The PS5 and Xbox 2 thread - it's happening

[tritosine2k]

I think global illumination is pretty cool, but I don't get the rampant orgasms over reflections at all. SSR has some quirks but looks fine overall when you're talking a 40% performance hit, and the reflections of ray tracing look kinda fake to me sometimes, too mirror-like for the surfaces they're on.

Either way though I'm more trying to ascertain where console ray tracing performance stacks up to PC so we kinda know what we're gonna need. If it requires 1080p with half-resolution ray tracing to do 60fps, then I'd say even RTX 2000 series owners are in decent shape to match console performance.

Carmack was right:

The primary advantages of ray tracing over rasterization are:

Accurate shadows, without explicit sizing of shadow buffer resolutions or massive stencil volume overdraw. With reasonable area light source bundles for softening, this is the most useful and attainable near-term goal.

Accurate reflections without environment maps or subview rendering. This benefit is tempered by the fact that it is only practical at real time speeds for mirror-like surfaces. Slightly glossy surfaces require a bare minimum of 16 secondary rays to look decent, and even mirror surfaces alias badly in larger scenes with bump mapping. Rasterization approximations are inaccurate, but mip map based filtering greatly reduces aliasing, which is usually more important. I was very disappointed when this sunk in for me during my research – I had thought that there might be a place for a high end “ray traced reflections” option in upcoming games, but it requires a huge number of rays for it to actually be a positive feature.

Some other “advantages” that are often touted for ray tracing are not really benefits:

Accurate refraction. This won’t make a difference to anyone building an application.

Global illumination. This requires BILLIONS of rays per second to approach usability. Trying to do it with a handful of tests per pixel just results in a noisy mess.

Because ray tracing involves a log2 scale of the number of primitives, while rasterization is linear, it appears that highly complex scenes will render faster with ray tracing, but it turns out that the constant factors are so different that no dataset that fits in memory actually crosses the time order threshold.

Classic Whitted ray tracing is significantly inferior to modern rasterization engines for the vast majority of scenes that people care about. Only when two orders of magnitude more rays are cast to provide soft shadows, glossy reflections, and global illumination does the quality commonly associated with “ray tracing” become apparent. For example, all surfaces that are shaded with interpolated normal will have an unnatural shadow discontinuity at the silhouette edges with single shadow ray traces. This is most noticeable on animating characters, but also visible on things like pipes. A typical solution if the shadows can’t be filtered better is to make the characters “no self shadow” with additional flags in the datasets. There are lots of things like this that require little tweaks in places that won’t be very accessible with the proposed architecture.

The huge disadvantage is the requirement to maintain acceleration structures, which are costly to create and more than double the memory footprint. The tradeoffs that get made for faster build time can have significant costs in the delivered ray tracing time versus fully optimized acceleration structures. For any game that is not grossly GPU bound, a ray tracing chip will be a decelerator, due to the additional cost of maintaining dynamic accelerator structures.

Rasterization is a tiny part of the work that a GPU does. The texture sampling, shader program invocation, blending, etc, would all have to be duplicated on a ray tracing part as well. Primary ray tracing can give an overdraw factor of 1.0, but hierarchical depth buffers in rasterization based systems already deliver very good overdraw rejection in modern game engines. Contrary to some popular beliefs, most of the rendering work is not done to be “realistic”, but to be artistic or stylish.

I am 90% sure that the eventual path to integration of ray tracing hardware into consumer devices will be as minor tweaks to the existing GPU microarchitectures.

John Carmack

Accurate shadows, without explicit sizing of shadow buffer resolutions or massive stencil volume overdraw.

... is also solved by "irregular shadow maps" .

 

[grimace]

Microsoft Sets Sights on Sony’s Home Turf in Game Console Clash

Console Wars Continue!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...hts-on-sony-s-home-turf-in-game-console-clash

In the battle of the next-generation gaming machines, two key players are moving in different directions.
Microsoft Corp. is making a serious attempt to attract fans in Japan with its new consoles and network services. Meanwhile, Tokyo-based Sony Corp. moved its PlayStation business headquarters to California in 2016 and has built the U.S. into its largest single market.

New Xbox and PlayStation devices launching this week will likely face an uphill battle in Japan, where Nintendo Co.’s Switch enjoys dominance with a family-friendly lineup of games.

But Microsoft’s targeting of the world’s third-largest video-game market -- including with services that can be accessed across a variety of devices -- could potentially yield strong results. As the Xbox has virtually zero presence in the country, there’s plenty of room for it to increase its share.

