What genre will benefit most from next-gen? (SSD, better GPU/CPU, etc)

Omnistalgic · Jan 12, 2020

I think the racing genre should greatly benefit from no loading and may even contribute to a faster sense of speed. I play GTS off and on and always bummed about how slow 35-65 mph feel in sim racers. Once u get into the race cars the sense of speed is pretty good but I'm hoping this genre improves on PS5.

what genre do you think will get the most dramatic benefits this year on new hardware?

Theswweet · Jan 12, 2020

Inarguably open-world. The CPU boost + SSD alone will help things a bunch.

Deleted member 4970 · Jan 12, 2020

instance based games like monster hunter world and destiny where you're constantly loading into new areas

modiz · Jan 12, 2020

Fighting games will be the first to gain the benefit out of it, assuming all players use an SSD means you can start a match immediately, without any loading screens, which is huge for the type of game

bell_hooks · Jan 12, 2020

Strategy games. Stronger CPU will make simulation easier and SSD will vastly improve load times. Games like XCOM run horribly on PS4. Also not a genre but Hitman needs both od these resources.

Deleted member 8196 · Jan 12, 2020

Literally any Multiplayer and open world game.

texhnolyze · Jan 12, 2020

Open world games, no contest.

It'll be the generation where open world truly shines.

MickZan · Jan 12, 2020

Open world RPGs. Really excited for the possibility of radiant world's.

Ganado · Jan 12, 2020

Karspankey said:
instance based games like monster hunter world and destiny where you're constantly loading into new areas

I don't think Destiny 2 will be that much faster on next-gen. I don't know how bad it is on XBO or PS4 but it still takes some time to load and connect on PC.

Dr Pears · Jan 12, 2020

With a much beefier CPU, a lot of games can have better physics and AI.

Tovarisc · Jan 12, 2020

Karspankey said:
instance based games like monster hunter world and destiny where you're constantly loading into new areas

modiz said:
Fighting games will be the first to gain the benefit out of it, assuming all players use an SSD means you can start a match immediately, without any loading screens, which is huge for the type of game

SSD's don't make Internet latency free and ultimate speed.

Dr Pears said:
With a much beefier CPU, a lot of games can have better physics and AI.

"Better AI" is such weird thing when you consider that many devs have talked about how problem with game AI design is fairness over difficulty. It isn't hard to make difficult AI, but it's challenge to make fair one.

Strings · Jan 12, 2020

Open-world titles the most, but exciting to have faster fighting game matches and (hopefully) seamless transitions into JRPG battles across the board.

Virtua Sanus · Jan 12, 2020

If fighting game developers are smart I really strongly believe that we could enter a new golden era for the genre with proper rollback implementation, crossplay, better load times between matches, constant longform support from devs and easier connectivity for fans in streaming and tournament scenes. I am only really expecting Riot to handle this all correctly though, unfortunately.

Open world, shared communities like Destiny will be super fascinating to see going into next gen but I do not think many developers will be able to harness this type of potential until PlayStation 6's era unfortunately.

Nuclear Muffin · Jan 12, 2020

None.

All of the loading time improvements will be wasted on pumping more graphics into each scene and the games will all remain exactly the same with slightly prettier graphics.

Menchin · Jan 12, 2020

Open world and instance-based multiplayer titles

Deleted member 4970 · Jan 12, 2020

Ganado said:
I don't think Destiny 2 will be that much faster on next-gen. I don't know how bad it is on XBO or PS4 but it still takes some time to load and connect on PC.

Destiny 2 on PC with SSDs is a decent bit faster than on console! I've tried both! Can't find a video demonstrating this, unfortunately.

Tovarisc said:
SSD's don't make Internet latency free and ultimate speed.

Of course, but they certainly make a difference

Asbsand · Jan 12, 2020

Soulsborne and games where dying is intended to be part of the experience. No more waiting for 1 minute per death. No particular need for a screen reminding you that you're dead. Just respawn; retry.

modiz · Jan 12, 2020

Nuclear Muffin said:
None.

All of the loading time improvements will be wasted on pumping more graphics into each scene and the games will all remain exactly the same with slightly prettier graphics.

It doesnt really work like that. The SSD cant load more than what the memory can take, so at worst you will load the full memory, which is rumored to be 16GB.

