The scalability and evolution of game engines *spawn*

[chris1515]

We haven't see of Ragnarok if they design it around PS5, it will be impossible to do on PS4. They said the first fight with Baldur (The Stranger) was limited by the hardware. They wanted to do a fight when Baldur punch you it send at a very fast speed in other part of the Realm with crazy destruction. The SSD and the CPU power will help to achieve what they want to do.

 

[PSman1700]

We haven't see of Ragnarok if they design it around PS5, it will be impossible to do on PS4. They said the first fight with Baldur (The Stranger) is
was limited by the hardware. They wanted to do a fight when you Baldur punch you it send at a very fast speed in other part of the Realm with crazy destruction. The SSD ant the CPU power will help to achieve what they want to do.

Thing is, people have been saying everywhere FW and Spiderman where impossible to do on PS4 but yet here we are. You dont know yet if GoW will be cross gen or not. It's very likely as they want to sell as many copies as possible, and that wont be many if it comes spring 2021 and its PS5 only.

No one knows how GoW looks either, we only have seen a logo so far.

 

[chris1515]

Thing is, people have been saying everywhere FW and Spiderman where impossible to do on PS4 but yet here we are. You dont know yet if GoW will be cross gen or not. It's very likely as they want to sell as many copies as possible, and that wont be many if it comes spring 2021 and its PS5 only.

No one knows how GoW looks either, we only have seen a logo so far.

I speak about what dev of Sony Santa Monica told they could not do because of PS4 hardware limitation on CPU and streaming side. It was long before God of War Ragnarok announcement. Something they told in 2018 or 2019.

No one said Spiderman was impossible to do on Ps4. We saw nearly nothing about the title before yesterday. On ps4, the vegetation density and tons of things will scale down a lot on Horizon FW but there is a reason we did not see flying mount in the first trailer.

Being on PS4 means the game could look better and the game design would have been very different if it was a PS5 only title. I am sure Horizon 3 will look much better than Horizon 2 PS5.

EDIT: Damage control by Jim Ryan

While it wasn’t mentioned in Sony’s official announcement, developers of certain games later confirmed that PS5 exclusives like “Horizon: Forbidden West” and “Spider-Man: Miles Morales” aren’t exclusive at all. They’re both releasing PS4 versions, which may irritate a few Sony fans who took to heart Sony’s commitment to “next gen” development. The belief is that developing games across generations stifles creativity, and hampers the technological ambitions of the game, since it has to cater to an audience with less powerful machines.

“No one should be disappointed,” Ryan said. “The PS5 versions of those games are built from the ground up to take advantage of the PS5 feature set, and we have an upgrade path for PS4 users to get the PS5 versions for free. It’s about people having choice. I’m really quite pleased about the situation.”

 

[BRiT]

EDIT: Damage control by Jim Ryan

Spoiler

I understood that reference!

 

[see colon]

Is God of War: Ragnarök confirmed as PS5 only. I'd have thought that if anything scales* well it'd be a GoW game.

*Can't quite achieve the punage this clearly deserves

Perhaps it is somehow bound by it's inability to scale. If so, let's hope it isn't 100% scalebound.

LOL. So PS5 exclusive games that aren't coming out until late 2021 or 2022 are somehow included as launch titles and showing some "clean break with past generations" Sony promised everyone a few months ago?

News just in: MS is making a clean break with this generation too as Fable, Avowed and new Forza are coming out in the "launch window" in 2022. LMAO!

The launch window has been extended because of the global health crisis.

 

[MistaPi]

What do you guys think of these comments from ID Software? Is a lower rendering resolution and texture resolution not enough? Does the RT BVHs need the same amount of memory regardless of rendering resolution?


Really bummed about this RAM situation on the Series S. This isn't easy to compensate and drags down base spec quite a bit for next gen multi platform. RAM increase was already small compared to previous gen, now it's almost non existent. RT BVHs also need a lot of mem on top.
— Axel Gneiting (@axelgneiting) September 10, 2020

The memory situation is a big issue on the S. The much lower amount of memory and the split memory banks with drastically slower speeds will be a major issue. Aggressively lowering the render resolutions will marginally help but will not completely counteract the deficiencies.
— Billy Khan (@billykhan) September 10, 2020

 

[BRiT]

About the split speed memory on Series S, the games will never deal with the different speed memory on the Series S. They will always be situated in the 8GB fast memory section.

