The semantic complications of 'demanding' games. *spawn

[sebbbi]

developers already are having trouble running engines, we already know of 3-4 games that are not graphically impressive for ps4/xb1 that have to run at half the frame rate, and even 900p. anyway i think nintendo will go x2 for the switch successor, if they pull a wii though it would suck and i wouldn't be surprised.

900p @ 30 fps is common in Xbox One games (IIRC Snake Pass doesn't even reach that). Switch is around 5x lower power consumption than Xbox One. Reaching half of Xbox One performance at 5x lower power wouldn't be a bad result, it would be a very good result. Mobile phones are designed to entirely different usage scenario (race to sleep) compared to consoles. You can't directly compare mobile phone specs with Switch either.

This is what mobile phones do when running heavy GPU work (max clocks <1 minute):

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/842800053970391040

 

[bunnybug]

900p @ 30 fps is common in Xbox One games (IIRC Snake Pass doesn't even reach that). Switch is around 5x lower power consumption than Xbox One. Reaching half of Xbox One performance at 5x lower power wouldn't be a bad result, it would be a very good result. Mobile phones are designed to entirely different usage scenario (race to sleep) compared to consoles. You can't directly compare mobile phone specs with Switch either.

This is what mobile phones do when running heavy GPU work (max clocks <1 minute):

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/842800053970391040

Most ports aren't doing half of xbone performance. games that are not impressive for ps4/xbone are having a hard time. dragon quest heroes, dragonball, sonic forces and project setsuna, run at half the frame rate with lower settings, the most impressive game being ported to switch of of any game released is sonic forces, thats 1080p/60fps solid on xbone, and 900p/30fps with drops for switch, this is based off darkx from digital foundry analysis.

Well I'd consider most of Nintendo's first party to be AAA games...just maybe not from a modern graphics perspective.

But I agree with you that Switch doesn't have to a 4th version of PS4/Xbox/PC to be successful...in fact it's probably smart of to avoid that direct competition and go with the form factor they have done.

it remains to seen how successful this thing will be, nintendo is releasing all there big guns, its both there console and handheld, i wonder what happens after most of the nintendo fans get one.

 

[sebbbi]

Most ports aren't doing half of xbone performance. games that are not impressive for ps4/xbone are having a hard time. dragon quest heroes, dragonball, sonic forces and project setsuna, run at half the frame rate with lower settings, the most impressive game being ported to switch of of any game released is sonic forces, thats 1080p/60fps solid on xbone, and 900p/30fps with drops for switch, this is based off darkx from digital foundry analysis.

At 5x lower power consumption that's what you should expect in the best case. Sonic Forces = 2.88x difference in pixels/second = much better than 5x = Switch has almost 2x better perf/watt. There's nothing wrong with those results. If you want better performance, you need to accept higher power consumption = bigger battery = less portability. Or wait for 7nm process. Nintendo could have released Switch almost year earlier (with the same hardware and lower profit margins), but that wouldn't have made much difference, since console life cycles are 5+ years. And one year earlier = much less games at launch = Switch could have just failed immediately. Console developers need to get devkits roughly year before the console launch. The hardware needs to be ready much earlier compared to PC and mobile parts.

Game not being visually impressive has nothing to do with hardware capability. Snake Pass can only muster 864p @ 30 fps on PS4. This makes it more demanding to the GPU than all the biggest AAA 1080p @ 30 fps games, including Horizon Zero Dawn. Game runs slower = game needs more GPU time to render a frame = game is more demanding to the GPU. If you port a game like this to Switch, it still remains more technically demanding, unless the Nvidia Maxwell GPU in Switch is less bottlenecked by the particular technical decisions of that game and/or the game engine. It is probable that a seasoned console GPU veteran could make Snake Pass run faster if he/she had few months of time to optimize the code base. But this is all speculation. In its current form Snake Pass is more demanding than many AAA games also on PS4. There's no reason to believe that it would somehow automatically become less demanding on Switch. Perceived visual quality doesn't always match 1:1 with the CPU & GPU tasks that the game is actually doing.

 

[bunnybug]

At 5x lower power consumption that's what you should expect in the best case. There's nothing wrong with those results. If you want better performance, you need to accept higher power consumption = bigger battery = less portability. Or wait for 7nm process. Nintendo could have released Switch almost year earlier (with the same hardware and lower profit margins), but that wouldn't have made much difference, since console life cycles are 5+ years. And one year earlier = much less games at launch = Switch could have just failed immediately.

