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[Ass of Can Whooping]

Hold on a second, are you saying that DarkMage619 is not an honest straight-down-the-middle type of dude and that he somehow pretends to like PlayStation.

I would never have guessed.

I got your back Darkmage, don't let this windbag take the piss out of you.

It's the honest to god truth fish

Every night I see him kneeled down in front of his alter, enthralled by his portrait of Phil, and for every game that's available on gamepass he'll inflict one lash on his back

 

[DarkMage619]

This problem existed for consoles for 15 years now - and the answer is always the same. The game 'can' be developed for any drive specs, but when it goes into Cert - it'll be tested against the standard spec that the platform holder dictates. Amusingly no company actually bothered to vet 3rd Party drives in last decade - so users could (and did) plug any old drive and get worse-than stock performance if they chose poorly as well.

As for this gen - approved drive route Sony is taking this gen is just the more customer-friendly approach.
There's no way to spin overpriced proprietary storage as 'good' for anyone other than the corporation that sells it at a markup.

So to you 'nothing' is better than 'something'? The price of the proprietary storage on one platform is within the standard price for similar products. It wasn't even necessary to purchase if you took advantage of cold storage, a feature given to the PS5 only recently.

In terms of internal storage your options on PS5 are...? This also assumes that the average consumer will purchase the correct drive once the bay is unlocked which historically has been to be an issue for someone not technically knowledgeable. Not sure how consumer friendly the current storage options are on PS5 but it's good to see them adopt some features that were available elsewhere for a while.

Consoles have always had proprietary accessories I don't know when that became an issue. Speaking of proprietary, Sony has cloud storage behind a paywall and that certainly doesn't seem consumer friendly. I assume you have an issue with that as well.

 

[TheRedRiders]

The crazy thing is that he hasnt learned anything. He literally just that this the BEST LIGHTING HES EVER WITNESSED IN A VIDEO GAME. Come the fuck on.

This was the part that was on screen when he says that.

Really? THIS is the best lighting ever in a video game, Mr. I review graphics for a living?

I dont even have to look at lighting for next gen games like Ratchet and Demon Souls to find better lighting than that. Several last gen games like RDR2, Spiderman and TLOU2 have better lighting. Hell, Death Stranding came out that year and had better lighting.

This bizarre fascination PC gamers have with tech over actual visuals really dilutes what makes visuals great in the first place. Tech is only a means to an end, cinematography is way more important than what rendering technique you are using to light the game.

Well said.



Ironically, this is precisely the issue SlimySnake is arguing.

That dynamic lighting is more computationally expensive is irrelevant. If you can achieve a superior end result with pre-computed light probes + SSAO + SSS + the number of other quick lighting hacks, then what does it matter how the lighting was achieved?

The problem with the way folks in the tech press have covered RT (people like Alex at DF), is that they've lost sight of the end result because of their extreme hard-on for a very specific means of getting to that end result. The goal of rendering technology is ALWAYS the end result, so losing sight of that undermines any perspective you seek to share.

Most if not all RT implementations in real games thus far have been aesthetically worse overall than the very best non-RT'd games; with the exception of limited RT-effects like RT-reflections used in games like Miles Morales.

And anyone with half a brain should have expected this because both RT and non-RT lighting is always a trade-off between accuracy and performance; however, because RT includes a step-change difference in performance vs non-RT lighting, full RT in games will require significantly more performance than the current hardware can deliver, for the same accuracy results as RT lighting (with few exceptions).

As such, the biggest benefits of current RT are in limited areas where the non-RT equivalents are also very expensive (e.g. reflections), as well as on the production side of creating and iterating on videogame assets.

Very well said.

I think one of the reasons gaming tech enthusiasts think ray tracing is so important is because Jensen Huang told them it’s important but I don’t think people are ready for that conversation yet.

I like RT but I do find it’s performance cost annoying, if you told me a few years ago we’d need dedicated hardware in GPU’s to accelerate “lighting” of all things I would have laughed. Sure the technology itself is cool but that’s not enough to warrant it’s use.