 

[function]

What do you guys think of these comments from ID Software? Is a lower rendering resolution and texture resolution not enough? Does the RT BVHs need the same amount of memory regardless of rendering resolution?


Really bummed about this RAM situation on the Series S. This isn't easy to compensate and drags down base spec quite a bit for next gen multi platform. RAM increase was already small compared to previous gen, now it's almost non existent. RT BVHs also need a lot of mem on top.
— Axel Gneiting (@axelgneiting) September 10, 2020

The memory situation is a big issue on the S. The much lower amount of memory and the split memory banks with drastically slower speeds will be a major issue. Aggressively lowering the render resolutions will marginally help but will not completely counteract the deficiencies.
— Billy Khan (@billykhan) September 10, 2020

I think those comments have been discussed here previously.

There are no doubt challenges from supporting different memory quantities, but iD's games have scaled very successfully from Switch to a 2080Ti with ray tracing. And the "split banks" don't affect game memory on the Series S beyond a relatively small amount of bandwidth contention from the OS reserve.

BVH performance is affected by the number of levels and the number of objects to test in each level. All is affected by the detail present in each stage of the hierarchy. That can be adjusted.

I love to hear about the details of such challenges. But I don't want to hear very well paid people on Twitter whining about doing what they're paid for.

Personal bias warning: I can't stand developers whining about making games for people. Shit working conditions, or bad treatment? Fair enough - that's not right. Awful documentation and a hostile reception to asking for help? Not cool, and big feels for battling through that. But doing your job, to deliver games to people who want to pay you for that?

Nah.

 

[iroboto]

What do you guys think about these comments from ID Software? Is a lower rendering resolution and texture resolution not enough? Does RT BVHs need the same amount of memory regardless of rendering resolution?


Really bummed about this RAM situation on the Series S. This isn't easy to compensate and drags down base spec quite a bit for next gen multi platform. RAM increase was already small compared to previous gen, now it's almost non existent. RT BVHs also need a lot of mem on top.
— Axel Gneiting (@axelgneiting) September 10, 2020
The memory situation is a big issue on the S. The much lower amount of memory and the split memory banks with drastically slower speeds will be a major issue. Aggressively lowering the render resolutions will marginally help but will not completely counteract the deficiencies.
— Billy Khan (@billykhan) September 10, 2020

It depends.
The advantage of having lots of everything is that you can support all sorts of engine and rendering types.
When you have a very limited set of resources with some features to accommodate weaknesses, then only a few engines will not be compromised, the rest will be

So it depends on whether or not you want to make alterations to accommodate for performance, with enough memory they wouldn't have to.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

This isn't an actual issue IMO. As the generation progresses the odd title will be missing a few effects on XSS than on XSX, but that's what you get for $299. I think the XSS will 90% deliver on the promise of XSX at 1080p revolution. That will be fine for the non-power users it is meant for. Devs will have to suck it up sometimes though.

 

[thoosh]

Jason Ronald, Microsoft’s director of Xbox program management, gave an interview to The Verge.

We did a lot of analysis of what it would really mean to run a game at 4K with 60fps and then to scale that down to 1440p at 60fps.
The reality is you don’t need as much memory bandwidth because you’re not loading the highest level MIP levels into memory. You don’t need the same amount of memory as well.

Developers have a whole host of different techniques, whether that’s changing the resolution of their title, things like dynamic resolution scaling frame to frame — that’s something we’ve seen a lot of adoption of, especially towards the end of this generation.
And obviously the ability to enable and display different visual effects, without actually implementing the fundamental gameplay.

With RDNA 2 we get basically a 25 percent performance uplift over GCN with no work by developers at all.
There’s a significant amount of efficiency we’re getting out of RDNA2 relative to GCN. Then we look at other things like using float 16 or variable rate shading, and we’re seeing on the order of 10-20 percent performance benefits from there as well.

It is really difficult to compare raw numbers like teraflops across generations, because we think about them differently.
In general on the GPU side the Xbox Series S is effectively the same performance as an Xbox One X GPU, but it brings all the next-gen features like ray tracing, VRS, mesh shaders, and obviously when you look at the massive leaps in CPU performance and I/O performance, that’s why Xbox Series S is designed to deliver that true next-gen experience just targeting a lower resolution than Xbox Series X.

