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Next-Gen PS5 & XSX |OT| Console tEch threaD

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jroc74

Phone reception is more important to me than human rights
I think that's proof that the footage wasn't faked. A render farm wouldn't leave those imperfections. If anything it's good news for PS5 owners.

Of course the gameplay footage isn’t faked oh my goodness what some people believe lol. Ratchet makes use of traditional lod so yes there’ll be some pop in and lod transitions noticeable 🙂. For the rest, Pixar movie 😉
Exactly.

Yeah, not really sure what the goal of that post was, lol.
 
So, Senjutsu was wrong all the time ( post 633 ). Why i'm not suprised. LOL


But nevertheless, his post here :

Real mature. I'm a douche because I disagree with you making up figures about what it takes to run things. I responded. You don't like the answer and that's my problem? Plz.

This is the quality of discussion on here. This is how mad some of you kids get whenever someone says something counter to what you want to hear. And what is the point of letting people like me post here? Go look at my previous posts where I cite evidence and direct demos and direct links from microsoft themselves, DF and from game developers. So people like me must mean *ding* *ding* xbox fan. Alright, this xbox fan will go back to enjoying his xbox and no longer post in the Playstation fan praise only thread. Bye now. Find it in your heart to forgive me?

50 cent laughing GIF


Calling others a kids and, of course, calling this thread a PS fan because, you know, he was wrong all the time. Just take an huge L for Xbox community.
 

onesvenus

Member
While I get what you are saying; I still don't understand how/why you and the other person you quoted speak as though you know for a fact how it will work.
Nobody outside Epic knows for a fact how UE5 works but you can do educated guesses.
Now, between two different guesses I'd always believe the one from people who have multiple years of experience on the field than the one from some random posters who constantly fail to grasp how some things work.
Can we be wrong? Obviously. Would I bet money on something ("No LOD system") that no computer graphics engineer would dare to say? Not a chance. As I said before, even Pixar in their offline renderers, which have memory and power orders of magnitude higher than what's on consoles, use discretized LOD levels. Do you really think it makes sense not to use them?

The problem with that technique "making sense" is we are talking insanely detailed models (they scale down to ~4k precision models for disk storage, but that's still massive).. and one of the bigger limitations is disk space. Even with compression halving space usage over last gen for a given model/texture or more... the numbers quoted are many times more than the compression advancements.. then you store multiple LOD levels? Games would be insanely
I think you are greatly overstimating mesh sizes. First, games already store multiple geometry LOD levels.
Let's say that the original mesh (LOD0) is an order of magnitude bigger than what they were on the previous gen and that LOD1 is a simplified mesh which has similar numbers to what LOD0 had on the previous gen. The only extra space you'll need is for the original mesh.
Second, and you'll have to take my word for it but I've worked with meshes of more than 100M triangles with a disk size of less than 500MB without any kind of modern compression.

What takes most of the disk space of a game are the textures, not the meshes. Another nice thing about such detailed meshes is that, with sub-millimeter edges, you can resort to simple per-vertex color instead of having a texture atlas. That's also space saved in comparison.
 
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onesvenus

Member
I think we tell the same story here, maybe I didn’t use the right words for you though 🙂. I also say there’ll be lod but decided by the engine, and on a sub pixel level so you won’t ever see it as a gamer.
You were talking about traditional LOD versus what Epic is doing with UE5/what you expect Sony first party engines to use.
I basically said that the same techniques that have been used for some years will still be used. They'll be refined but I don't think it will be anything groundbreaking. That's why I don't get this distinction.
What it is groundbreaking is not having to author them, not how they'll be used during rendering.
Ratchet makes use of traditional lod so yes there’ll be some pop in and lod transitions noticeable 🙂.
See? You talk about pop in as it's a consequence of "traditional lod" but it's not. You could refine each LOD level in real time to not create pop-in. Multiple games using what you call "traditional lod" do it.
The thing is that it'll always come down to a compromise between the time spent by the engine refining those meshes or doing other things. That's a decision the developers take, not something inherently with the LOD system used and that's why I think this distinction is not a good one
 
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PaintTinJr

Member
You are right that SDF in the mathematical sense have unlimited resolution but almost all the big implementations of it store them discretized in a grid-like volume texture.

The voxel size is what effectively constitutes the LOD level. With a bigger grid size you are going in bigger steps when raymarching but the volume has less resolution.

I used polygonal meshes in the example described in the post you quote because I think folks are more used to polygons and would be easier to understand. And even if Nanite used SDF, those are not really well suited for everything. Animated characters for example would be hard so I'm sure it will be a mixed approach where some meshes are rendered via SDF and others aren't. These last kind of meshes will be using LODs IMHO.

Having said that, I can obviously be wrong. I think it aligns quite well with the restrictions Epics claims about Nanite and with Brian Karis prior research but it might be personal bias about interest for that kind of rendering.

Even if that weren't the case, though, I think we can all agree that "having no LOD system" is bullshit and that traditional LOD methods won't be removed (except for a few simple cases) for the near future. Improving the progressive-meshes-like techniques to further refine a LOD and to make transitions between them almost invisible and not having to author LODs manually, does not mean they won't be used, which is the initial claim I was debunking.

Let me take advantage of this post to ask you something in return: I'd love if the few forum posters with more graphics computing knowledge here like you wouldn't let these misconceptions to be spread. It's great to speculate about what they are doing, but spawning technical discussions with things that are obviously wrong only brings confusion to the table and are only used as fuel for trolling (see all the "R&C is still using traditional LOD systems", "PS5 won't use LODs" or "Xbox can only render 5x less polygons than the PS5" posts across the forum in other threads).
I completely appreciate your headsup about SDFs, and far superior knowledge on the subject, so thank you for that, and I empathise with the last part of your post, and on balance of probabilities suspect you are probably correct - about LoDs still being used in the Nanite part of the rendering, even if it is using SDFs.

However, in saying that, from the introductory SDF info I got from these two links below, I'm probably leaning more towards no LoDs in nanite for various reasons.
Raymarching SDFs (Signed Distance Fields, or Functions sometimes)

Examples of basic SDF geometry

But just in case our definitions of what no LoDs would be are different, I'll first make my distinction. IMO a LoD level - much like a mipmap - is a discrete self contained/standalone version of the full item, just at a lower level of detail.

By comparison, I don't consider signals made up of multiple signal parts, eg Jpeg, MP3, etc to have LoD levels, primarily because the only level that represents the signal by itself, is the lowest detail base signal - all the other higher order components that need added to reconstruct the full signal, don't represent the signal, but just some aspect of it.

Any how, my main reasonings behind why I think an SDF Nanite solution wouldn't have any LoDs is as follows.

SDFs have seemingly been around for quite some time, and I don't think just formulating the best of existing real-time SDF techniques for use on new powerful consoles and putting them in a toolchain with a 2-way converter for megascans and AtomView assets is enough for Unreal engine 5's sales pitch. And even if it was, does it not seem odd to you, that UE5 nanite code is still under NDA for techniques that would already be in the public domain? I also think that from the way they've bullishly suggested that nanite could have handled massively more geometry, rendered at full 4k60 without slow down- if lumen wasn't the bottleneck - leans me to thinking nanite is a very simple solution that doesn't care about what it is encoding and rendering.

On the technical side , to achieve that, I would be expecting Epic to have looked at procedurally representing megascans/atomview assets with just one repeating general purpose SDF primitive - a triangle - and like a JPEG encoder, are (3D) quantising the (normalised model space) asset with their SDF primitive to generate a base signal; by starting at the furthest visible distance - in some standard Frustum setup with a 4K viewport - and continuing towards the near frustum clip plane.

Naturally, if they have been able to achieve something like a JPEG style of signal representation, then I would expect the computational cost of rendering the complex items at distance to automatically be tiny, and as they fill the screen, the cost would be massive, but because the union with other SDFs in the scene would eliminate the other SDF items' higher order workloads, because those SDFs were occluded, the expected computational cost would even out mostly, would be my way of thinking if that was the solution.
 
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Imtjnotu

Member
ad LOD, pop up etc .. watching 1080p shit YT IQ ..

