something that will be in the PS5.

Sony execs have been saying that PSVR2 won't come out at the same time as PS5 to prevent each product from taking focus from each other. AFAIK they didn't say PSVR5 wouldn't release in 2020.
We could be looking at PS5 releasing late H1 2020 and PSVR2 during holidays 2020.

 

IIRC, I believe I seen a patent or two by Sony or Microsoft somewhere (here, Era or Reddit) addressing photon mapping and global illumination, setting up k-d tree structuring towards resolving these issues that you raised.

 

Spiderman or not. I just found interesting that particularly him, as developer of cutting edge texture compression library he might be privy to platform holders juicy details in this context (besides public demos) early on and would not easy to impress and waste time for casual comments.

 

That's cool in all. But stating, "Microsoft will have to keep up," is fanboyish and console warrior fodder. As a professional, he may want to keep his opinions more neutral within his field of work.

 

i dunno, that's sort of the problem with text in general. There's a lot of different ways to interpret his words; one of encouragement; one of excitement; one of console warrior fodder.

I don't blame him, nor do I think he said anything wrong. People will twist words much more neutral than this to their advantage. There's pretty much nothing that can be done when one is vigilant in winning or having an agenda to adhere to.

A rationale person stays fairly neutral, but that also means no risk nor reward. Someone who postures is risking their credibility and expending their effort, but there is a payout if they are right. I think when we look at things this way, we can never stop this type of forum. Being rational for many folks is uninteresting

But i think the most important aspect is the general statement around the need for asset streaming at high rates. I get that we see less texture pop in, and even it's possible that you can have games go even faster than say 250 kmph and still hold some level of super fast streaming to keep the world feel like it's not just appearing before your eyes. Or perhaps we can have much more complexity in the number of different textures and things happening scene to scene.

I don't necessarily think his goal was to create cannon fodder, but the hopes that Richard may have in pushing the industry forward on this front so that he is not fighting the hardware to work on the goals he's wanted to

 

When was that quote made? That should help exclude leaks. As basically anything before the investor panel would indicate that no development kits have been handed out to non-Sony developers. Which means anything coming from a non-Sony developer would just be made up fluff.

The bolded part of the quote is just another way of saying, "We can't comment on rumors." IE - We can't say if a rumor is true or not, but when we finally do release information you'll be able to tell for yourself what is true or not true.

Regards,
SB

 

True. I just want the crazy season(s) to be over soon... after the announcements and launches. Then we can focus on the tech that's given, and their strengths and weaknesses.

 

A Cnet article from this past Tuesday. https://www.cnet.com/news/sonys-pla...ss-transition-to-its-next-generation-console/

 

Yes, I've mentioned previously that Cinema has to fake a lot of lighting because real lighting conditions, especially at night, isn't deemed pleasant by most viewing audiences.

That's something that game companies will have to deal with if they wish to use RT. What techniques will they use to make RT "less realistic" in order to make the lighting in their game look good?

It is interesting to consider that while RT allows for more realistic lighting, RT also means that the artists for games lose a bit of control over lighting. I'm not sure it's a clear cut win for development budget and time for extremely well crafted games and development teams. It'll save time and cost in some areas but possibly increase time and cost in other areas.

After all you can't just litter the scene with lighting props (whether to increase, decrease or redirect light) like film and TV media does if a player has control over their movement and view (camera).

Regards,
SB

 

Loading times can't always be fixed (sometimes causes bugs) but all of the others can. Assuming you're ok with texture upscaling algos like xbrz, which often handles textures better than pixel art.

Retroarch also supports SSAA on vulkan now for Beetle PSX, which often looks more natural and consistent than normal higher resolution rendering.

https://www.libretro.com/index.php/new-vulkan-graphics-enhancements-features-in-beetle-psx-hw/

 

How important will ray tracing be for Sony's PS5 and Xbox's Project Scarlett?

 

I'm in the boat that RT won't matter unless it saves time for developers or actually becomes an integral part of gameplay. It'll fan the flames of fanboy wars for sure, but in the end most gamers really won't care. Pretty pictures only matter so much and regardless of how incorrect today's rendering is, it still looks very nice. Multiplatform developers will need both RT and non-RT render paths for a while if they want to keep PC game system requirements at a manageable level too.

 

Rasterized lighting is not good enough for PBR assets. Moving on the flaws will only be more obvious without ray tracing.

 

I expect shadowing to be utilized this generation but probably not much else. Start with something that is not a huge impact on performance but can still have a significant visual benefit and simplify development somewhat.

 

As others have mentioned before, once you start getting used to correct looking visuals, the inadequacies of current approximations will become more jarring. PS1 used to look great, but now it's an eyesore. 640x480 used to be high-res, but now it's a pixelated or blurry mess.