Game not being visually impressive has nothing to do with hardware capability. Snake Pass can only muster 864p @ 30 fps on PS4. This makes it more demanding to the GPU than all the biggest AAA 1080p @ 30 fps games, including Horizon Zero Dawn. Game runs slower = game needs more GPU time to render a frame = game is more demanding to the GPU. If you port a game like this to Switch, it still remains more technically demanding, unless the Nvidia Maxwell GPU in Switch is less bottlenecked by the particular technical decisions of that game and/or the game engine. It is probable that a seasoned console GPU veteran could make Snake Pass run faster if he/she had few months of time to optimize the code base. But this is all speculation. In its current form Snake Pass is more demanding than many AAA games also on PS4. There's no reason to believe that it would somehow automatically become less demanding on Switch. Perceived visual quality doesn't always match 1:1 with the CPU & GPU tasks that the game is actually doing.

umm you lost me there, you realize this doesn't make any sense, this is up to the developers and how they use the hardware, it's like saying if a game runs like shit on said hardware, its more impressive then a game that runs at a solid frame rate because the game was too demanding to run at a solid frame rate on the same hardware. it's like saying dragon quest heroes is the most demanding game on switch because it can't even run at a acceptable frame rate on switch sub 30fps most of the time.

 

[sebbbi]

umm you lost me there, you realize this doesn't make any sense, this is up to the developers and how they use the hardware, it's like saying if a game runs like shit on said hardware, its more impressive then a game that runs at a solid frame rate because the game was too demanding to run at a solid frame rate on the same hardware.

I am purely talking about technology. I wasn't using the word "impressive". It's not a technological term. I am talking about how demanding a certain piece of software is to the hardware. If Snake Pass code needs more GPU time than Horizon Zero Dawn code, it is by definition more demanding to the GPU. Porting that code from AMD GPU to Nvidia GPU doesn't change the code to take less GPU time. Snake Pass would still likely need more GPU time than Horizon Zero Dawn on Switch. And I must say that I am talking about this particular piece of code. I am not talking about hypothetical things like: How fast Snake Pass would run if a team of AAA rendering programmers could rewrite the renderer to be more efficient. We will never know. My educated guess is that Snake Pass code is easier to further optimize than Horizon Zero Dawn code. But we can't assume that Xbox One -> Switch port includes any further code changes beyond porting the code. If they didn't have resources to optimize the Xbox One and PS4 versions, it is likely that they don't have resources to optimize the Switch version either. Result = the code still remains very demanding to the GPU.

It is easy to write code that is very demanding to the hardware. The trick is to write less demanding (faster) code, so you can run more of it in the same time budget. That is what makes AAA games look better than most indie games. The end visual result doesn't correlate with the amount of CPU & GPU cycles used to produce the result. When comparing ports, you should always compare how well the same code runs on other platforms. Most of the games you listed aren't looking that good or running that well on Xbox One or PS4 either. You can't expect code like this to become much better after porting it to another platform. I would wait for products from AAA teams to judge the capability of Switch to run AAA code bases.

 

[bunnybug]

I am purely talking about technology. I wasn't using the word "impressive". It's not a technological term. I am talking about how demanding a certain piece of software is to the hardware. If Snake Pass code needs more GPU time than Horizon Zero Dawn code, it is by definition more demanding to the GPU. Porting that code from AMD GPU to Nvidia GPU doesn't change the code to take less GPU time. Snake Pass would still likely need more GPU time than Horizon Zero Dawn on Switch. And I must say that I am talking about this particular piece of code. I am not talking about hypothetical things like: How fast Snake Pass would run if a team of AAA rendering programmers could rewrite the renderer to be more efficient. We will never know. My educated guess is that Snake Pass code is easier to further optimize than Horizon Zero Dawn code. But we can't assume that Xbox One -> Switch port includes any further code changes beyond porting the code. If they didn't have resources to optimize the Xbox One and PS4 versions, it is likely that they don't have resources to optimize the Switch version either. Result = the code still remains very demanding to the GPU.