“The Xbox has a chance to make Japan its second-largest market after the U.S. if it takes the right steps for years to come,” said Hideki Yasuda, an analyst at Ace Research Institute in Tokyo. “Sony’s attention is drifting away and fans have started to notice that.”
Sony has placed more importance on the U.S. market after the PlayStation 4’s disappointing performance in Japan, according to employees who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters.

Global sales of the PS4 rose to more than 113 million from the PS3’s 87 million, according to Sony data. But the console sold fewer than 10 million units in Japan, less than its predecessor, according to Famitsu, a Japanese video-game magazine. The U.S., meanwhile, accounts for 35% of the video-game unit’s revenue, compared with 10% for Japan, according to Macquarie Group Ltd. analyst Damian Thong.


Any suggestion that Sony is shifting its focus away from Japan is incorrect and doesn’t reflect the company’s strategy, spokeswoman Natsumi Atarashi said. She noted that the PlayStation 5 is launching first in Japan and said “our home market remains of utmost importance.”

A senior figure inside PlayStation headquarters in San Mateo, California, said the U.S. side was frustrated by the failure of the Japan marketing team to sell as many PlayStation 4 units as expected. The person asked not to be identified discussing internal matters.

As a result, Japan has been sidelined in planning the PlayStation 5’s promotion, according to several PlayStation staff in Japan. Employees in Tokyo said they’ve been left awaiting instructions from California.

Japan-based developer support teams have been reduced by as much as a third from their peak, and the rolling contracts of a number of game creators at PlayStation’s Japan Studio, one of the unit’s oldest in-house software ateliers, haven’t been renewed, former employees said. The U.S. office believes the PlayStation business doesn’t need games that only do well in Japan, employees in the California headquarters said.

The PlayStation 5’s two main online promotional events both took place at 5 a.m. in Tokyo -- making them more accessible to American and European fans -- and lacked Japanese translation for some parts. The company also decided to standardize its PS5 control scheme so that Japanese players would have to use X to confirm and O to cancel, like the rest of the world. That reverses a 26-year tradition in a country where circles signify positives and crosses mark negatives.

Local retailers said they haven’t received many more first-batch PlayStation 5 units than they did of the PlayStation 3, which had a limited initial production run.

“It’s analyst consensus that PlayStation no longer sees the Japan market as important,” Morningstar Research analyst Kazunori Ito said. “If you want to know their take on the Japanese market, you need to ask about it because otherwise Sony wouldn’t talk about it.”

TV ownership among Japanese households has been falling for years, according to government data. That makes the market less attractive, according to Ace’s Yasuda. In order to play games on the PlayStation, a user must have a TV or monitor, though some titles are also available to play on PCs.

Serkan Toto, a game consultant in Tokyo, said the PlayStation 5 should sell fewer units than its predecessor.
“Many PlayStation 4 owners in Japan would eventually move to the PlayStation 5, but that would largely depend on how strong the PlayStation team in Tokyo will be in pushing the needs of Japanese customers to the American headquarters,” he said. “Considering the current power balance between the U.S. and Japan, I can’t expect much, unfortunately.”

To be sure, the PlayStation 4’s worldwide success suggests Sony’s strategy hasn’t been detrimental. Chief Financial Officer Hiroki Totoki said on Oct. 28 that the company would be able to sell more than 7.6 million PlayStation 5 units in the first five months, more than the popular PlayStation 4 achieved in the same timeframe. The long-term goal is to sell as many units as the PS4, Totoki said.

And the company’s PlayStation Plus subscription service, for owners of Sony consoles, reported a record increase in subscribers during the period of pandemic lockdowns.


But Microsoft, which is launching its next-generation consoles in Japan on Tuesday, the same day it does so in the rest of the world, sees an opportunity in the country’s market. Microsoft didn’t start selling the Xbox One in Japan until almost a year after the U.S., which contributed to its disappointing sales in the Asian country.

The challenge facing Microsoft is steep. The Xbox One accounted for just 0.1% of console sales in Japan this year through Nov. 1, compared with 10.1% for the PlayStation 4 and 89.8% for Nintendo’s Switch, according to Famitsu.
Microsoft is betting its Xbox Series S, the smallest Xbox ever, will help turn the tide. Previous consoles were criticized as being too large for Japanese living rooms, Ace’s Yasuda said.

The U.S. company has been stepping up discussions with Japan-based game developers about releasing titles on the Xbox, said Sarah Bond, who oversees relations with game creators across the Microsoft gaming ecosystem.
Koei Tecmo Games Co. is one of those firms. Hisashi Koinuma, president of the Japanese publisher, said he’s willing to consider releasing more games for the Xbox if the U.S. company shows continued interest in Japan.

