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Digital Foundry: Heard that Xbox Series S Is A "Pain" For Developers Due To Memory Issues
- Thread starter IbizaPocholo
- Start date
- Opinion Hardware
- Status
Faithless83
Banned
Geez... I meant we still only have crossgen games, once the powerful hardware gets pushed, the weaker will struggle to keep up. It's why people upgrade their PCs.
Also why Nintendo will be in a tough spot pretty soon.
It's basic logic.
Vognerful
Member
Have you been there when we had 2 thread simultaneously arguing about wither the switch should be considered a home console and thus compared to PS5 and XSX?
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
Oh my god, y'all really love splitting hairs lol.
The SSD through put speed is the least of the problems, the demo has plenty of drops from its target 30 FPS as it is. The dreaded pixel fill rate or TFlops didn't prevent it. The SSD through put is not a factor as it isn't close to maxing out on any of the consoles in the first place.
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SportsFan581
Member
They stress them more, but as far as getting the most out of the console they generally get better at that as time goes on. At least that's the way I've always looked at it. You don't think the games late in the generation typically utilize available resources better than earlier ones?
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dcmk7
Banned
Were you asleep when Cyberpunk released for X1?
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
I'm cringing at the lengths he goes through to defend his program. Even a pre qualifier damage control of throwing devs under the bus. Cause no, it can never be the anemic machine's fault.
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adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
Forza Horizon 2 and Forza Horizon 5 run on the same base XBO and there's a significant improvement in Horizon 5, even though the 2nd game was built as a cross gen game over the 2nd one which would have given it a bigger headroom.
So, yeah you're right, developers can make games run notably better on the same console hardware as time goes on with optimization and experience.
Dude that game is notoriously bad on for the first year or more even on the highest of PC rigs.
It shouldn't be used as a barometer for any kind of optimization/performance talk.
S0ULZB0URNE
Member
Games that shine on the PS5 have to be designed around its SSD/I/O.
We can tell who hasn't watched the legendary Cerny PS5 breakdown.
SportsFan581
Member
I have to defend the right to throw devs under the bus at the drop of a hat, only other alternative would be to admit that I haven't spent enough on hardware to have the experience I want. That wouldn't be good.
yamaci17
Member
for record books, i never claimed this specifically for a generalized situation
to me;
very big devs like ubisoft/rockstar will make games primarily for sx/ps5, and scale down them for series s with their wizardry. in the end, ID tech and CDPR proved that a game that was primarily designed for ps4/xbox one can be ported to the freaking Switch somehow.. (i don't know if it was CDPR that did the port but someone did) and they succeded. cutbacks, yeah. but it was achieveable. remember that this little handheld machine only has 4 GB usable memory. so yeah. but the cutbacks are really huge but i also understand its a very weak machine in terms of GPU power as well. in the end: it was possible. these games were never meant for Switch but we have what we have
some devs may, in secret, design games around series s. we may never know. but since series s still has respectable CPU, I/O systems and a solid SSD, I believe the game would still be very different than what we have these days.
but for most cases, i don't think series s will hold back the entire generation. maybe it can hold back small to medium sized game developers from some aspects. but then again, it will be onto them, because if such a thing occurs, we will see a large gap between game quality between devs
actually, that's relevant even for today. how many games have the technical success that rdr 2 has? just look at how complex that game is in terms of story telling and world design. even gta 5 is more complex and have more intricate AI/physics details than most games we have nowadays
i remember DF giving a troll statement, in their GOTG review they talked about foliage "swayed" on nextgen versions and they did not "sway" on lastgen systems. like, damn? more complex stuf than that has been achieved on ps4, yet their dev needed a much stronger CPU/GPU somehow to make that sway "happen". it is funny to me!
relevant part;
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DarkMage619
$MSFT
MLB The Show 22 ran better on PS4 Pro than XSS. Cross gen games have no real baring on what a system is actually capable of. It will come down to developer effort and choice. The areas where the XSS is 'weaker' deals primarily with graphics. Graphics are scalable.
There has been no indication that the XSS will be unable to handle similar physics, AI, or level design. The lower amount of RAM could cause problems if a developer chooses to not use the included features both Series consoles have to deal with that. Again I've never seen a console do worse as a generation goes on; look at early and later PS3 titles for example.
Faithless83
Banned
MLB was ported to Xbox, mystery solved. It was developed on PS machines first.
It's not a slider, if it was we still had PS3 games today, same as PC games running on 2006 hardware.
"GTA5 is a PS360 game", then grab a PC from 2006 and run the "PS360 game".
If it was a slider, devs wouldn't complain about it, specially if we are talking RAM/bandwidth.
Remember when the Gears devs showed MS the difference between 512 vs 256 RAM on the 360?
It's limiting beyond graphics, while adding development time. This will make PS5 be the first platform of choice for development and making the Series consoles be the port.
I believe you remember how this pan out for PS3 early years, right?
The weaker hardware will struggle to keep up, period. Compare the Switch vs PS4 ports of games. It "runs Witcher 3" but at what cost?
To everyone that made the mistake of grabbing a XSS, get an XSX or a PS5 and sell it while it still has value.
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Hoddi
Member
You're confusing gigabits with gigabytes.
The Matrix demo is only pushing ~200 megabytes per second (or 1.5 gigabits).
avin
Member
I skipped through that vid. And as the lone casual here, perhaps it's worth saying I actually think that looks fine. Not always, perhaps, but most of the time, and overall I'm pretty impressed with this little box.
avin
Bernd Lauert
Banned
Where you got that number from? Sounds wrong.
DarkMage619
$MSFT
Know idea what your point is about MLB unless you think the PS4 Pro and XSS are equal in performance. Based on your later comments I wouldnt be surprised.
Who said anything about a slider? But since you obviously have some extensive technical knowledge of XSS development please explain why the XSS will have additional limitations beyond graphics? Be sure to include the features that address RAM which have yet to even be used. What features do you think will be removed and I am not talking about graphics.
I also saw you making the same strange comparison others have made with the Switch and PS4. What has more in common technically, the Switch and PS4 or the XSS and XSX? It's like you guys don't even hear the arguments you are making. The Switch has absolutely nothing in common with the XSS performance wise it isn't even in the same generation.
SportsFan581
Member
I agree that there is a much bigger performance gap between the Switch and PS4. Only half the memory, but even worse, only 15% of the memory bandwidth. We'll see how it goes, so far the results have been okay IMO.
S0ULZB0URNE
Member
I was using voice to text and it put it wrong didn't notice it until I got on my laptop.
1.5GB/s is the proper way.
FrankWza
Member
SportsFan581
Member
The system only has a 128bit memory interface. I'm assuming they figured they could get by with low bandwidth for the OS and were trying to give devs as much memory as possible to work with.
When the numbers first leaked I was surprised, I figured it would be 192bit 12GB. Probably too expensive.
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Bernd Lauert
Banned
Bernd Lauert
Banned
No, it's 1.5 Gb/s, which means it can run on a ten year old Sata SSD. No need for Cerny sauce.
Faithless83
Banned
You lack the understanding of what it means developing for a target platform vs porting to a platform.
A port, unless development time is invested into it, is not as optimized as the target platform.
Here, (timestamped 14:33) a dev on exactly what I'm saying:
Considering performance alone there is a big difference. So it's up for the devs to develop on the lower end and increase things from there, limiting their vision, or having a much harder time scaling everything down to run on XSS.
S0ULZB0URNE
Member
Which is closer to XSX.
Cerny's PS5 sauce would make it shine much brighter but the "Xbox's Coalition team" had to design it around the weaker Xbox SSD tech.
CamHostage
Member
(*Before I comment, I wanted to first say I'm confident in Series S, and while I can see reasons for concern, I am hopeful the power difference will not end up being a real issue. That said...)
So, yes, games have been ported down to Switch, but I think we do have to make a line of distinction here that Switch is its own build of a production. It can be a totally different game, with wildly different assets on the disc/dl, often by different development houses, sometimes even ported onto or assisted by different additional engines.
That's not the same case of a build of a game made to be scaled to two platforms at once. The S and X games need to be in the same box*. They need to pull assets off the same disc (which is already straining the 66-100GB capacity of BD for boxed products.) They generally need to run on the same engine, with a scaled capacity of the same technical demands (you're probably not going to light a whole game in Lumen for Series X but then fall back to baked lights if for some reason the Series S version choked on it.) They're made by the same developer, in the same process of development and optimizing (unless the developer brings another studio in specifically for the downscaled version, which hasn't happened yet to my knowledge?) If you're making a Switch version of a next-gen game, you have every trick in the book to "demake" the game; if you're making a game to run on the Xbox Series (which is X and S right now, but rumors are out there of an Xbox Stick and other types of Xbox Series consoles,) you probably don't have that latitude.
(*Although I'm not sure, can you make a dedicated executeable specifically one for Xbox Series X and another for Series S? I know you can put the One and Series builds on the same disc, and I think even Xbox One X had some specific variants over straight Xbox One, but I don't know for sure all the package process?)
Also, Switch is getting ports of mostly cross-gen games anyway. We haven't yet had a mainline, AAA, Lumen+Nanite console-buster that was also ported down to Switch. Switch can run UE5, but it doesn't have (and will not get) a port-down of Matrix Awakens. We will see what Switch ports look like when developers evolve out of current techniques and take up mesh shading and dedicated raytracing and whatever else is coming up, but those might be roadblocks for straight ports and instead we might be seeing custom games made in the image of the original ala Forza Horizon 3 for 360 or PSP/DS/Wii ports back in the day.
Similarly with Xbox Series S, everything game developers have been doing right now is scaling proportionately. It's 4K 60 here, it's 1080p 30 there, or whatever the math runs out to. The new methods coming up, supposedly they are not scaling so easily, and you really do need all that horsepower just to get anything under those demands on the screen. Crazy physics, dependent realtime lighting, things like that maybe don't divide by 4 or whatnot so easily. Matrix Awakens for Xbox is so far good evidence that Series S is still in the pipeline of Series X, and hopefully that holds steady as current-gen pushes with that next-gen software technology on the horizon.
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SportsFan581
Member
So they designed it well below the specifications of their own drive?
Bernd Lauert
Banned
Now you're trolling. Xbox SSD is more than ten times faster compared to what the Matrix demo needs.
JTCx
Member
He also has access to the 1-800 hotline dev support which he failed to provide for the devs.
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
And people say Xbox fans have cult like mentality towards Phil Spencer, with a straight face
"It's a lot more difficult to engineer an old game to make sure it works on everything. But now that we're building future games and we know these are the systems it has to run, we take account the systems and ensure all platforms have as good of an experience as possible"
This is what the developer says a minute into your time stamp.
This does not read like a problem to me.
SportsFan581
Member
Who knows what we'll see. There were also those weird rumors of the XSS being a hybrid local/streaming device. Maybe that comes into play at some point, unless that was a total smokescreen for the XSS (which is possible).
Faithless83
Banned
So it's ok to ignore everything he says AFTER my timestamp.
The guy even gasps prior to start talking about XSS for fuck's sake.
Bernd Lauert
Banned
Just use some common sense bro. Last gen games had to load everything from an ancient HDD, which means you'd push as many assets as possible into RAM. This gen doesn't need to do this, so the amount of RAM won't be a big deal.So it's ok to ignore everything he says AFTER my timestamp.
The guy even gasps prior to start talking about XSS for fuck's sake.
NickFire
Member
"we take account the systems and ensure . . . ."And people say Xbox fans have cult like mentality towards Phil Spencer, with a straight face
"It's a lot more difficult to engineer an old game to make sure it works on everything. But now that we're building future games and we know these are the systems it has to run, we take account the systems and ensure all platforms have as good of an experience as possible"
This is what the developer says a minute into your time stamp.
This does not read like a problem to me.
Having to take account at the design level is my issue with S. I get and understand why MS produced it, and believe it made perfect sense for them (more so in hindsight with all the shortages). But having to take account of it at the design level hinders what they will push the other platforms, X included, to do.
yamaci17
Member
SlimySnake
well i just had to !you can see what a real bottleneck looks like in non-rt 1080p section. even then, 2700 is plenty enough for frames north of 90!
0:08 rt reflections very high
0:43 no rt
1:23 rt high+no rt transparencies
you can hopefully understand better how much 4k+dlss perf is taxing for the gpu !
soo in the end: i'm sure frame drops are not related to CPU on consoles. so it has to be something else. i still blame their wonky dynamic resolution. could be the reason why the damn game does not use dynamic 1440p/4k.
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adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
So it's ok to ignore everything he says AFTER my timestamp.
The guy even gasps prior to start talking about XSS for fuck's sake.
The guy is very clearly defining the difference between converting older games on newer hardware versus developing for newer hardware native. And then he talks about it being an issue from the point of view of QA and them being a smaller studio with less workforce.
The whole cerny sauce is fanboy-ish level oxymoron in the first place.
Playstation podcast host asking a PS developer point blank if games like Ratchet and Clank will be possible on SX, the developer flat out says "Yes".
Time stamped:
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Digital Foundry did this test as well, Ratchet runs the same even on SSDs much slower than the stock PS5 SSD.
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SportsFan581
Member
What do you think the issue is. Is there a noticeable difference in settings between the pc and console at 1080p (for example do you think that 1080p lowers settings on PC even when using ultra that aren't reduced in the 1080p mode on console)?
Bernd Lauert
Banned
There might be a point in time, maybe 5 years from now, when the entire Cerny sauce is gonna get squeezed in a first party Playstation game. But third parties will never fuck with it, the 2.4GB/s (or 4.8 GB/s) from Xbox will always be the maximum target.
Faithless83
Banned
Did you watched the video? I sent a video so you guys can hear it, you are mentioning things prior to the timestamp or what he says at the end about QA. Not the part where he says that "the system in the lower end dictates what you can do, because it needs to run on that system." You are reaching delusional territory.
Yeah, tell that to the devs. "Just use less RAM, man!!"
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SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
you can see what a real bottleneck looks like N Non -rt 1080p section. even then, 2700 is plenty enough for frames north of 90!
0:08 rt reflections very high
0:43 no rt
1:23 rt high+no rt transparencies
you can hopefully understand better how much 4k+dlss perf is taxing for the gpu !
Yeah, it seems DLSS has a hit of around 20 fps. or 20% i guess.
Still, I think your 2700 is holding back your GPU. I just watched a bunch of 3070 benchmarks of this game on youtube, and even at 1440p they are getting better framerates than you in both native and dlss quality settings. That CPU is trash my man.
What are your firestrike or port royale scores?
ChiefDada
Member
The sub optimal fps was an engine bottleneck, not a memory bottleneck.
Key part from the same DF video that you apparently missed, timestamped for your convenience.
Also from Insomniac Core Tech Director:
TL;DR - Enough with the SSD red herring. It is the entire I/O memory subsystem that Cerny, industry developers, and "PS5 fanboys" have been alluding to when discussing PS5 hardware advantages.
DarkMage619
$MSFT
Based on how MLB ran on Xbox it is clear Sony didn't put much time in development whether they ported from the PlayStation or not.
Regardless the XSS is the same generation as PS5 and XSX plus the development environment for the XSS is exactly the same as XSX.
The Control devs should have been able to take the X1 version of the title and add 60fps at the least. Scaling down is always preferable than scaling up but unless you can describe in what ways other than graphics that a developer would have to 'limit their vision' it's all nonsense.
yamaci17
Member
it is trash to you, it is valuable to me. I do not appreciate your weird hate towards this particular CPU, so if you please stop with that weird slur, I would appreciate it. A trash CPU would mean that It does not provide you an enjoyable experience, I'm simply not seeing such a notion. The CPU holds back in certain situations and does not hold back in certain situations.
In the case of GOTG
It holds back;
@native 1080p
@native 1080p with low RT settings
It does not hold back;
@native 1440p
@native 1440p with RT
@4K+DLSS Performance with rt
Since I like to play with 4K DLSS Performance all the time, it never holds back anything in my case.
Then again, every section of the game performs different, and by that extent, we need to increase the scope of the discussion for a proper basis. You can find a video that is captured in Chapter 3: the cost of freedom (a very GPU bound section, where I did my tests)
Or, you can provide me the said 1440p video and the section, and I can test them and show you that I'm getting exact same framerates (at 1440p). it goes both ways. I have literally no clue as to which videos you may be referring to.
btw; it would hold back @1440p dlss quality. i'm not disputing that. card is indeed very strong for the render resolution near 1080p. that is why PS5 and SX performance is shocking. they could actually run this game at a native 1440p 60 fps easily. i don't think it has anything to do with bandwidth or anything, I think its just about people simply accepting it without making a fuss. maybe they're testing the waters. honestly i have no clue. but i think it to be another case of dying light 2 where both consoles would push native 1080p 90+ frames.
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adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
And we've already established that there is no storage bottleneck either, with the engine utilizing max of 1.5Gbps, well short of the Xbox max through put.
So, there's no real conceivable reason to expect the Series S is holding back the Matrix demo in any way.
But it *is* running it, with only minor visual cut backs from the bigger consoles.
Developers themselves are saying that Ratchet would run on Series X.
Once we get to those later generation games that benefit from it if at all, we can talk about them then, but for now the flashiest PS5 game can be run on the Xbox as well, as per a developer.
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
Per a developer, in 2020, for a system or game that has not even come out yet at the time, nor he has worked on. His game being... Bugsnax, that utilizes nothing that R&C does. A third party game, mind you. Regardless of that Marlon guy's click bait title.
pLaYsTaTiOn dEv tHo Fascinating.
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SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
Bernd Lauert
Banned
Same for the id software guy who never touched a Series S before writing those tweets
Fascinating indeed.
Riky
$MSFT
The Coalition helped out with the Xbox versions, mostly on Series S. They didn't design the demo or do the PS5 version.
I think you're confused.
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