Ratchet PS5

9:37 - grass pop up /middle centre part of the screen around the rock/
10:25 - abrupt LOD change /middle centre right, branches, bushes round tree/
12:45 - shadow pop up /middle centre, on da road/
seems like it will be ironed out. it isnt the entire scene and infact seems to only be a small screen space compared to the last two gens where it was the entire frame
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
To be honest, I'm already tired of the same graphic imperfections on PS 3-4-5. The same type of pop-ups, at the same distance. I'm watching disgusting 1080p video and it's striking.
I am not a fan of pop ins and LOD management on current gen games. It really bothers me at times. Here is a screenshot I took of GoT last year, one of the best looking games of last gen and this foliage LOD in the distance bothered me so much I decided to take a screenshot.

EeUHGLwWsAAuZBU


So while I sympathize with your complaints, I have yet to notice it in the many R&C videos I have seen so far. The game looks exceptional to say the least. It boasts level of detail never before seen in a game.


What I see here is that the LOD in the distance remained the same even after the cutscene transitioned to gameplay. The LOD in distant objects is just like it is for objects right in front of you. We are already seeing a massive improvement over last gen games like GoT pictured above.

The game is a launch window game after all. It doesnt seem to be using the UE5 mesh systems to eliminate pop-ins and that's understandable. I dont believe the pop-in you noticed is a failure of the PS5 hardware. We've already seen that the hardware can do it in the UE5 demo. The R&C demo is more than twice the resolution of the UE5 demo at native 4k 30 fps compared to the 1440p 30 fps UE5 demo. They couldve used the 2x GPU power to completely eliminate pop-in if they wanted to settle for 1440p. I am guessing they felt a native 4k presentation was far more valuable than eliminating a few pop-ins here and there.

There is also an interview with their technical lead who said they didnt know what the hardware looked like in the early days. Artists were coming to him and asking whats possible, and he said I have no idea, I dont have the PS5 hardware. So thats probably the reason why they couldnt implement a UE5 style mesh system that takes full advantage of primitive shaders.
 
To be honest, I'm already tired of the same graphic imperfections on PS 3-4-5. The same type of pop-ups, at the same distance. I'm watching disgusting 1080p video and it's striking.

We are only at the beginning of this generation, and I think this game is not perfect but already impressive at this level. It will progress, pretty sure of that.
 
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SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
I'll take first option over the second any day of the week.
1440p with 60fps+RT
Keep in mind that Miles had a downgrade in several other aspects aside from just a reduction in pixels to 1440p. The crowd density was much lower, the lighting quality was lower, and traffic as well. The ray tracing resolution was cut down to 720p from 1080p as well. Insomniac was up front about those changes and they were listed right next to the graphics profiles so you knew what you were getting.

I'd be curious to see what downgrades are made here. There arent many NPCs here, but its possible they reduce the amount of vehicles in the skyboxes and reduce the lighting and environment quality somewhat. Typically on PC, I can just double the framerate just by reducing the resolution by half but Insomniac had to make several other concessions in Miles which is curious.

Personally, I plan to do a 30 fps run like I did with Miles then switch to 60 fps for harder difficulties, NG+ and trophies. Did the same for GoW, SOTC as well and it made me appreciate their visual fidelity a lot more. Especially SOTC which has some of the best grass blades ever and the 1080p 60 fps mode muddles them together and completely ruins the quality of the foliage.
 
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SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
lol someone asked DF about Insomniac loading data in and out of VRAM on player turns. Known SSD hater, Alex, would like more information before commenting and still ended up downplaying it. lol

Timestamped:



He brings up "concerns" about the speed and latency of getting things in and out of memory even though insomniac literally confirmed Cerny's claim that you could do it on a player camera turn. Clearly, the speed and latency is no longer a concern because you can literally do it on a player camera controlled turn. He then speculates that we dont know what the benefits are. I mean the article mentions how the benefits are more detailed worlds.