Personally, I’m a sucker for eye candy so I usually look out for high poly count geometry and high resolution textures, I think those will play a huge role in achieving photorealism. I don’t usually pay much attention to lighting as I think games in recent years have done a more than sufficient job without ray tracing. But each to their own.

 

[DeepEnigma]

I’m still waiting to see how much less taxing UE5’s GI is in comparison, since it was pretty damned convincing in that demo.

 

[bitbydeath]

The one thing I'm not a fan of for this "no load screens" concept.. feel like it also means "games that don't require a lot of calculations".. I don't want simple action games, I want advanced AI... a living world populated with things that are actually being simulated, etc

Load screens existed because it wasn’t possible to calculate and load up the world in real-time so they had to do everything in advance which would put more strain on the systems abilities.

Now you just turn your character and everything is drawn, AI is run etc. It no longer needs to hold all those things in memory for extensive periods of time since it can now operate on the fly.

 

[Zadom]

So to you 'nothing' is better than 'something'? The price of the proprietary storage on one platform is within the standard price for similar products. It wasn't even necessary to purchase if you took advantage of cold storage, a feature given to the PS5 only recently.

In terms of internal storage your options on PS5 are...? This also assumes that the average consumer will purchase the correct drive once the bay is unlocked which historically has been to be an issue for someone not technically knowledgeable. Not sure how consumer friendly the current storage options are on PS5 but it's good to see them adopt some features that were available elsewhere for a while.

Consoles have always had proprietary accessories I don't know when that became an issue. Speaking of proprietary, Sony has cloud storage behind a paywall and that certainly doesn't seem consumer friendly. I assume you have an issue with that as well.

I’ve noticed you’ve brought up the cloud saves behind paywalls before. Odd thing for you to be so triggered about.
.

 

[SlimySnake]

Very well said.

I think one of the reasons gaming tech enthusiasts think ray tracing is so important is because Jensen Huang told them it’s important but I don’t think people are ready for that conversation yet.

I like RT but I do find it’s performance cost annoying, if you told me a few years ago we’d need dedicated hardware in GPU’s to accelerate “lighting” of all things I would have laughed. Sure the technology itself is cool but that’s not enough to warrant it’s use.

Personally, I’m a sucker for eye candy so I usually look out for high poly count geometry and high resolution textures, I think those will play a huge role in achieving photorealism. I don’t usually pay much attention to lighting as I think games in recent years have done a more than sufficient job without ray tracing. But each to their own.

Yeah, the performance cost just isnt worth it. i actually went out and bought a 2080 after watching Alex's original Metro exodus videos, and watched in horror as enabling RT literally cut my framerate in half. Worst part was that I couldn't even tell the difference most of the time.

The Unreal Engine Rebirth demo shows you can get photorealistic lighting without RT GI. Hell, the UE5 demo shows you can get dynamic GI without RT. I actually recall Epic boasting about having realtime GI in the UE4 engine when they first revealed it, and only took it out later presumably because the consoles were too weak to support it. So it's not like RT is a must for realtime GI anyway.



I am gonna try and find a Fable interview I saw years ago where they were demo'ing about doing realtime GI. or maybe it was just regular baked GI.

 

[twilo99]

The dev didn't even have to do work for this? I don't get how they are able to do all these system level enchantments... what else can they do like that?

More importantly, if its DX12u, it would be great if we get it on PC as well

 

[SlimySnake]

The dev didn't even have to do work for this? I don't get how they are able to do all these system level enchantments... what else can they do like that?

More importantly, if its DX12u, it would be great if we get it on PC as well

System level AF was also on the Xbox One IIRC.

I think texture filtering was also on the PS2 for PS1 games. Or was it PS3 for PS2 games?

 

[DeepEnigma]

System level AF was also on the Xbox One IIRC.

I think texture filtering was also on the PS2 for PS1 games. Or was it PS3 for PS2 games?

Both.

 

[twilo99]

Ye I dunno, would they be able to replicate this on a system level with something like DLSS to boost resolution? That way they can boost frames, graphics, and resolution without having to rely on game devs.