Deleted member 46489 · Jan 12, 2020

Asbsand said:
Soulsborne and games where dying is intended to be part of the experience. No more waiting for 1 minute per death. No particular need for a screen reminding you that you're dead. Just respawn; retry.

Oh dude, I totally didn't think of that. That's gonna be such a relief.

Roytheone · Jan 12, 2020

Asbsand said:
Soulsborne and games where dying is intended to be part of the experience. No more waiting for 1 minute per death. No particular need for a screen reminding you that you're dead. Just respawn; retry.

Playing sekiro on my PC with an SSD after bloodborne on the PS4 (even post loading time patch) was such a huge improvement.

Tovarisc · Jan 12, 2020

modiz said:
It doesnt really work like that. The SSD cant load more than what the memory can take, so at worst you will load the full memory, which is rumored to be 16GB.

So 12 - 13 GB unified memory for the game use from which X GB will be used by GPU as VRAM because OS will again take several GB right off the bat.

PLASTICA-MAN · Jan 12, 2020

You won't believe me OP but all types of games.

defaltoption · Jan 12, 2020

Open world rpgs the most but course everything will be better by miles

tokkun · Jan 12, 2020

modiz said:
It doesnt really work like that. The SSD cant load more than what the memory can take, so at worst you will load the full memory, which is rumored to be 16GB.

It sounds like you are assuming that main memory can only hold unmodified data read directly from disk. As soon as you allow the CPU to modify the data, then this reasoning falls apart.

Dr Pears · Jan 12, 2020

Tovarisc said:
"Better AI" is such weird thing when you consider that many devs have talked about how problem with game AI design is fairness over difficulty. It isn't hard to make difficult AI, but it's challenge to make fair one.

Well maybe not better AI, but increase the amount of AI on screen.

Days Gone's massive hordes can cause performance issues on PS4. With a beefier CPU, not only can u render more characters on screen with better AI, but you can program each individual AI to do more.

Imagine Days Gone with bigger, smarter hordes, with stable performance.

Asbsand · Jan 12, 2020

snowhite said:
Oh dude, I totally didn't think of that. That's gonna be such a relief.

Also, Mass Effect games like Witcher and uh... Mass Effect where you sometimes need to wait for it to stream the next room and you're waiting for a painfully long door to load.

In Mass Effect 3 on a PlayStation 3 you have about 40 second load screens everywhere, between going to the Citadel (a main hub), your ship (another hub) and a mission, and they put in all kinds of pre-rendered cutscene animations to mask it very poorly. On pc you never get to see those animations, you just get a brief second of a shot of a ship in flight and it jumpcuts back to the gameplay. They could've made the entire map seamless on a modern pc if they had that hardware to begin with.

I know this is more of a two-generational jump but that's the stuff we're looking at with load times. You can have games that would've required hundreds of "squeeze-throughs" and annoying roadblock asset-load-tricks completely removed and just make a seamless game that computes fast enough to load everything at a normal rate.

A huuuge issue for PlayStation 4 games this gen, and especially games like Witcher 3, Mass Effect Andromeda and Fallen Order has been how they need to genuinely freeze-frame in order to load fast enough, like the game itself is bottlenecked by the slow loads. I don't expect that to go away next gen, but it will likely be reduced a lot and optimization will probably be more efficient than ever.

Decarb · Jan 12, 2020

Games like Destiny where everyone can load in almost instantly and at the same time. Unlike now when even if your own game is installed on fast SSD, you have to wait for that one potato with spinning drive to load in before activity starts.

Raide · Jan 12, 2020

Open world games, so I will they can fill them full if interesting interaction and maybe even interesting physics etc.

Zonnes · Jan 12, 2020

~~Sports games, so they can release the same game every year all over again.~~ Open world games, they can load new areas faster and add more "things" into the currently loaded area like animations and interactions

modiz · Jan 12, 2020

tokkun said:
It sounds like you are assuming that main memory can only hold unmodified data read directly from disk. As soon as you allow the CPU to modify the data, then this reasoning falls apart.

I am not an expert on this but wouldnt this generally take much less work than the process of loading assets?

Deleted member 135 · Jan 12, 2020

A Flash open world game will finally be possible with his speeds.

Green Yoshi · Jan 12, 2020

Real-time strategy games.

Clive · Jan 12, 2020

Not a genre per se but VR in general needs a beefier CPU since the games absolutely require a high framerate. Loading times are also more jarring in VR than on flat screen.

