There is a definite shift in SIE strategy when it comes to ports. I expect within the next 3 years you'll see much more ports and at a sooner interval. I could be wrong but that's how I'm reading the business
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Tom Warren: Developers are saying CPU and SSD are key to next gen, not teraflops, Lockhart won't hold back games
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Imo, they'll first port the big PS4 games and then move on to next gen games when more PCs can catch up with the PS5
That'd still be completely different vs necessarily accommodating a given spec from the get-go.
I don't think Guerilla will be actively concerning themselves with anything other than PS5 as a target. That doesn't mean ports won't arrive later for hardware that can accommodate the games.
By contrast, other publishers are, up-front, actively concerning themselves with multiple specs. That's where lower specced targets affect development, not an after-the-fact release, like Horizon for PC was. There is nothing to suggest Sony is shifting to consideration of multiple platforms up-front, vs after-the-fact porting.
Sony 1st party will develop games with PS5 as their base, period. If a PC can handle that game, they can port it if they want.
Agreed. This is a really good post I hope many will read and comprehend. It's only the exclusives that can truly take full advantage of the system's potential. MS' approach with Series S, X, PC puts them in a position where they cannot fully leverage the full power of the Series X as they have to design around the limitations of lockhart and any potential lower spec PCs. There's no way around that.
With Sony only having to worry about 1 sku, they can leverage that to design games with a very high default spec. It should be interesting to see how these exclusives play out.
I could see this happening as well. But the industry as a whole is moving ever closer to platform agnosticism so I can see Sony moving there eventually.
God some people expecting 'more and more' PS4 exclusive games being ported to PCs, but forget that both of those games are made in Guerrilla Studio's Decima Engine and that is why they are ported. It is a situation like this-> 'Gee there's costs already spent on porting one game on the engine, so why shouldn't we NOT spend another dollar to make MANY dollars' They would leave money on the table if they didn't. That doesn't mean other PS4 games are going to be ported to PC. PS5 games being ported isn't even on the table, there is yet no game to come out on PS5 to begin with and there is NO precedent at all for ppl to think in a stupid logic like "moar and moar PS games are going to come to PC wah wah no reason to buy a console waaaahhh" that is plain stupidity
Who cares. In game has never looked as good as cinematics nor should it. If the actual hardware is pushing those visuals, thats good enough for me.
Well we all believe Jason to have credible sources and he says this is only the beginning so that's what a lot of people are going off
Smart Delivery. Lockhart games won't need 4k assets so it won't be downloaded.
PCs are going to be more powerful than both the PS5 and Xbox within a year or two of them launching so I'm struggling to figure out how a PS5 will be able to do something a PC can't but anyways.
Every console cycle people fall for the magic box hype and I would have thought people would realize that these consoles are basically just PCs and aren't going to be able to do anything that the PC can't do.
Every console cycle people fall for the magic box hype and I would have thought people would realize that these consoles are basically just PCs and aren't going to be able to do anything that the PC can't do.
It's not that they won't be able to, it's that when developing a game for PC you have to develop for the lowest common denominator and for the time being that means no - slow SSDs as well.
PCs will outperform these consoles in less than that. 3000 series this year Ryzen 4 likely less than a year, SSDs is the only thing that might take some time but 980 pro is end of year I believe. Basically anything these consoles can do a pc can do better (at a cost). This is why I game mostly on console, price to performance is way better (minus 2013 launches)
it's already common to see SSD in the recommended specs for pc games it'll be a minimum spec within a year or two imo
Sure. But you're assuming that many people are able to buy a PC that will be able to handle the games.
SSD is slowly becoming the norm and SSD game design isn't going to fundamentally alter how games are made like some seem to think but the games will speak for themselves
There's a big difference with porting a game designed around a console to pc than developing a game for both console and pc in mind.
We literally had Matt here saying how SSD will change to game design. Hell, we're literally in a thread of devs saying that.
We were there with Cerny's PS5 talk. The problem is that that awesome PS5 SSD that doesn't currently have an equal needs expandable storage of the same speed. That expandable storage is going to come in the form of an off the shelf PC SSD. That doesn't mean that the consoles aren't great but there is no way that consoles get to keep the power crown when they are using PC components and architecture. On top of that consoles aren't constantly evolving and updating at the pace that PC is
Well, exactly. Porting to PC, particularly after the fact, doesn't necessarily mean that process affected your performance targets for the game or how you used the console, if the PCs your targeting are a superset of the console. And there will be plenty such PCs over time if not already (... an excess of RAM could serve much the same purpose, in a different way, that SSD throughput serves, for example).