It is easy to write code that is very demanding to the hardware. The trick is to write less demanding (faster) code, so you can run more of it in the same time budget. That is what makes AAA games look better than most indie games. The end visual result doesn't correlate with the amount of CPU & GPU cycles used to produce the result.

if it takes more gpu time explain why it runs the same resolution as the xbox one version. i'm not getting your logic though, it could be a simple case of developer incompetence, or just want quick port job and happy with the results. by you're logic iam project setsuna runs at 30fps on switch, is more demanding then any 60fps game on switch because the ps4 version is 60fps . or what about the other ports like metal gear rising and resident evil 5 on the shield are those most demanding games on the tegra x1? because the shield can't run them properly.

 

[Rodéric]

A straight port is just recompiling for a new target, it doesn't take its differences into account (or not much) and therefore is not representative of the performance of the hardware.
We have had console ports that run abysmally on high-end PC that are leaps & bounds more powerful (in all metrics) than said console...

 

[sebbbi]

i'm not getting your logic though, it could be a simple case of developer incompetence, or just want quick port job and happy with the results. by you're logic iam project setsuna runs at 30fps on switch, is more demanding then any 60fps game on switch because the ps4 version is 60fps

If software A needs twice the amount of GPU cycles to render a frame compared to software B, then software A is more demanding to the GPU than software B. The visual quality or impressiveness has nothing to do with certain code being technically demanding for the targeted processing architecture. For example a sorting algorithm that requires O(n^2) time is more demanding to the CPU than a sorting algorithm requiring O(nlogn). Both achieve identical result. You could say that only idiots choose the more demanding option, but I have seen lots of O(n^2) sorting algorithms in real game code (for small arrays). It's simpler to program. There's lots of reasons why certain code is technically more demanding than other. Most common reason of shipping unoptimized code is lack of resources. It is easy to talk about incompetence, but most developers aren't incompetent. They just have different priorities and have a tight schedule to ship the product. AAA developers can afford to have dedicated persons that know certain hardware perfectly and are able to optimize code quickly and efficiently. Most smaller developers don't have this luxury, thus their code is often more demanding to run on any hardware (Switch, Xbox One, PS4, PC, doesn't really matter).

 

[bunnybug]

A straight port is just recompiling for a new target, it doesn't take its differences into account (or not much) and therefore is not representative of the performance of the hardware.
We have had console ports that run abysmally on high-end PC that are leaps & bounds more powerful (in all metrics) than said console...

The comment about snake pass being the most demanding game on ps4 gpu, is the silliest thing i heard.

If software A needs twice the amount of GPU cycles to render a frame compared to software B, then software A is more demanding to the GPU than software B. The visual quality or impressiveness has nothing to do with certain code being technically demanding for the targeted processing architecture. For example a sorting algorithm that requires O(n^2) time is more demanding to the CPU than a sorting algorithm requiring O(nlogn). Both achieve identical result. You could say that only idiots choose the more demanding option, but I have seen lots of O(n^2) sorting algorithms in real game code (for small arrays). It's simpler to program. There's lots of reasons why certain code is technically more demanding than other. Most common reason of shipping unoptimized code is lack of resources. It is easy to talk about incompetence, but most developers aren't incompetent. They just have different priorities and have a tight schedule to ship the product. AAA developers can afford to have dedicated persons that know certain hardware perfectly and are able to optimize code quickly and efficiently. Most smaller developers don't have this luxury, thus their code is often more demanding to run on any hardware (Switch, Xbox One, PS4, PC, doesn't really matter).

i really don't see the point of bringing up snake pass, other then the code or what ever you wanna call it, nothing about it is impressive, yes i watched the digital foundry video, it's about the results, and the results are not impressive, it's like me bringing up resident evil 5 and metal gear rising on tegra x1 and saying those are most demanding games on the switch hardware because they run like crap compared to the 360 versions, what's the point? we know the hardware can achieve much better results. same thing with snake pass on ps4.

 

[sebbbi]

i really don't see the point of bringing up snake pass, other then the code or what ever you wanna call it, nothing about it is impressive, yes i watched the digital foundry video, it's about the results, and the results are not impressive, it's like me bringing up resident evil 5 and metal gear rising on tegra x1 and saying those are most demanding games on the switch hardware because they run like crap compared to the 360 versions, what's the point? we know the hardware can achieve much better results. same thing with snake pass on ps4.

Demanding and impressive are two completely different things. That's what I have been trying to explain all along. I am purely talking about technical perspective here. How easy it is for certain hardware to run certain piece of code.