Soap · Jan 12, 2020

Any games with excessive load times will benefit first, but also the better cpu should increase the number of NPC's that can be simulated in a more accurate way. I'm other words expect even more open worlds.

Joris-truly · Jan 12, 2020

Raphael Colantonio on wishful thinking with every next generation

"When a game is successful, it’s a miracle": Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio opens new studio and vows to fight industry trends

Raphael Colantonio is one of the few developers around today still fighting the good fight for the immersive sim.

www.vg247.com

Quote:

Because all of the extra CPU power, all of the better everything power, actually goes somehow in the graphics. I've noticed a funny thing between Dishonored 1 and Dishonored 2 – we had these conversations where… well, actually, no, that was between, sorry, Dishonored 1 and Prey. It was one generation. I remember this conversation with the lead programmer. 'So how many characters can I have on screen in a fight?' 'Uh, maybe five or six.' That was for Dishonored. That was kind of disappointing, but okay, we're going to deal with it. So you get a character, and you have about, whatever, six, eight thousand polygons on the character, or more, I can't remember.

And then you find yourself three or four years later, and same meeting, same conversation, 'How many characters can I have, now that we have this new hardware?' 'I don't know, five or six.' And like, 'what's the point?'

"moar faster loads, moar better AI, Moar physics" sounds like easy sideline yelling. I'm way more interested in what can be achieved on the world simulation end due to SSD's as a baseline. Think of more persistent worlds with more AI interplay. More Systemic consequences because a lot of your past actions in the world can be quickly stored and loaded.

Omnistalgic · Jan 12, 2020

modiz said:
Fighting games will be the first to gain the benefit out of it, assuming all players use an SSD means you can start a match immediately, without any loading screens, which is huge for the type of game

This is the dream yea, but I don't see it affected the gameplay much. Maybe some cool round transitions??

tokkun · Jan 12, 2020

modiz said:
I am not an expert on this but wouldnt this generally take much less work than the process of loading assets?

I'm not sure I understand your question. The main point I was trying to make is that you cannot assume that the size of main memory acts as an upper bound on the amount of data that the CPU loads from disk.

Here's an analogy: When you build a house, the total volume of all the materials you bring in during construction could exceed the volume of the house you get at the end. Why is that? Well, some things are tools used to do the construction but not part of the final structure. Some raw materials only get partially used and portions are thrown away. Sometimes you combine two materials together and get something that takes up less space than the constituents.

Something similar can happen when constructing a scene in a game. The raw materials are your models, textures, shaders, etc. as they are stored on disk. But as you build the scene you may only use part of an asset, you may combine assets, transform them, and so forth. In this way, it is possible that you end up reading more data from disk than the size of the final scene in memory. It is also possible that you load less data from disk than the size in memory due to things like compression. But the overall point is that there is not necessarily a 1:1 relationship between the two. You can imagine that as games allow more dynamism in their scenes (e.g. deformable objects, procedural terrain generation, ray tracing) that the relationship becomes more disconnected.

modiz · Jan 12, 2020

tokkun said:
I'm not sure I understand your question. The main point I was trying to make is that you cannot assume that the size of main memory acts as an upper bound on the amount of data that the CPU loads from disk.

Here's an analogy: When you build a house, the total volume of all the materials you bring in during construction could exceed the volume of the house you get at the end. Why is that? Well, some things are tools used to do the construction but not part of the final structure. Some raw materials only get partially used and portions are thrown away. Sometimes you combine two materials together and get something that takes up less space than the constituents.

Something similar can happen when constructing a scene in a game. The raw materials are your models, textures, shaders, etc. as they are stored on disk. But as you build the scene you may only use part of an asset, you may combine assets, transform them, and so forth. In this way, it is possible that you end up reading more data from disk than the size of the final scene in memory. It is also possible that you load less data from disk than the size in memory due to things like compression. But the overall point is that there is not necessarily a 1:1 relationship between the two. You can imagine that as games allow more dynamism in their scenes (e.g. deformable objects, procedural terrain generation, ray tracing) that the relationship becomes more disconnected.

my point is the figure i was trying to throw (memory size/SSD speed) should still work within a rather small margin of error as the majority of the time in the loading screen is just to load the assets, placing and modifying them shouldnt take as long. i dont think you will see the SSD taking 5 seconds to load all the assets it needs to but the CPU takes 20 seconds to modify the data.