 

[SlimySnake]

Found the dynamic GI implementation in Fable Legends. The studio and site were shutdown, (thanks Phil) so i had to dig through the web archive to find this explanation from their lead graphics programmer. There is a video on youtube too.

Blog - Latest News from Lionhead : Dynamic Global Illumination in Fable Legends

Lionhead recently developed its own custom Global Illumination technology. This blog post from Fable Legends’ Lead Graphics Programmer gives the...

web.archive.org

Since Epic released the full Unreal Engine 4 source to subscribers, we've had a number of questions about our dynamic global illumination tech, which Epic recently integrated into UE4. We wanted to take the opportunity to talk about why we developed this technology and how we're using it to make Fable Legends look amazing.

We made a decision early on to have fully dynamic lighting in our game. We think this is important for a number of reasons: It allows dynamic time of day, which adds variation to our world; it massively improves iteration times for artists; and it supports dynamic objects both reflecting and receiving light. Dynamic GI can also give higher quality results than baked lighting in some cases, for example, reflections, where lighting needs to take into account the view position.

Dynamic direct lighting has been around in games for a number of years, but dynamic indirect lighting (i.e bounce lighting or global illumination) – light bouncing off objects in the scene onto other objects - is a much harder problem to solve, so generally it either isn't computed dynamically, or a very simple representation is used (e.g. a single hemispherical light for the sky).

 

[VFXVeteran]

Very well said.

I think one of the reasons gaming tech enthusiasts think ray tracing is so important is because Jensen Huang told them it’s important but I don’t think people are ready for that conversation yet.

I like RT but I do find it’s performance cost annoying, if you told me a few years ago we’d need dedicated hardware in GPU’s to accelerate “lighting” of all things I would have laughed. Sure the technology itself is cool but that’s not enough to warrant it’s use.

The cost is heavy for a reason. You will get to see that as this generation unfolds.

Personally, I’m a sucker for eye candy so I usually look out for high poly count geometry and high resolution textures, I think those will play a huge role in achieving photorealism. I don’t usually pay much attention to lighting as I think games in recent years have done a more than sufficient job without ray tracing. But each to their own.

That's not how to achieve photorealism. You should read my post about PBR shaders.

Graphics Analysis : 5 Best Games using PBR Shaders

All: I'd like to go into the importance of having good lighting and shaders so that gamers can get an appreciation for what's the best in getting the overall look of a scene to approach VFX. We've come a long way with PBR shaders in gaming but there are still some things that I've seen in...

www.neogaf.com

It gives you some education on what's important to achieving it and why gaming studios are going this route after film studios have made the change. You absolutely need RT lighting/shading in order to reach photorealism moreso then textures and geometry. That's the reason it's so expensive.

 

[VFXVeteran]

The dev didn't even have to do work for this? I don't get how they are able to do all these system level enchantments... what else can they do like that?

More importantly, if its DX12u, it would be great if we get it on PC as well

They can do it because the hardware has it built in. It's just a state function call to set the texture filtering state to 16x anisotropic filtering.

 

[VFXVeteran]

Yeah, the performance cost just isnt worth it. i actually went out and bought a 2080 after watching Alex's original Metro exodus videos, and watched in horror as enabling RT literally cut my framerate in half. Worst part was that I couldn't even tell the difference most of the time.

The Unreal Engine Rebirth demo shows you can get photorealistic lighting without RT GI. Hell, the UE5 demo shows you can get dynamic GI without RT. I actually recall Epic boasting about having realtime GI in the UE4 engine when they first revealed it, and only took it out later presumably because the consoles were too weak to support it. So it's not like RT is a must for realtime GI anyway.



I am gonna try and find a Fable interview I saw years ago where they were demo'ing about doing realtime GI. or maybe it was just regular baked GI.

Those are using bounced diffuse lighting on a vector based single directional light (namely the sun) with inaccurate ambient occlusion for each light bounce. That's not the same complex lighting at all. RT lighting with emission uses local+sun light bounces by sampling an area instead of just a vector. It also computes AO while it's doing it. Which is what gives the best results.

In this image, it's using the Lumen. Like every other game, this isn't correct. There isn't enough self-shadowing. You can't get that kind of accuracy without RT.