There are also opportunities where we can enhance the titles on Xbox Series S even further than what we can do on Xbox One X.
If you look at the raw power of the Xbox Series S, if a title wants to go in and double its frame rates it’s actually really easy, because we’ve more than doubled the GPU performance and more than doubled the CPU performance, so it’s relatively easy for a developer to go in and enable that if they choose to update their title.

Historically, console generations have really been defined by how games look.
This generation a lot of it is going to be how do they feel? How do they play? When you think about these large open worlds and keeping players immersed in it, I don’t want pop in, I don’t want load times.

When we think about the Xbox velocity architecture or sampler feedback streaming, those are areas where we expect a lot of innovation over the generation.
With something like sampler feedback streaming, it can deliver performance well beyond the raw hardware specs itself. So much of this generation is about efficiency.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/17/...xt-gen-gaming-performance-gpu-memory-hardware

---

Disapointed in allowing “to enable and display different visual effects, without actually implementing the fundamental gameplay” for Series S — that's not just lowering the resolution.
Same for “There are also opportunities where we can enhance the titles on Xbox Series S even further than what we can do on Xbox One X.” — don't talk about non-conrete theoretical further enhacements when practically you can't even deliver One X enhacements.

 

[BRiT]

Same for “There are also opportunities where we can enhance the titles on Xbox Series S even further than what we can do on Xbox One X.” — don't talk about non-conrete theoretical further enhacements when practically you can't even deliver One X enhacements.

It's not just talk, it's concrete. See the following post https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2157920/ which has highlights from the following DigitalFoundry article: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...is-how-xbox-series-s-back-compat-really-works

--- snippets highlighted by @TheAlSpark 's original post --


SSAA for ogXbox and 360 Enchanted titles:

Kicking off with games running on the vintage 2001 Xbox - the 'OG' machine - we've confirmed that Xbox Series S will run these games at an enhanced resolution. There's a 3x boost to resolution on both axes, meaning that titles targeting 480p on the original machine will hit a maximum of 1440p on Series S, presumably with a range of performance benefits. The good news continues with the enhanced Xbox 360 titles that were released for Xbox One X. These games will also be enhanced for Series S, this time running with a 2x2 resolution multiplier, bringing titles that ran at native 720p up to 1440p.

Similar boost operation (as unpatched games running on Scorpio):

Only the Series X will benefit from Xbox One X enhancements to existing games - which typically boils down to resolution boosts, higher quality textures and other graphics-driven effects. Xbox Series S brings its additional horsepower to bear in improving the experience of Xbox One S titles instead. This is more limiting in some respects (a game hard-coded to run at 900p will not run any higher on Series S, for example) but the new console benefits from increased resolutions in games that use dynamic resolution scaling, as well as improvements to texture filtering quality. Obviously, running games from solid state storage reduces loading times significantly, while the Auto HDR feature we've seen running on Series X also features on Series S - all games should present nicely on HDR screens, whether they natively support high dynamic range or not. It's a feature I personally can't wait to test. Finally, it goes without saying that CPU-limited titles should also deliver more stable performance at target frame-rates.

Select XO titles enchanted to double framerate:

"We designed the Series S to enhance the Xbox One S games in a way that the Xbox One X can't do," system architect Andrew Goossen tells us. "We made it easy for existing Xbox One S games to be updated to run with double the frame-rate when played on Series S as well. When games are updated, existing games can query to determine whether they're running on the new console. And in terms of the performance, the Series S provides well over double the effective CPU and GPU performance over the Xbox One, making it pretty straightforward for the games to do this. And in fact, the Series S GPU runs the Xbox One S games with better performance than the Xbox One X."

the compatibility team can step in with its own specific type of magic, opening the door to running 30fps games at 60fps and 60fps titles at 120fps

 

[PSman1700]

''Historically, console generations have really been defined by how games look.
This generation a lot of it is going to be how do they feel? How do they play? When you think about these large open worlds and keeping players immersed in it, I don’t want pop in, I don’t want load times.''

That's like it is atleast, this coming gen MS/Sony cant deliver that traditional leap and thus try to seek that leap elsewhere. It explains why we haven't seen anything true next gen leap, aside from tech demos.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Yup. Xbox has no native binary compatibility. This has downsides, such as not being able to shove any random OG Xbox or Xbox 360 discs in an modern Xbox and have have it "just work", but has upsides that for the majority for most-played/popular (whatever metric Microsoft used) of games that Microsoft went back and did a lot of work to port/enhance for modern Xbox hardware exploiting various virtualisation layers that they've employed for year.