JahIthBer · Jan 12, 2020

Nuclear Muffin said:
None.

All of the loading time improvements will be wasted on pumping more graphics into each scene and the games will all remain exactly the same with slightly prettier graphics.

This probably has the most truth to it lol, loading screens will be shorter but i think most devs will go for better visuals again.

Deleted member 59519 · Jan 12, 2020

I'm going to say sports games, maybe NBA in particular. They could actually look photo-realistic and play better with enhanced AI and physics.

harz-marz · Jan 12, 2020

Nuclear Muffin said:
None.

All of the loading time improvements will be wasted on pumping more graphics into each scene and the games will all remain exactly the same with slightly prettier graphics.

I bet you're great fun at a party lol

KernelC · Jan 12, 2020

I think we will see less open world games, although traversal will be seamless in games, huge open world games will be severely scaled back

Callibretto · Jan 12, 2020

fighting game and arcade racing game I guess. when I saw the leaked Spider-Man PS5 demo, all I can think of is I want a new Wipeout with this speed

tokkun · Jan 12, 2020

modiz said:
my point is the figure i was trying to throw (memory size/SSD speed) should still work within a rather small margin of error as the majority of the time in the loading screen is just to load the assets, placing and modifying them shouldnt take as long. i dont think you will see the SSD taking 5 seconds to load all the assets it needs to but the CPU takes 20 seconds to modify the data.

That is not the reality of the way things work on PC where you can buy an NVME today.

Here are some benchmarks of game load times comparing HDD, traditional SSD, and NVME drives:

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...-23-why-ssds-are-essential-for-pc-gaming-7005

The NVME drives have 5-6X higher sequential throughput than SSD. 25-35X higher than HDD.

However the NVME drive only reduced load times by 20% compared the SSD and 50% for the HDD; a far cry from what you would predict if you assumed that they were bottlenecked by sequential read times. You will also note that despite the NVME drives having 3 GB/s read speeds, the average load time is still 30 seconds. I probably don't need to tell you that these games are not using 90 GB of RAM. So clearly the (memory size / SSD speed) calculation is not useful in the slightest.

Now, having said that, I am hopeful that this can improve on the next-gen consoles. If every system has an NVME, it should lead to better optimization for them at the both OS and game level. But we will have to wait and see how successful they are.

exodus · Jan 12, 2020

The main thing we're going to see is the removal of the CPU bottleneck. The new CPUs are not going to be a limiting factor, which means titles can now aim for 60 fps with nothing more than a resolution compromise.

Tovarisc · Jan 12, 2020

exodus said:
The main thing we're going to see is the removal of the CPU bottleneck. The new CPUs are not going to be a limiting factor, which means titles can now aim for 60 fps with nothing more than a resolution compromise.

You must be new to this gaming thing if you think that 60 FPS will become norm in console space.

exodus · Jan 12, 2020

Tovarisc said:
You must be new to this gaming thing if you think that 60 FPS will become norm in console space.

I'm optimistic.

I don't think we'll be seeing 4K60, but I think we'll be seeing a lot of performance modes that can safely target 60 fps. The main reason current performance modes fluctuate so much is that the CPU is a major bottleneck and ends up limiting the GPUs potential. We're going back to being majorly GPU bounded. Unless titles start aiming for 1080/30 for some reason (could be the case with ray tracing), there should be plenty resolution overhead to lower the resolution dynamically to adjust for a 60 fps target.

This is the first time a console is releasing with a CPU comparable to high end desktop CPUs (ignoring the Cell, but that was a mess for other reasons). CPUs have far outpaced modern game engines at this point, which was not always the case. I don't think game engines are going to push these CPUs hard at all any time soon.

Bad_Boy · Jan 12, 2020

Fighting games with instant play right after you select your character would be huge.

Imagine backing out of a fight, selecting a new character and playing again in less than 5seconds.

Evodelu · Jan 12, 2020

Open world games with sprawling cities. Imagine having a village with 100+ fairly detailed NPCs in one area that you can interact with.

bionic77 · Jan 12, 2020

Outside of improvements on fine graphical detail I wonder if we are beyond the point where hardware is limiting games.

If something is improved I hope it is physics. Load times seem like they should improve but I don't know what genre that helps. Load times always suck and the less they are the better.

What genre will benefit most from next-gen? (SSD, better GPU/CPU, etc)

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