On top of that, there’s evidence Microsoft is seeking to make acquisitions in the country, though it hasn’t yet landed a deal with a big name there. Several Japan-based game developers, from small to big, said it had approached them about buying their businesses. They asked not to be identified as the talks were private, and declined to give details on how the discussions went.

When asked about potential purchases of Japanese companies, Jeremy Hinton, head of Xbox operations in Asia, said Microsoft is always open to discussions with creators that are a good fit. He said acquisitions are a possibility but there are no announcements to share at this time.

“Japan has long been an isolated part of the Xbox world, but it appears Microsoft is changing that landscape,” Katsuhiko Hayashi, representative of Famitsu Group, said of Microsoft’s efforts to target the country.

The focus isn’t just on selling consoles. Hinton said the company is also banking on winning subscribers to the Game Pass Ultimate service, which includes the xCloud game-streaming offering. This service, which can be used for other devices as well as the Xbox, offers more than 100 all-you-can-play games for a fixed monthly fee and will seek to entice the country’s growing cohort of mobile gamers.

While Japan has fallen behind China and the U.S. in the size of its video-game market, Microsoft said Japan is still biggest when measured by per-capita spending.

But questions remain about whether the U.S. company will be able to penetrate it given its lack of success in the past, according to game-industry consultant Toto.

“Microsoft will continue to have a hard time in Japan, and I don’t see any reason why the next Xbox should do better in Japan than the previous models,” he said. “All signs point that for the next years, Nintendo will stay king in Japan, and I really don’t understand why Microsoft is still so obsessed with Japan.”

Whether he’s right -- or whether the U.S. company can prise open the door to a market that has long eluded it -- remains to be seen.

“Microsoft won’t be able to take Sony’s position as No. 2 in Japan anytime soon, but at least it has started to make changes,” Ace’s Yasuda said. “A big tide always starts with a small change.”

Highlights:

As a result, Japan has been sidelined in planning the PlayStation 5’s promotion, according to several PlayStation staff in Japan. [SONY] Employees in Tokyo said they’ve been left awaiting instructions from California.

Japan-based developer support teams have been reduced by as much as a third from their peak, and the rolling contracts of a number of game creators at PlayStation’s Japan Studio, one of the unit’s oldest in-house software ateliers, haven’t been renewed, former employees said.

The U.S. office believes the PlayStation business doesn’t need games that only do well in Japan, employees in the California headquarters said.


On top of that, there’s evidence Microsoft is seeking to make acquisitions in the country [of Japan], though it hasn’t yet landed a deal with a big name there. Several Japan-based game developers, from small to big, said it had approached them about buying their businesses.


Microsoft wants to buy out Japanese studios to undermine Sony.

Sony fights back by letting Americans decide how to run the Japanese company.

 

[DalekFlay]

Somewhere some Japanese equivalent of the Codex exists where instead of bitching about consoles tainting Western RPGs they bitch out the West ruining their console games.

 

[grimace]

the West ruining their console games.

Literally, the West Coast. Literally, California.
I'm shaking as I type this.

 

[ultimanecat]

Somewhere some Japanese equivalent of the Codex exists where instead of bitching about consoles tainting Western RPGs they bitch out the West ruining their console games.

It’s called 2ch, and yes, they do bitch about it. But honestly, we knew Sony had relocated the Playstation brand to California a few years ago - there were games with only Japanese releases getting rejected by Sony Santa Monica without censorship. Plus the PS5 is fuckoff huge physically. It’s almost like Sony is ready to write off Japan and give it to Nintendo.

 

[Pika-Cthulhu]

Wierd none of you posted xbox new biggest feature yet. Floating ping pong balls

Needs more Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Phil Spencer!!!

 

[JDR13]

Wierd none of you posted xbox new biggest feature yet. Floating ping pong balls

One hell of a blowjob

 

[TemplarGR]

I think global illumination is pretty cool, but I don't get the rampant orgasms over reflections at all. SSR has some quirks but looks fine overall when you're talking a 40% performance hit, and the reflections of ray tracing look kinda fake to me sometimes, too mirror-like for the surfaces they're on.

Either way though I'm more trying to ascertain where console ray tracing performance stacks up to PC so we kinda know what we're gonna need. If it requires 1080p with half-resolution ray tracing to do 60fps, then I'd say even RTX 2000 series owners are in decent shape to match console performance.