I'm surprised that Lumen isn't using their RT functions from 4.26. It's all in there.

 

[3liteDragon]

That's not how to achieve photorealism. You should read my post about PBR shaders.

Were PBR shaders made to be used with standard rasterization techniques or can they also work with ray-traced lighting? Idk if this question makes any sense.

 

[Hawking Radiation]

It's the honest to god truth fish

Every night I see him kneeled down in front of his alter, enthralled by his portrait of Phil, and for every game that's available on gamepass he'll inflict one lash on his back

 

[azertydu91]

Hold on a second, are you saying that DarkMage619 is not an honest straight-down-the-middle type of dude and that he somehow pretends to like PlayStation.

I would never have guessed.

I got your back Darkmage, don't let this windbag take the piss out of you.

Dammit, I better add something technical before I get banned, err infinity fabric err Help me @geordiemp.

Peace

fish Rule

Yep I'm shocked and I've heard even more concerning news...Our vrry own Riky , again from the rumors I've heard and please before you read remain sitted or go sit , would be pro Xbox too.

I know ,I know, this may sound surprising to anyone and maybe some of you will need an hour or two to get accustomed to this reality...
Maybe we can create a coping thread or something for those shocking revelations.

And wait there's more ....Have you heard of a guy named Bo_Hazem ?There are some rumors that he might be pro sony "GASP in shock".

 

[yewles1]

Yep I'm shocked and I've heard even more concerning news...Our vrry own Riky , again from the rumors I've heard and please before you read remain sitted or go sit , would be pro Xbox too.

I know ,I know, this may sound surprising to anyone and maybe some of you will need an hour or two to get accustomed to this reality...
Maybe we can create a coping thread or something for those shocking revelations.

And wait there's more ....Have you heard of a guy named Bo_Hazem ?There are some rumors that he might be pro sony "GASP in shock".

 

[ArcaneNLSC]

Yep I'm shocked and I've heard even more concerning news...Our vrry own Riky , again from the rumors I've heard and please before you read remain sitted or go sit , would be pro Xbox too.

I know ,I know, this may sound surprising to anyone and maybe some of you will need an hour or two to get accustomed to this reality...
Maybe we can create a coping thread or something for those shocking revelations.

And wait there's more ....Have you heard of a guy named Bo_Hazem ?There are some rumors that he might be pro sony "GASP in shock".

 

[Hashi]

One of the best lighting system I saw was in Killzone Shadow Fall multiplayer. Numbers of dynamic lighting and transparency RGBA (+light effects) was incredible. And game uses Ray-Tracing reflections. 2013.

 

[TheThreadsThatBindUs]

Maybe dynamic was the wrong word in terms of what implies but I meant dynamic in the same sense as in minecraft rtx, you can create a camera obscura. Also all of these dynamic lights are very very good assumption and tricks to make realistic behaviour but they do unfortunately break down too often.

As with all rendering techniques, the disadvantages can be often overcome by careful design.

 

[Setsuna Mudou]

So to you 'nothing' is better than 'something'? The price of the proprietary storage on one platform is within the standard price for similar products. It wasn't even necessary to purchase if you took advantage of cold storage, a feature given to the PS5 only recently.

In terms of internal storage your options on PS5 are...? This also assumes that the average consumer will purchase the correct drive once the bay is unlocked which historically has been to be an issue for someone not technically knowledgeable. Not sure how consumer friendly the current storage options are on PS5 but it's good to see them adopt some features that were available elsewhere for a while.

Consoles have always had proprietary accessories I don't know when that became an issue. Speaking of proprietary, Sony has cloud storage behind a paywall and that certainly doesn't seem consumer friendly. I assume you have an issue with that as well.

A consumer savy enough to open an m.2 drive bay in a console and actually having a screw driver small enough for that nano-sized screw, is definitely not going to buy an unsupported drive
Also pretty sure Cerny mentioned last year commercial drives will be perfectly fine, they just want to test and certify them to confirm which ones are cool to use. If they created a proprietary drive, it's only one more option.
Btw on the dig regarding the paywall, Xbox started it on 360 man and you seem to love them for that, Sony just followed along 1 gen later.