Just because Series S can't utilise One X enhancements does not mean those games will run at original hardware performance, some nascent improvements will deliver better performance and if Microsoft revisit those games you may get other enhancements over the original, or even One X. The One X vs Series S hardware differences is a mixed bag of pros/cons but quite possibly some things could be better on Series S than One X and some things may be a a bit worse but overall it'll always be a substantial improvement over the original title

 

[BRiT]

Some titles may need some slight game fixes and patches from developers, to update possibly odd bugs like animations. If and when patches are needed, I hope they are done so everyone on PS5 and Xbox Series consoles can see the benefit of double framerates.

"There's no real perf tuning necessary when you do this, and so often it's just as easy as changing three lines of code, and then the game works." Goossen adds. "Even when it's not that easy, the fixes are still pretty minor. We had one triple-A title where doubling the frame-rate really worked perfectly, except that the crowd animation was twice as fast as normal. And so, those sorts of fixes are typically very, very easy for developers to go fix. We're working with game developers and publishers to update [their titles]. It'll basically be select games that run at a doubled frame-rate on the Series S."

Some games will be able to see this functionality enabled by the developer themselves, while others may be collaborations between the game maker and Microsoft's compatibility team.

 

[AlNom]

They'll fix the Halo 5 animation rate, right?

/s

 

[scently]

They'll fix the Halo 5 animation rate, right?

/s

Lol. my mind immediately went to Halo 5 but instead of double the framerate the animation will still be running at half rate. They really should update that title for the upcoming gen. Both consoles are powerful enough to handle fixing the issues that the game has from texture filtering at high res, half framerate animation, LOD, etc. The game is decent-ish so fixing these issues would make it a bit more palatable.

 

[QPlayer]

"With something like sampler feedback streaming, it can deliver performance well beyond the raw hardware specs itself."

The secret souce.

 

[thoosh]

SSAA for ogXbox and 360 Enchanted titles:

No further enhancements, but basically the same Heutchy Method as Xbox One X just with 1440p as render target instead of 4K.
(Looks possible slightly worse on a 1440p screen since Xbox One X will super-sample from 4K: FSAA vs MSAA)

Similar boost operation (as unpatched games running on Scorpio):

If it's similar to Scorpio, it's no further enhancements.

Select XO titles enchanted to double framerate:

Not a further enhancement to Xbox One X Enhanced version, but something different.
No concrete titles named. Needs updates from devs or BC team.

BC team said in the past that Heutchy Method (to change render target) is done in RAM. Since Xbox Series S has less RAM than Xbox One X, i don't see how it can downscale Xbox One X' 4K assets.
I hope BC team has copyright wavers for Xbox One games now, so they can create downloadable 1440p assets instead.

---

Digital Foundry interviewed a Dirt 5 dev about next-gen:

We have high resolution texture packs that are available for the higher end consoles that can do that.
Then we just dial back resolutions and sometimes things like amounts of crowd or intensity of weather or shadow quality things like that for the different platforms.

 

[function]

No further enhancements, but basically the same Heutchy Method as Xbox One X just with 1440p as render target instead of 4K.
(Looks possible slightly worse on a 1440p screen since Xbox One X will super-sample from 4K: FSAA vs MSAA)


If it's similar to Scorpio, it's no further enhancements.


Not a further enhancement to Xbox One X Enhanced version, but something different.
No concrete titles named. Needs updates from devs or BC team.

Doubling the frame rate in previously CPU limited games is an enhancement farther than the X1X can deliver. Achieving better performance than X1X in unpatched games is going farther in terms of delivering performance.

They aren't claiming XSS is doing everything the X1X can do plus more, they're saying enhancements can go beyond what X1X could have done. And this is correct.

And btw, it doesn't take Hercule Poirot to spot this absolute gem:

If it's similar to Scorpio, it's no further enhancements.

Not a further enhancement to Xbox One X Enhanced version, but something different.

So if it's similar, it doesn't count. But if it's different, it still doesn't count.

Dude, you've just told us nothing about XSS and a lot about yourself. It's honestly much cooler and far more interesting to talk about the tech than fight a console war.