The implication here, I think, is that because Horizon is coming to PC, Sony will start targeting a wide range of PC spec, such that it compromises the extent to which they can take advantage of the PS5.
Who knows, maybe that could turn out to be the case - but Horizon being on PC doesn't indicate that. From the info we have now, it's like putting 2+2 together and coming to 5. Like saying - I don't know - that Cyberpunk's development will have been (negatively) affected by the thought of a possible Switch port later. Big leaps of logic required to believe that, from the info we have right now, especially with Sony repeatedly echoing, and recently too, that it still very much 'believes' in the benefit to game development of generational resets and leaving legacy hardware behind.
You're just artificially assuming that MS won't set a minimum PC spec requirement that includes an SSD. They can do that any time. And adding Lockhart changes nothing as far as target spec since it has the same SSD.
There is no incentive for Sony to compromise the design of their big releases for PC specs. On the other hand, there are a sizable amount of PC games who should be able to run PS5 spec games over the next few years, ssd and all. No chance big games would be day and date, but a couple of years down the line, they can still get sales. I expect Horizon to sell pretty well on PC. It will look awesome with PC upgrades and it is a great game. I think the approach of releasing certain games - not all - a couple of years down the line make sense.
No, it's not. See above. Lockhart and XSX are the same minimum spec in terms of SSD and CPU, and MS decides what the minimum PC spec is for any given game. There's nothing "holding them back" here.
I am not artificially assuming that. Even if they require an SSD it needs to also be graded at the speeds of the the XSX/XSS in order for games to be designed around that given spec. Same goes for RT.
It won't be at least a year given what they've said anyway, since their studios will be working on cross-generation games releasing for that first year or so with no next-gen exclusives from them until later. MS's minimum spec is whatever the PC minimum spec is, then Lockhart, then XSX. There are 3 tiers of specs there, no ways around it.
Of course they will. It's a fundamental principle in business and in software development. When you develop something you have to develop it to reach to largest audience possible. It's a balancing act of course, but if 40% of the PC population (not real number) is using a HDD you are damn straight gonna develop the game to work for that audience as well. That's not to say that there won't be outliers but for a little while at least third parties are going to develop their PC games to work for as many of their fans as possible.
Getting The Flash in a Marvel game might be difficult. 😜
I would love a Flash or Superman game though.
Yeah, that's not happening.
For MS yes, we certainly aren't seeing that from Sony and Nintendo. 'One console future' has been talked about for decades, it won't happen.
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It is a joke, but it wasn't meant to be one. For some seeing will have to believing.
We just had COD requiring DX12 and Windows 10 with update 1909 just a few months ago. We had multiple games in the past locking the whole batch of gamers out of their games due to GPU or Directx requirements, the transition is always forced by high end games.
The way some ppl post, you would think they know this.
Idontbelieveyou.gif
Mind you...this was devs talking about Series X.
User Banned (1 week): Antagonizing other members, history of similar behavior
If MS had a faster SSD he would be hyping it to all heaven.
Don't waste your time.
EDIT: I see he's changed his avatar from the Halo ring.
I don't think they'd do that, no. They did the same thing with Halo at the beginning of this generation with it being cross gen IIRC.
Lockhart. A larger TF number doesn't mean everything. Lockhart will be the new architecture, so it's actually a bit more powerful. Plus, it has the SSD, More RAM, and a much better CPU. My guess is lockhart will have a better frame rate and visuals.
The part I'm wondering about is how they'll position it. Is lockhart supposed to be a 1080p box? It would be strange, but we could end up with a weird mix like the X being a lot worse technically but in a higher resolution. Time will tell.
Dude in 2018 windows 10 adoption was at like 700 million devices. DX12 launched in 2015, it took years for devs to start requiring it. Why do you think most AAA third party games are going to be cross platform for a little while, when they could have made them exclusives? It's a business decision. Eventually SSDs are going to be the norm but it takes some time. Could be 1, 2, 3 years but yeah eventually you will see it.
Silver Surfer
I bring great shame to my family. Was just trying to think of someone fast and that was the first thing on my mind.
You can buy SSDs for like 10 years now, all games and the operating systems run way better on them, some games practically required them for years to stay sane like Path of Exile. Its not a new technology and most PC gamers playing higher end games have already adopted them.
You're obviously very knowledgeable on these matters, but wouldn't it be best to just wait the assumed couple weeks for Sony and MS to show the games and what the consoles are capable of before making these kind of statements?