My entire point was that you can't judge the capability of Switch to run AAA games by looking at these games that you call "less impressive". These "less impressive" games have proven to be highly demanding to Xbox One and PS4 hardware by failing to deliver 60 fps and failing to deliver 1080p. There's no reason to believe that demanding unoptimized code like this would be easy to port to a lesser mobile platform and make it run at proportionally higher resolution and/or frame rate. It's dangerous to draw a conclusion that because these games look less impressive it would mean that Switch hardware will have more problems running properly optimized AAA software.

 

[bunnybug]

Demanding and impressive are two completely different things. That's what I have been trying to explain all along.

i understand what you''re saying, but it seems pointless to me, and it's not really more about demanding, it's more about the code just not running well on the hardware. do you agree resident evil 5 and metal gear solid rising are the most demanding games on the tegra x1 even at 720p? both are 720p and can't run at there targeted frame rate. seems like a excuse for every developer that under achieves, sorry but there are standards , if every developer is getting better results, 99% of ps4 games are 1080p and look better with more things going on, once a game runs below 900P and doesn't look impressive well just make a excuse for them, well start doing the same for frame rate as well. new excuse its the most demanding game on the gpu or cpu game that exists

 

[sebbbi]

i understand what you''re saying, but it seems pointless to me, and it's not really more about demanding, it's more about the code just not running well on the hardware. do you agree resident evil 5 and metal gear solid rising are the most demanding games on the tegra x1 even at 720p? both are 720p and can't run at there targeted frame rate. seems like a excuse for every developer that under achieves, sorry but there are standards , if every developer is getting better results, 99% of ps4 games are 1080p and look better with more things going on, once a game runs below 900P and doesn't look impressive well just make a excuse for them, well start doing the for frame rate well, new excuse its the most demanding game on the gpu or cpu game that exists

I am not talking about quality. Of course AAA games that utilize the hardware better and run better optimized code have better perceived quality. I am trying to talk about drawing conclusions between Switch and Xbox One ports. The fact that both Switch and PS4 fail to deliver 1080p even at 30 fps on Snake Pass doesn't indicate that AAA ports behave worse on Switch. It's reasonable to believe that game reaching higher frame rate and higher resolution on PS4 will also reach higher frame rate and higher resolution on Switch. Being impressive or not isn't a factor here. What I am trying to say that Switch showing poor performance on badly optimized code isn't an indication that it will show bad performance on well optimized AAA code. We can't assume that Switch will have more troubles running optimized code than it has with unoptimized code (that also struggles on PS4).

 

[bunnybug]

I am not talking about quality. Of course AAA games that utilize the hardware better and run better optimized code have better perceived quality. I am trying to talk about drawing conclusions between Switch and Xbox One ports. The fact that both Switch and PS4 fail to deliver 1080p even at 30 fps on Snake Pass doesn't indicate that AAA ports behave worse on Switch. It's reasonable to believe that game reaching higher frame rate and higher resolution on PS4 will also reach higher frame rate and higher resolution on Switch. Being impressive or not isn't a factor here. What I am trying to say that Switch showing poor performance on badly optimized code isn't an indication that it will show bad performance on well optimized AAA code. We can't assume that Switch will have more troubles running optimized code than it has with unoptimized code (that also struggles on PS4).

I would assume a game taking advantage ps4 specs would have more trouble on switch, it's only logical. i never only look at one port, i look at all of them, there are 6 ports, and 4 of them seem to have huge downgrades, and these games are not even impressive for ps4. it's also funny that you mention badly optimized code because thats what exactly snake pass is on ps4.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

i understand what you''re saying, but it seems pointless to me, and it's not really more about demanding, it's more about the code just not running well on the hardware. do you agree resident evil 5 and metal gear solid rising are the most demanding games on the tegra x1 even at 720p? both are 720p and can't run at there targeted frame rate etc.

I'm not following your argument and definitely not seeing the relevance in a discussion on Switch's tech. If you just want to rant about Switch's low total power, do that elsewhere. In technical terms, the low wattage hardware is actually driving some relatively significant visuals, which is a testment to the efficiency of the platform. There's lots of meaningful, technical discussion to be had - please don't ruin it with ranting.

 

[sebbbi]

I would assume a game taking advantage ps4 specs would have more trouble on switch, it's only logical. i never only look at one port, i look at all of them, there are 6 ports, and 4 of them seem to have huge downgrades, and these games are not even impressive for ps4. it's also funny that you mention badly optimized code because thats what exactly snake pass is on ps4.