 

[Garani]

So to you 'nothing' is better than 'something'? The price of the proprietary storage on one platform is within the standard price for similar products. It wasn't even necessary to purchase if you took advantage of cold storage, a feature given to the PS5 only recently.

In terms of internal storage your options on PS5 are...? This also assumes that the average consumer will purchase the correct drive once the bay is unlocked which historically has been to be an issue for someone not technically knowledgeable. Not sure how consumer friendly the current storage options are on PS5 but it's good to see them adopt some features that were available elsewhere for a while.

Consoles have always had proprietary accessories I don't know when that became an issue. Speaking of proprietary, Sony has cloud storage behind a paywall and that certainly doesn't seem consumer friendly. I assume you have an issue with that as well.

Please, you are embarrassing yourself at this point. You are console warring and you are bad at it to boot.

Just drop it. There is no issue with PS5 external storage, there is no issue with cloud saves.

 

[Shmunter]

Please, you are embarrassing yourself at this point. You are console warring and you are bad at it to boot.

Just drop it. There is no issue with PS5 external storage, there is no issue with cloud saves.

Beclowning oneself

 

[Garani]

Beclowning oneself

Honestly. I get it that at the beggining there are a lot of questions unanswered, but after 1 year since tech reveals and 6 months on the market, we have a pretty clear idea of what happens, how and why. We have have played games, and we have seen things getting better for both platforms.

Now we get back to day one FUD just because Sony showed off R&C? Who's stopping Microsoft from writing games for its platform?

 

[Bernd Lauert]

Those are using bounced diffuse lighting on a vector based single directional light (namely the sun) with inaccurate ambient occlusion for each light bounce. That's not the same complex lighting at all. RT lighting with emission uses local+sun light bounces by sampling an area instead of just a vector. It also computes AO while it's doing it. Which is what gives the best results.

In this image, it's using the Lumen. Like every other game, this isn't correct. There isn't enough self-shadowing. You can't get that kind of accuracy without RT.

I'm surprised that Lumen isn't using their RT functions from 4.26. It's all in there.

Lumen runs on the PS5, so it's great. RT only Metro doesn't run on the PS5, so it's bad. Only from this point of view the conversation actually makes sense. Otherwise we wouldn't see Snake post screenshots of flat and gamey looking games, telling everyone how they look so much better than RT, and a dozen people giving thumbs up.

Hope this helps

 

[jroc74]

So to you 'nothing' is better than 'something'? The price of the proprietary storage on one platform is within the standard price for similar products. It wasn't even necessary to purchase if you took advantage of cold storage, a feature given to the PS5 only recently.

In terms of internal storage your options on PS5 are...? This also assumes that the average consumer will purchase the correct drive once the bay is unlocked which historically has been to be an issue for someone not technically knowledgeable. Not sure how consumer friendly the current storage options are on PS5 but it's good to see them adopt some features that were available elsewhere for a while.

Consoles have always had proprietary accessories I don't know when that became an issue. Speaking of proprietary, Sony has cloud storage behind a paywall and that certainly doesn't seem consumer friendly. I assume you have an issue with that as well.

As far as internal storage....you do realize the only difference between the PS4 and PS5 is it used older hard drive technology that didnt need to have compatibility tests? Or as extensive as the PS5?

Hell, I fixed a broken PC (hard drive failed) by taking the harddrive that came in the PS3 and used that.

It wasnt an issue for the PS3, PS4...and once they do tests it wont be an issue for the PS5.

 

[Darius87]

Lumen runs on the PS5, so it's great. RT only Metro doesn't run on the PS5, so it's bad. Only from this point of view the conversation actually makes sense. Otherwise we wouldn't see Snake post screenshots of flat and gamey looking games, telling everyone how they look so much better than RT, and a dozen people giving thumbs up.