Well, i don't believe raytracing will ever be anything more than a gimmick (and a way to push for expensive gpu upgrades) until video games become fully 100% real time raytraced and gpus dumb all rasterization hardware. I don't particularly like what i have seen as of yet and i don't find it much more realistic either. The rasterization "approximations" are quite enough for real time games and are far more cheap in terms of hardware requirements.

TL: DR : If i have to choose to get half the framerate and/or resolution over having some raytracing effects in place of traditional raster techniques, i will be getting the extra framerate/resolution anytime, anywhere.

 

[DalekFlay]

TL: DR : If i have to choose to get half the framerate and/or resolution over having some raytracing effects in place of traditional raster techniques, i will be getting the extra framerate/resolution anytime, anywhere.

This is especially true once you get used to a 144hz monitor. I'd take the frames every time. Consoles tend to operate on the theory that graphics sell more than framerate though, so don't be surprised when 30fps remains the standard on PS5 so they can claim "4k" for marketing reasons and have some low resolution ray traced reflections.

 

[TemplarGR]

This is especially true once you get used to a 144hz monitor. I'd take the frames every time. Consoles tend to operate on the theory that graphics sell more than framerate though, so don't be surprised when 30fps remains the standard on PS5 so they can claim "4k" for marketing reasons and have some low resolution ray traced reflections.

One other problem modern consoles face, that consoles in the decades past didn't, is that now higher resolutions are more important for consoles than they are for desktops/laptops.

We own a large 4K TV at home, and i experimented with both 1080p and 4K movies/youtube/games, and quite frankly, unless you are sitting next to the TV (which isn't recommended for large TVs), the difference is indeed noticeable but not groundbreaking. 1080p->4K is a much lesser improvement than 480p->1080p was. You do get smaller pixels at 4K but unless you are watching objects from the sky or panoramic view etc, or you care to notice the small hair on the protagonist's head or something, the difference is not that large to be honest. It doesn't matter how small the pixels are, if the neighbouring pixels end up being the same color anyway. There is only so much detail that is noticeable at higher and higher resolutions, especially at fast paced gaming speeds.

Now, things get even worse when we are talking at smaller desktop/laptop monitors. Again, the improvement can be noticeable depending on the content, but is not groundbreaking, and it certainly isn't worth the performance cost it brings. Personally i won't be bothered if i stay at 1080p for gaming on my desktop for the next 5 years. Getting a 4K PC monitor is not a bad idea for a larger desktop and better video watching, and it has the added plus that 1080p scales perfectly on 4K monitors so you can still game at 1080p just fine on your small 4K monitor. In any case, the 4K quality improvement is much less noticeable the smaller your screen is, it loses much value when compared to a large TV for gaming and video.

So there is this weird situation, where consoles have more of an incentive to support 4K than desktops and laptops do. Yet consoles are also typically weaker, lol. This is much different than in the past, up until this generation gaming PCs typically supported much higher resolution, especially before the PS3 "HD" generation.

 

[DalekFlay]

I notice resolution differences on my monitor pretty easily, but then I have way too fucking big a monitor so that's probably why. When I hook my PC up to my TV for a controller game I find resolution differences much less important, because of the distance from the screen. Everyone's setup is different though.

To me the really great thing about my 4k TV is the HDR. Movies benefit from it a LOT in my opinion, way more than they do the added resolution. I can't wait for good HDR monitors to get cheaper.

 

[Konjad]

TL;DR:
Consoles run ray tracing below PC's minimum RT specs. Xbox X run the game in 30 FPS, 2060 Super ran at 4k with average 32 FPS. PC has higher resolution RT and the world has more details in ray-tracing reflections than XboX X that runs RT in 1080p and Xbox S in 720p.

Xbox X runs the game from 4k to 1440p depending on the scene, while S from 1080p to 720p.

EDIT: Oh, and PS5 uses the same settings as Xbox X

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Guise you need to buy an RTX 3090 to have shinier puddles.

 

[J_C]

TL;DR:
Consoles run ray tracing below PC's minimum RT specs. Xbox X run the game in 30 FPS, 2060 Super ran at 4k with average 32 FPS. PC has higher resolution RT and the world has more details in ray-tracing reflections than XboX X that runs RT in 1080p and Xbox S in 720p.

Xbox X runs the game from 4k to 1440p depending on the scene, while S from 1080p to 720p.

EDIT: Oh, and PS5 uses the same settings as Xbox X

I can't imagine someone paying double or triple price for a graphics card just to have a bit shinier reflections, losing half of the framerate. What a waste of money.

