I don't see a reason considering is from someone who actually works with game development.
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Remedy Technical Producer on Xbox Series S: "As a consumer, I love this! As a Technical Producer, I see trouble!"
- Thread starter Lant_War
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Let me call my friend, the Sony warrior mod, so that he can pin it at the top of the forum.
Is that what you meant right?
I'm a software engineer, but take this with a grain of salt.
Here's the thing, I understand the issues with supporting next gen and last gen at the same time. Different architectures require different dev kits, and the work is increased, etc. You're building multiple binaries with drastically different tools and processes. In this case though, The Series S and Series X have identical dev kits and architectures, just different performance levels. Nobody complains when you make a game that runs on PC with a billion possible configurations, and I don't expect that supporting the Series S and Series X will be any more difficult than supporting, for example, the PS4 and PS4 Pro or Xbox One X and Xbox One at the same time.
Here's the thing, I understand the issues with supporting next gen and last gen at the same time. Different architectures require different dev kits, and the work is increased, etc. You're building multiple binaries with drastically different tools and processes. In this case though, The Series S and Series X have identical dev kits and architectures, just different performance levels. Nobody complains when you make a game that runs on PC with a billion possible configurations, and I don't expect that supporting the Series S and Series X will be any more difficult than supporting, for example, the PS4 and PS4 Pro or Xbox One X and Xbox One at the same time.
niceYeah, in the Xbox article today they posted this:
"In speaking to game developers, we identified the areas that are most difficult to scale effectively, including the CPU and I/O, and made it easy to include Xbox Series S for developers who are targeting their experiences for Xbox Series X."
Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X Launch November 10, Starting at $24.99 a Month with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and EA Play - Xbox Wire
Now more than ever, gaming plays an important role in our lives. As one of the greatest forms of creative expression, gaming sparks in our imagination and connects us to new worlds, stories, and our friends. On November 10, a new generation of console gaming begins. That’s when our vision...news.xbox.com
A console that will undoubtedly outsell the X and lead to even more game sales. Without the S I wouldn't be buying an Xbox, and I assume that is going to be true for many other people. So hopefully the headache it causes is somewhat alleviated by all the extra profits.
PCs are not expected to have curated settings for highly tuned performance. Some of the onus is on the consumer to dial in the settings how they would like. There is an expectation on consoles of very even performance, and thus the developer must carefully balance the precision of many things. This also presents a performance floor that limits the range on the high end. If a developer has an idea for a fully path traced game at 1080p on XSX where they feel the low resolution would be justified by the rich visuals, they might change their mind if it means they have to run at ~620p on XSS. Somewhat ironically, I would expect the existence of the XSS to mean more native 4k games on XSX, as devs might be dissuaded from ramping up other graphically demanding areas as it might drop the resolution too far on the XSS.
No one is writing off, but this comment coming from a developer that made poor PS4 and Xbox One versions of Control is iffy.
Having a Series S means just more work, and they are already used to; Remedy released Control on PS4, PS4 Pro, Xbox One, Xbox One X and PC, this wasn't troublesome?
On PC we mostly brute force through unoptimized games or go through setting by settings to achieve the fps we want. Sometimes you get games like Doom Eternal run well across the board and then you have Avengers, Control, Horizon as recently that clearly needed a lot more time so yes it's not as simple a task.
Still waiting for those One X esclusives everyone was sure about in 2017.
I assume more info would probably be coming out in the near future about how devs feels about it?
not the same , you have to get some stable performance on console. on PC...you get whateber your hardware can get
Was the worry that it would hold them back or that it was just extra work? I mean, it makes sense for Remedy cause they can't optimize for shit and the extra work load I could see bugging them.
Remedy technical producer... they were probably involved with the worst game I've ever played on PS4 (Control) so I can see lots of trouble for them trying to optimise any game on any system.
Lol yeah I do remember, is it safe to say devs are still worried about Series S or are they more okay now they've got their hands on it and can actually work with it?
Finally a believable take on this.
Especially from a games producer side. Does the existence of XSS increase your audience, or does it shift users away from XSX or PS5 and help Microsoft's bottom line?
Especially from a games producer side. Does the existence of XSS increase your audience, or does it shift users away from XSX or PS5 and help Microsoft's bottom line?
Is it a matter of holding back development or just being more optimization work? This comment reads like the latter (which is not huge), if it's the former, that's a problem.
Yeah they do and they if their testing right do it on a big set of different pc builds to make sure it works.
I remember, and Digital Foundry said they were hearing the same things as well. Has anything changed?
pepperidge farms Remembers lol. and yeah its natural to worry about it.
not true. There are Ram bandwidth differences, slight CPU differences and the GPU all that has to take time to optimize. its not just simply click a button and change resolution.
Oh right, not like the *checks notes* One X and One S or the Pro and Base PS4 versions they had to support this gen.
Nope, now it's a problem.
Nope, now it's a problem.
How is that iffy? They made a technical showstopper on Pc and had trouble running it on consoles, now they're worried about even more, weaker consoles. if anything, this is the exact kind of dev whose opinion matters most.
Can someone please tell the Remedy Technical Producer that they are absolutely wrong and that the Series S will not make anything harder for developers and will not hold the Series X back?
/s
/s
That's really impossible. The GPUs of the Series X and the Series S are not that similar to just drop a few pixels and have it working. Different CUs, speed, memory, etc. More work has to be done.
Not hard probably, but really, it's not automatic or anything.
Oh...so is it now that the Series X is a mid gen refresh, just at launch?
This is getting more n more interesting the closer we get to launch.
I definitely wouldn't want to play the next Remedy game on a Series S, based on how their last game played on my PS4.
Remedy is always pushing boundaries so I imagine the series S versions will look like smeared ass. The xbo versions of quantum break and control had low pixel counts and shoddy performance (particularly control, QB at least performed okish)
that other thread was someone referring to unnamed devs, and maybe another with someone on reddit saying they were a dev, but this one is a official account about it.
The thing is the Series X isn't supposed to be the Xbox One X redux, right? Like there is no mandate from MS that every game has to run on 4K on Series X, is there? What happens if a dev optimizes like crazy for Series X and, in doing so, decides that it's best to not use 4K native resolution but 1440p with upscaling on Series X. The Series S port becomes that much more difficult because you can't just drop the resolution to match the Series X version but now have to make more nuanced decisions.
Yes, but every console and platform has it's own quirks. There's overall optimization you can do to improve performance in general, but each console is going to have it's own headaches. 2 Xbox SKUs == 2 sets of headaches. It also creates a larger set of hurdles to jump for release on the platform as you now either need ONE low-spec version, or two versions, one for each X-Box. A good example of this is that back in ye olden we had an issue where overlapping colliders were a surprisingly expensive issue on PS4, but not on XBox or PC.
It just complicates the picture.
Eh, I don't think that this can still be argued in a post Digital Foundry world. Many console games suffer from inconsistent or outright bad performance.
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