Hope this helps

i think people care more about overall graphics then just RT features while metro looks great but it's not big of a jump compared to UE5 demo it's just moderate improvement in some areas , clearly 8K textures + micropolygons triumphs over RT in visuals. i would take micropolygons + 8K textures over RT features everytime if i can't have both.
i know i'm comparing apple vs oranges but like i said people care about overall graphics.

 

[Bernd Lauert]

i think people care more about overall graphics then just RT features while metro looks great but it's not big of a jump compared to UE5 demo it's just moderate improvement in some areas , clearly 8K textures + micropolygons triumphs over RT in visuals. i would take micropolygons + 8K textures over RT features everytime if i can't have both.
i know i'm comparing apple vs oranges but like i said people care about overall graphics.

True, but if we're only talking about lighting (just like Alex did), there's no doubt that Metro has the best (as in, the most accurate) lighting in a video game, ever. It's an objective fact.

 

[sircaw]

Yep I'm shocked and I've heard even more concerning news...Our vrry own Riky , again from the rumors I've heard and please before you read remain sitted or go sit , would be pro Xbox too.

I know ,I know, this may sound surprising to anyone and maybe some of you will need an hour or two to get accustomed to this reality...
Maybe we can create a coping thread or something for those shocking revelations.

And wait there's more ....Have you heard of a guy named Bo_Hazem ?There are some rumors that he might be pro sony "GASP in shock".

I tell you this, i have been a bit concerned about Bo_Hazem lately, he seems to have a fetish for old frumpy meat..

For some reason, he is in love with the woman from Returnal, specifically her ancient butt.

He private messaged me yesterday saying, have you seen this costume, her arse looks incredible in it.

so in reality, it's not the game, it's not the graphics, it's not the incredible gameplay, but rather, it's a grab a granny butt.

I have him on ignore now.

 

[Ass of Can Whooping]

I tell you this, i have been a bit concerned about Bo_Hazem lately, he seems to have a fetish for old frumpy meat..

For some reason, he is in love with the woman from Returnal, specifically her ancient butt.

He private messaged me yesterday saying, have you seen this costume, her arse looks incredible in it.

so in reality, it's not the game, it's not the graphics, it's not the incredible gameplay, but rather, it's a grab a granny butt.

I have him on ignore now.

Hey don't knock it till you try it

Personally i've been having dreams of her tucking me into bed every night

Nothing beats big anime tiddies though

 

[M1chl]

The dev didn't even have to do work for this? I don't get how they are able to do all these system level enchantments... what else can they do like that?

More importantly, if its DX12u, it would be great if we get it on PC as well

Dev didn't have to work for BC on Xbox, if BC team decide to enhance the version, that's why there are not ideal result from the FPS boost.

But on X|S there are enforced 16xAF on X1 games, so no work from dev.

 

[Great Hair]

PS5 Is The Prefered Console Among Devs According to GDC 2021 Survey

Sony's PS5 is the lead favorite among developers next to PC in a new state of the industry survey held by GDC. Nintendo Switch claimed the third spot.

twistedvoxel.com

TLDR for the platform section (excluding breakdown of VR section and not accounting for Mobile):

Which Platform(s) most interest you as a developer?

• PC - 58%
• PS5 - 44%
• Switch - 38%
• XSX/S - 30%
• VR - 27%

The platform(s) of the current project?

• PC - 58%
• PS5 - 27%
• XSX/S - 24%
• Switch - 17%
• VR - 10%

The platform(s) of the next project?

• PC - 53%
• PS5 - 30%
• XSX/S - 25%
• Switch - 19%
• VR - 11%

 

[M1chl]

One of the best lighting system I saw was in Killzone Shadow Fall multiplayer. Numbers of dynamic lighting and transparency RGBA (+light effects) was incredible. And game uses Ray-Tracing reflections. 2013.

I love Killzone Shadow Fall, but as far as I know, I know about Ray traced sound and AI uses some ray traced stuff, which makes them not cheat, because rays are from their eyes and if they don't see you from the rock they don't engage. I don't remember anything about ray-traced reflection. And I doubt that's the case, I played a ton of this game. Right up to the point I sold my PS4 Pro last year.


Fucking Horizon, Killzone had to die for some Ubishit game.

 

[ToTTenTranz]

This bizarre fascination PC gamers have with tech over actual visuals really dilutes what makes visuals great in the first place. Tech is only a means to an end, cinematography is way more important than what rendering technique you are using to light the game.

Agreed, though not necessarily on PC gamers but a subset of the enthusiast tech press. That and some press+consumers whom Nvidia successfully convinced that a game only looks as good as the amount of light rays it's simulating in real time.


As much as I like Alex's commentary at a technical / analytical level, I think the DF folk shouting "BEST GRAPHICS EVER!!" at every single raytracing iteration is starting to gradually chip away at the credibility of what they think are "best graphics". Even if each one's personal opinion on what are the "best graphics" is a subjective term.
I think The Cherno's reaction videos end up feeling more authentic in this respect. The guy obviously knows a lot about technical game development and has no sponsors nor professional relationships he needs to cater to.


The latest Ratchet&Clank trailer is turning all the heads of the general audience, yet a couple of days later we see a DF video talking about how "transformative" an old-gen game with a RT patch looks.

 

[Insane Metal]

PS5 Is The Prefered Console Among Devs According to GDC 2021 Survey

Sony's PS5 is the lead favorite among developers next to PC in a new state of the industry survey held by GDC. Nintendo Switch claimed the third spot.

twistedvoxel.com

TLDR for the platform section (excluding breakdown of VR section and not accounting for Mobile):

Which Platform(s) most interest you as a developer?

• PC - 58%
• PS5 - 44%
• Switch - 38%
• XSX/S - 30%
• VR - 27%

The platform(s) of the current project?

• PC - 58%
• PS5 - 27%
• XSX/S - 24%
• Switch - 17%
• VR - 10%

The platform(s) of the next project?

• PC - 53%
• PS5 - 30%
• XSX/S - 25%
• Switch - 19%
• VR - 11%

Not that much of a difference tbh. Also PC >>>> everything

 

[Fafalada]

Consoles have always had proprietary accessories I don't know when that became an issue.

When it comes to storage expansion - it's literally always been an issue. MS has been on receiving end of that multiple times now (since this isn't their first time doing it) and so have Sony, Nintendo and others when they've done their own. Yes it's a common monetization practice, but that doesn't make it a consumer friendly one, and I've never heard anyone call it that in the past.

Not sure how consumer friendly the current storage options are on PS5 but it's good to see them adopt some features that were available elsewhere for a while.

External storage support has been done by both companies for two generations prior, so 'adopting' what exactly - their own history?
As for internal storage expansion - Sony's literally had this in every living room console for the past 21 years - the only thing PS5 changes is getting stricter with supported drives.

This also assumes that the average consumer

Average consumers don't buy storage expansions - if they did, all of these consoles would ship driveless and require a mandatory storage purchase.

 

[TheRedRiders]

Agreed, though not necessarily on PC gamers but a subset of the enthusiast tech press. That and some press+consumers whom Nvidia successfully convinced that a game only looks as good as the amount of light rays it's simulating in real time.


As much as I like Alex's commentary at a technical / analytical level, I think the DF folk shouting "BEST GRAPHICS EVER!!" at every single raytracing iteration is starting to gradually chip away at the credibility of what they think are "best graphics". Even if each one's personal opinion on what are the "best graphics" is a subjective term.
I think The Cherno's reaction videos end up feeling more authentic in this respect. The guy obviously knows a lot about technical game development and has no sponsors nor professional relationships he needs to cater to.


The latest Ratchet&Clank trailer is turning all the heads of the general audience, yet a couple of days later we see a DF video talking about how "transformative" an old-gen game with a RT patch looks.

Exactly my thoughts.

 

[IntentionalPun]

Load screens existed because it wasn’t possible to calculate and load up the world in real-time so they had to do everything in advance which would put more strain on the systems abilities.

Now you just turn your character and everything is drawn, AI is run etc. It no longer needs to hold all those things in memory for extensive periods of time since it can now operate on the fly.

I've had a CPU more powerful than the XSX/PS5 CPU for years on PC.. games that do very little asset loading but heavy simulation still have decent load times.

 

[IntentionalPun]

The crazy thing is that he hasnt learned anything. He literally just that this the BEST LIGHTING HES EVER WITNESSED IN A VIDEO GAME. Come the fuck on.
.
This bizarre fascination PC gamers have with tech over actual visuals really dilutes what makes visuals great in the first place. Tech is only a means to an end, cinematography is way more important than what rendering technique you are using to light the game.

Or maybe he and others have a different opinion?

I think both things are really cool... the new lighting engine in Metro is awesome, as are nicely lit cinematic vistas in other games that don't quite have the tech.

But TBH I would geek out way more over the interactive nature of the RT shadows/dynamic lighting in Metro than a gorgeous cinematic presentation. Why is that bizarre? Why do you seem so bothered by this?

 

[SlimySnake]

Looking good boys less than 14 hours to go!

way higher than i expected.

The latest Ratchet&Clank trailer is turning all the heads of the general audience, yet a couple of days later we see a DF video talking about how "transformative" an old-gen game with a RT patch looks.

To be fair to Alex, this video also had a behind the scenes look at their ray tracing engine. So this was likely in the making for a while. The video actually shows how easy it is to just turn the lighting on and just see it 'work'. So if it saves dev time, I am all for it. But of course, other non ray traced dynamic GI solutions also save time.

 

[VFXVeteran]

Were PBR shaders made to be used with standard rasterization techniques or can they also work with ray-traced lighting? Idk if this question makes any sense.

The PBR shader code math stays the same whether it's rasterization or RT. It's just one uses samples to evaluate the area of a light source while the raster version just evaluates a light source by a vector or point.

 

[VFXVeteran]

Agreed, though not necessarily on PC gamers but a subset of the enthusiast tech press. That and some press+consumers whom Nvidia successfully convinced that a game only looks as good as the amount of light rays it's simulating in real time.


As much as I like Alex's commentary at a technical / analytical level, I think the DF folk shouting "BEST GRAPHICS EVER!!" at every single raytracing iteration is starting to gradually chip away at the credibility of what they think are "best graphics".

Tbf, Alex never said that. He said "best lighting in a videogame ever". And he's objectively correct.

 

[Sinthor]

Hey don't knock it till you try it

Personally i've been having dreams of her tucking me into bed every night

Nothing beats big anime tiddies though

No matter whether it's your 'thing' or not, you have to respect a set of tig old biddies!

 

[kyliethicc]

Nothing beats big anime tiddies though

Well said Ass Can, you're a true gaymer just like Dark Mage.

 

[ToTTenTranz]

Tbf, Alex never said that. He said "best lighting in a videogame ever". And he's objectively correct.

And considering everything you actually see is light, so am I.

 

[DeepEnigma]

Those are using bounced diffuse lighting on a vector based single directional light (namely the sun) with inaccurate ambient occlusion for each light bounce. That's not the same complex lighting at all. RT lighting with emission uses local+sun light bounces by sampling an area instead of just a vector. It also computes AO while it's doing it. Which is what gives the best results.

In this image, it's using the Lumen. Like every other game, this isn't correct. There isn't enough self-shadowing. You can't get that kind of accuracy without RT.

I'm surprised that Lumen isn't using their RT functions from 4.26. It's all in there.

Holy cherry picked blurrovision screenshot, morpheus.

 

[VFXVeteran]

Holy cherry picked blurrovision screenshot, morpheus.

The game was moving too fast to get a good shot. But it's there - typical overly lit geometry while in shadow from a direct light source indexing GI voxels with screenspace AO instead of using RT to attenuate the light bounce with a multiply by an occlusion term.

 

[DeepEnigma]

The game was moving too fast to get a good shot. But it's there - typical overly lit geometry while in shadow from a direct light source indexing GI voxels with screenspace AO instead of using RT to figure out the triangles that are occluded from the GI light.

I get where you are coming from, even RT can overly light geometry as well, hence why we stress artists need to get creative and tone down brightness in areas so it looks like how your eyes will see it if you were there, rather than looking through a camera lens. Just like they do with film.