 

[cruel]

Nioh collection coming to PS5:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiihGiEQB0o

Looks good.

 

[DalekFlay]

TL;DR:
Consoles run ray tracing below PC's minimum RT specs. Xbox X run the game in 30 FPS, 2060 Super ran at 4k with average 32 FPS. PC has higher resolution RT and the world has more details in ray-tracing reflections than XboX X that runs RT in 1080p and Xbox S in 720p.

And this is a with a cross-gen game. What are they gonna do once more and more GPU resources are being used to make the games look "next-gen" you have to wonder.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

TL;DR:
Consoles run ray tracing below PC's minimum RT specs. Xbox X run the game in 30 FPS, 2060 Super ran at 4k with average 32 FPS. PC has higher resolution RT and the world has more details in ray-tracing reflections than XboX X that runs RT in 1080p and Xbox S in 720p.

And this is a with a cross-gen game. What are they gonna do once more and more GPU resources are being used to make the games look "next-gen" you have to wonder.

1080p for XSX and 540p for XSS?

 

[TemplarGR]

I think raytracing is a gimmick that is going to be forgotten soon, like the 3D televisions and VR. It is the "bloom" effect of this decade. It won't go away, but developers will finally understand that they don't need it to sell games so they don't need to overdo it and they will just use it occasionally here and there and try to optimize its usage for the optimal visual quality/performance.

I repeat, unless we get to the point where raytracing is the bulk of a gpu and raster hardware goes away, it won't be important. Seeing the puddles of water is nice, i get it, but who gives a fuck when playing a game? Current non-raytraced puddles looked just fine anyway.

 

[Gerrard]

and the reflections of ray tracing look kinda fake to me sometimes, too mirror-like for the surfaces they're on.

You know why that is? Because if they made them blurry, people wouldn't notice any difference from how the games they played without it looked, because the available techniques are "good enough".
I guess nvidia couldn't pay studios enough to just drop non-RTX reflections completely to make fake comparisons.

 

[SlamDunk]

The next one from Fumito Ueda is the only console game I'm looking forward to. Hopefully it will be a native PlayStation 5 title (with no PS4 version).

http://www.gendesign.co.jp/E_index.html

 

[aweigh]

 

[Riddler]

Just realized that the next gen games will be 80$. Who is the target audience here? Why would you buy a console that will have worse graphics than a PC barely any exclusives and games that cost 33% more?

This especially goes for the XBOX where as far as I'm aware, everything will be on PC as well.

Can anyone explain what's going on here?

 

[Konjad]

Just realized that the next gen games will be 80$. Who is the target audience here? Why would you buy a console that will have worse graphics than a PC barely any exclusives and games that cost 33% more?

This especially goes for the XBOX where as far as I'm aware, everything will be on PC as well.

Can anyone explain what's going on here?

Xboxes have Gamepass, which is to be the main selling point of theirs.

Dunno what Sony came up with.

Microsoft doesn't really care if you play on Xbox or Windows as long as you pay for the gamepass.

 

[TemplarGR]

Just realized that the next gen games will be 80$. Who is the target audience here? Why would you buy a console that will have worse graphics than a PC barely any exclusives and games that cost 33% more?

This especially goes for the XBOX where as far as I'm aware, everything will be on PC as well.

Can anyone explain what's going on here?

No explaining needed, we are living in a world where Apple exists...

Besides, developers will be crippling PC performance on purpose, as per usual, to push more console sales. Be prepared to be needing an Nshitia 5090 Ti with 32GB VRAM for proper 1080p60fps console ports. LOL.

 

[Volrath]

Because there's no excuse to not have it. It's effectively the same architecture as before.

My question is why is it getting so much attention this time? I think it's 'cause there ain't no real next gen games as said above.

It's something Phil Spencer has been working on since he took over xbox, we're finally seeing it come to full fruition now.

It was a selling point of the original 60gb ps3, before they removed the EE chip to lower cost of the machine. As for the One and PS4, I think people were just desperate for new machines at that point, the PS360 era was absurdly long.

Ngl, I would've bought a PS5 if it enabled me to play all the ps1,2 and 3 games I gathered through the decades. Completely skipped over the latest generation and looks like I'll be doing that again.

 

[Cromwell]

Ngl, I would've bought a PS5 if it enabled me to play all the ps1,2 and 3 games I gathered through the decades. Completely skipped over the latest generation and looks like I'll be doing that again.

would have done the same but without backwards compatibility the decision was easy.

 

[Neuromancer]

Xbox Portable: