Why don't they just open a blog e share the link?
The scalability and evolution of game engines *spawn*
- Thread starter ultragpu
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As Brit said, they probably talked to at least their own developers about scalability. Probably didn't want to make too much noise early on so as not to let Sony know what they were planning.
MS seem to have based a lot of their decisions on analysing the way games work, and building supporting systems. Perhaps they ultimately felt they could make the decision largely on their own.
One thing that's consistently true is that if you want to change the status quo, people will be resistant. And MS are very definitely looking to be disruptive. If MS had talked to those developers at iD they'd have said 'no' to XSS.
It is somewhat funny to see these comments about not being able to scale down from the makers of Doom and Wolfenstein, which another studio scaled down to the Switch facing vastly greater challenges across basically every part of the system. I mean *the Switch*, which has only 2GB for games (iirc), and approximately zero processing power. And I'm sure you wouldn't want to go through that for every game, but with XSS it's not like you will.
I'm sure it'll cause some headaches and need to be planned around, but ultimately if you don't want to do that don't support the platform.
He must be the ultimate dev, being so lazy to not even release any games!!!
With sampler feedback does it evict no longer required data?, it auto blends stuff when required so perhaps you can allocate a block of ram for textures and the system does it's thing, all in hardware and hopefully just works.
They must have benchmarked these things internally, probably have been with the X for a long while knowing what they wanted next generation
They must have benchmarked these things internally, probably have been with the X for a long while knowing what they wanted next generation
Probably but I prefer dev with devkits and with one of the best gane engine of the market releasing a technological masterpiece like Doom Eternal. I think they are much more believable.
After this is not very important at the end if Xbox Series S is a success. It will be the minimum requirement and devs will not complain, the design will be done around it and the game will scale up to PS5 and Xbox Series X with the best console version on XSX.
Rurouni
Veteran
He even acknowledged that either RT will be lower quality on XsS (which is to be expected) or turned off. This is back to one of my example about a game where it is full of mirror, important for gameplay. We know that even with XsX power, it might not be possible to create everything with mirror at full 4k. What I'm thinking is that the RT quality need to be dropped enough that dropping the quality even more to accommodate XsS might not be possible. What to do with that kind of game? Wait for the gen after this or become PS5 exclusive. PC is always possible, just say the minimum is 2070. You can play it using 2060 but the experience might not be pleasant (which I don't mind. I played Arkham Knight on AMD Kaveri, yes, low but playable fps, 720p).
As an enthusiast, I don't like the existence of XsS. As a cheap gamer, I welcome XsX because now the bar to next gen is rather low. Other than the SSD thing (which I think still for console style subsystem SSD is still far away from being a standard on PC) is the cheapest RT GPU, which is 2060. Everything created for next gen, because of XsS, should be scalable to and very much playable on 2060 until the end of next gen.
As an enthusiast, I don't like the existence of XsS. As a cheap gamer, I welcome XsX because now the bar to next gen is rather low. Other than the SSD thing (which I think still for console style subsystem SSD is still far away from being a standard on PC) is the cheapest RT GPU, which is 2060. Everything created for next gen, because of XsS, should be scalable to and very much playable on 2060 until the end of next gen.
cheapchips
Veteran
As an aside, I looked at that Watchdogs puddle as it's our first look at Xbox raytracing beyond the Minecraft demo. It looks like screen space. The baddie's arm obscures the reflection as it moves across it.
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Right - I suppose we're looking at 5GB down to 3GB for those ports. The major challenge was the CPU. To be fair, Doom is a corridor shooter with very tailored encounters. If the devs want to open things up more like Serious Sam, then it might be more of a headache. Witcher 3 is probably a better example, but it had compromises in a lot of places that folks may not realize (judging by the developer presentation on it), and at the end of the day it was a ton of work for various reasons.