These games aren't visually impressive on either PS4 or Switch because they haven't been optimized properly for either... or any hardware for that matter. In comparison, an well done AAA port would be properly optimized for both PS4 and Switch. It would be better on both platforms. Of course porting well optimized code and then optimizing it well for the another platform is going to take more work than porting generic poorly performing code without specifically optimizing it to any platform. Only future will tell how much time and resources 3rd party AAA devs are willing to spend to support Switch. But I am sure that big brand ports to Switch will be higher quality than some of these smaller game ports you listed above.

 

[bunnybug]

I'm not following your argument and definitely not seeing the relevance in a discussion on Switch's tech. If you just want to rant about Switch's low total power, do that elsewhere. In technical terms, the low wattage hardware is actually driving some relatively significant visuals, which is a testment to the efficiency of the platform. There's lots of meaningful, technical discussion to be had - please don't ruin it with ranting.

the argument all started about snake pass being the most demanding game on ps4 gpu because of it's low resolution. I think switch is powerful for a handheld, i just don't think it can do AAA games justice from what i have seen so far, unless developers put a lot of extra work in it. anyway it's over now, nothing to really discuss.

These games aren't visually impressive on either PS4 or Switch because they haven't been optimized properly for either... or any hardware for that matter. In comparison, an well done AAA port would be properly optimized for both PS4 and Switch. It would be better on both platforms. Of course porting well optimized code and then optimizing it well for the another platform is going to take more work than porting generic poorly performing code without specifically optimizing it to any platform. Only future will tell how much time and resources 3rd party AAA devs are willing to spend to support Switch. But I am sure that big brand ports to Switch will be higher quality than some of these smaller game ports you listed above.

sonic forces is the closest thing so far to AAA, and it will sell best on switch, the results are pretty bad so far based on the e3 demo.

 

[sebbbi]

the argument all started about snake pass being the most demanding game on ps4 gpu because of it's low resolution. I think switch is powerful for a handheld, i just don't think it can do AAA games justice from what i have seen so far, unless developers put a lot of extra work in it. anyway it's over now, nothing to really discuss.

There hasn't been that many AAA ports so far. Zelda port from WiiU is pretty good. Switch has higher resolution (720p vs 900p), slightly improved IQ and runs at slightly higher frame rate (less drops). 900p = 56% more pixels than 720p. 50%+ advantage over last gen is pretty much where people expected Switch to be.

If last gen consoles would still be alive, Switch would get more 3rd party ports. It would be simpler to upgrade last gen version with increased resolution and settings than downgrade current gen version. Unfortunately last gen died very quickly after current gen launch. Xbox One is now the lowest target, and Scorpio and PS4 Pro didn't make the situation any better for Switch. Console devs must already make games that scale from Xbox One to Xbox One X (4x+ difference). Scaling the games down by another 3x to be able to target Switch as well with the same code base and same levels isn't going to be easy.

 

[bunnybug]

There hasn't been that many AAA ports so far. Zelda port from WiiU is pretty good. Switch has higher resolution (720p vs 900p), slightly improved IQ and runs at slightly higher frame rate (less drops). 900p = 56% more pixels than 720p. 50%+ advantage over last gen is pretty much where people expected Switch to be.

If last gen consoles would still be alive, Switch would get more 3rd party ports. It would be simpler to upgrade last gen version with increased resolution and settings than downgrade current gen version. Unfortunately last gen died very quickly after current gen launch. Xbox One is now the lowest target, and Scorpio and PS4 Pro didn't make the situation any better for Switch. Console devs must already make games that scale from Xbox One to Xbox One X (4x+ difference). Scaling the games down by another 3x to be able to target Switch as well with the same code base and same levels isn't going to be easy.

which is what i have been saying, it's too much work, that's why we haven't seen any announcements of the more demanding AAA games. a few developers that wanted to support nintendo next console said this isn't gonna work after seeing the specs, like titan fall 2 developer.

 

[Rootax]

And don't forget they need to target the "on the go" mode too for the Switch, not only the docked one.

 

[Goodtwin]

@sebbbi

Really nice posting. You could string those post together and it would be a nice article on the topic. Seeing a knowledgeable person break it down into layman terms is very nice for someone like me. Poorly optimized code doesn't see a benefit on Switch compared to other platforms, and highly optimized code would see a benefit just like on other platforms. Not sure why anyone would ague with you on the topic.