We have absolutely no idea what's the fastest useful ssd in this situation and have no reason to assume that PS5 doesn't have clear benefits with faster ssd. There's still a 100% increase over XSX which on paper is really massive if you think about it, when at the same time some people are arguing that XSX's 18% increase in GPU will be significant.
They've probably tested these specs to death and it's very unlikely that there's something included just for bragging rights.
Good postThis should be obvious to anyone.
Graphics cards make things shiny. CPU affects performance.
Now of course it's more nuanced than that, but generally it's a lot easier to turn down the visual quality/resolution to improve performance than optimize for a slower CPU.
For example:
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided on an old i5-2500K, with an ~2.5 TFLOP GTX 960:
This scene (the most CPU-intense one I have found in the game) is running at ~43 FPS with only 60% GPU utilization, because the CPU is maxed-out at 100% and holding it back.
Let's upgrade the GPU to an ~6.5 TFLOP GTX 1070:
Oh, it's the exact same 43.7 FPS; but since the GPU is faster it's only running at 33% utilization now.
We can of course do more with a faster GPU: increasing the resolution and graphical fidelity:
We get the same ~43 FPS, but now the GPU is at 99% utilization and it looks a lot better.
No matter how much you turn down the graphical settings or increase the performance of the GPU, it won't run any faster because the CPU is the limiting factor here.
Upgrade the CPU from that old i5-2500K to a Ryzen 1700X and performance in the above scene now reaches 92 FPS instead of 43 FPS:
But we are still limited by our CPU, as the GPU utilization is still only reaching 56%.
With a fast enough CPU, that scene could theoretically be running at 164 FPS on the GTX 1070 - though I'd prefer to tune it for ~90 FPS with better graphics.
In another set of tests, if we have the CPU running at 4.5 GHz, it runs at 50 FPS:
If we roughly halve the CPU clockspeed to 2.3 GHz, it now runs at 26 FPS:
Performance in this test scales almost linearly with CPU performance, since we are not limited by our GPU.
PS5 GPU is 20% slower than XSX? You can just drop the resolution by 20% to make up for it.
CPU performance is what matters more.
4K is 4x the resolution of 1080p.
The performance difference is 3x.
Why would the 12TF system be holding back the 4TF system?
If all else was equal, that would actually make Lockhart more powerful relative to the output resolution, since it is 1/3 the power for 1/4 the resolution.
I'm quite sure that it will be scaled back in other ways, but if we're purely comparing 4TF to 12TF, I don't see the issue. You could run games at 1200p and still have a slight performance advantage.
Not saying it's new, it's about adoption. Price for SSDs were very expensive for a long time. They are only just starting to get really cheap. Eventually they will be the standard, I hope sooner rather than later. My only point is that most devs are going to make games that have the potential that sells as much as possible. That means you have to develop for HDDs for the time being. I'm willing to bet 2 years at least before games require SSDs.
Thanks current gen consoles for that, not PCs. PC gamers adapt as they always had. Its so easy right now, compares to the hardware rush in 90s and 00s.
Seriously 1tb M2 drive cost is the same as two new games, people will adapt if they will have too.
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And I don't blame you. It's not easy to describe how it will affect. But you can expect more variety in a scene, from sound effects to assets, since not everything will be needed to be in RAM.
I guess all the developers who have come to this forum and told us how SSDs will change game design are...what, full of bologna?
You're misunderstanding what the post i was replying to was talking about. Im aware of the specs and how it comes together and am a follower of cpu/gpu tech.
it's not about lockheart vs series x holding back. He was talking about the low bar that games are designed around and how it can influence the design decisions being made in development.
the more skus your game is to run on, the more you'll have to factor that in with designing the world. Which is why a ps5 exclusive has a higher low bar than a lockhart/seriesx/pc to design from. That's the point he was trying to make. It's strictly about first party exclusives being able to take full power of the system to the max. Leveraging all the power available to the max.
multiplatform games are where we would see limitations in design put in place.
They won't have to though, at least not in the beginning. Once the adoption rate gets to a certain point then devs are going to start putting it in required specs. I'll give you an example if you've ever developed for android using android studios one of the first decisions you want to make is what version of android to develop your app for. Android Studio is handy when making this decision because it will show you the adoption rate for each version. Most devs will choose to develop for the version with the most adoption. As the years go by the newer version start becoming the mostly used, and the newest version is rarely developed for at least initially.
I do think that you are right that consoles with SSDs will ramp up adoption rates, but book mark this post if you want, I just don't see that happening this year or maybe even the next year. I think we will see it in maybe end of 2021 maybe 2022.