It certainly does come down to the overall design, though even I'm not really sure what sort of game would be designed for a 13GB title space that wouldn't be possible on half that. R&C is somewhat contrived and fantasy, but if you take a game like Last of Us, you're not exactly opening portals. Same with Call of Duty - there's a very set formula to how a number of AAA games are made. Open world games are obviously doable in the form of RDR2, GTA5, Cyberpunk - but where do developers go from there on next gen with just over 2x RAM?
Titanfall 2 kept both time periods in memory to facilitate the time-jumping, but that sort of thing will be alleviated somewhat by the stuff we've been discussing.
hm. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
idk - there are things like pre-canned zomg-physics that might suck up a ton of memory, but I gather that would be streamed in as needed.
D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
I was mostly joking, but posting messaging from people with an axe to grind undermines the message even if it's shared by those without blunt axes.
D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
I think it depends what you think as of portals, or how long you're willing to wait. R&C is obviously using a very slick implementation but you can bet that the two areas that portals bridge are almost certainly scaled back just a bit in complexity terms to make the world transition/generation as fast as possible.
But if you think fo Bethesda RPGs like Elder Scrolls and Fallout, many areas are connected through a door which you "open" then you get the sloooooow opening door animation then, depending on a bunch of factors you appear in another place. You just never really see both at the same time aka R&C but it's the same problem - moving you from here to here, which are very different world spaces - as quickly as possible.
I'm still not getting much the egregious pessimism of Series S some are toting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thought the alleged problem was that MS is requiring any game that runs on the X to also run on the S at reduced visual quality.
D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
And perhaps they'll need to scale back the marketing. I'm seeing terms like "targeting" which we all love. I recall early in 360's launch days, it was widely reported (and not necessarily factual) that all 360 games had to run at 720p native. It was also widely reported (and not necessarily factual) that Microsoft relaxed that TRC soon after. So. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
cheapchips
Veteran
Saw on Tom Warren's (The Verge) Twitter that he's asking any develops with S concerns or comments to PM him. I'm sure he's not the only journo lining up an S performance article.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
It'd be awesome if he also asked for comments from developers who didn't have any concerns or didn't think releasing a title on XBSS would entail any difficulties.
It seems one sided if you only talk to developers who don't like like it. Versus getting balanced opinions by included developers who feel there isn't anything particularly special that needs to be done.
Regards,
SB
cheapchips
Veteran
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Yeah. I remember that. God I feel old. On a semi-related note. Was watching the Digital Foundry video on MS Flight Simulator. Amazing how much of the visual quality is CPU bound.
Say you. What about me with my first console being the Intellivision https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellivision
The voice module add on has burned scars in my brain with the robotic voice of the game B-17 bomber "Fighters six o'clock" listen at 1:28.
I wonder if they could scale up that game with ray tracing and 4K HDR
TeamGhobad
Newcomer
indie devs' opinion dont count, they aren't pushing games to their limit. i rather listen to ID software and Remedy.
Anybody thinks developers will drop Navi and GTX 1060s based GPUs anytime soon? Nevemind a RT enabled GPU. Ubisoft is going through thr trouble of supporting 2.5 Tflop Pitcarns with WD Legions while Activision is supporting 1.5 Tflop R7 260 with Cold War.
The offering of first gen RT has always come with a caveat of being employed in a hybrid (rasterization + RT) rendering solution limited to a few effects. Does even Nvidia 3000 series card offer enough RT performance to allow you to go all nilly willy with RT effects without driving down fps and resolutions to levels that most who splurge on $500-$1500 cards would find off-putting?
How many of these devs that are miffed at a 4Tflop RT-based console can even produce world-class visuals based games?
The offering of first gen RT has always come with a caveat of being employed in a hybrid (rasterization + RT) rendering solution limited to a few effects. Does even Nvidia 3000 series card offer enough RT performance to allow you to go all nilly willy with RT effects without driving down fps and resolutions to levels that most who splurge on $500-$1500 cards would find off-putting?
How many of these devs that are miffed at a 4Tflop RT-based console can even produce world-class visuals based games?
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