For those who arent aware of Alex's crusade against the SSD and I/O of the PS5. This is him getting called out for downplaying it last year, throwing a fit, crying to mods, and getting both posters he quoted banned in the process.
4sQ9dNU.png


We now finally have proof that the SSD and I/O combined to bring a more detailed world in Ratchet, and he wants to wait and see. Umm, how about you pick up the phone and call Insomniac? They contact studios all the time over some framedrops and have no real access to Insomniac? Even John and Richard just shrugged this off. It looks really unprofessional for them to just punt it off like that when they can just say, "hey, we need more detail on this so we are going to contact Insomniac and see if we can get that."
 
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lol someone asked DF about Insomniac loading data in and out of VRAM on player turns. Known SSD hater, Alex, would like more information before commenting and still ended up downplaying it. lol

Timestamped:



He brings up "concerns" about the speed and latency of getting things in and out of memory even though insomniac literally confirmed Cerny's claim that you could do it on a player camera turn. Clearly, the speed and latency is no longer a concern because you can literally do it on a player camera controlled turn. He then speculates that we dont know what the benefits are. I mean the article mentions how the benefits are more detailed worlds.

For those who arent aware of Alex's crusade against the SSD and I/O of the PS5. This is him getting called out for downplaying it last year, throwing a fit, crying to mods, and getting both posters he quoted banned in the process.
4sQ9dNU.png


We now finally have proof that the SSD and I/O combined to bring a more detailed world in Ratchet, and he wants to wait and see. Umm, how about you pick up the phone and call Insomniac? They contact studios all the time over some framedrops and have no real access to Insomniac? Even John and Richard just shrugged this off. It looks really unprofessional for them to just punt it off like that when they can just say, "hey, we need more detail on this so we are going to contact Insomniac and see if we can get that."


They really shouldn't dismiss this because the I/O is pretty important for Sony. I mean they have a ton of hardware just dedicated to it in the console. As people that do comparisons it would benefit them to understand the tech a little better.
 

assurdum

Banned
lol someone asked DF about Insomniac loading data in and out of VRAM on player turns. Known SSD hater, Alex, would like more information before commenting and still ended up downplaying it. lol

Timestamped:



He brings up "concerns" about the speed and latency of getting things in and out of memory even though insomniac literally confirmed Cerny's claim that you could do it on a player camera turn. Clearly, the speed and latency is no longer a concern because you can literally do it on a player camera controlled turn. He then speculates that we dont know what the benefits are. I mean the article mentions how the benefits are more detailed worlds.

For those who arent aware of Alex's crusade against the SSD and I/O of the PS5. This is him getting called out for downplaying it last year, throwing a fit, crying to mods, and getting both posters he quoted banned in the process.
4sQ9dNU.png


We now finally have proof that the SSD and I/O combined to bring a more detailed world in Ratchet, and he wants to wait and see. Umm, how about you pick up the phone and call Insomniac? They contact studios all the time over some framedrops and have no real access to Insomniac? Even John and Richard just shrugged this off. It looks really unprofessional for them to just punt it off like that when they can just say, "hey, we need more detail on this so we are going to contact Insomniac and see if we can get that."

This guy will have a rude awake in the next couple of years
 

LucasBR

Member
lol someone asked DF about Insomniac loading data in and out of VRAM on player turns. Known SSD hater, Alex, would like more information before commenting and still ended up downplaying it. lol

Timestamped:



He brings up "concerns" about the speed and latency of getting things in and out of memory even though insomniac literally confirmed Cerny's claim that you could do it on a player camera turn. Clearly, the speed and latency is no longer a concern because you can literally do it on a player camera controlled turn. He then speculates that we dont know what the benefits are. I mean the article mentions how the benefits are more detailed worlds.

For those who arent aware of Alex's crusade against the SSD and I/O of the PS5. This is him getting called out for downplaying it last year, throwing a fit, crying to mods, and getting both posters he quoted banned in the process.
4sQ9dNU.png


We now finally have proof that the SSD and I/O combined to bring a more detailed world in Ratchet, and he wants to wait and see. Umm, how about you pick up the phone and call Insomniac? They contact studios all the time over some framedrops and have no real access to Insomniac? Even John and Richard just shrugged this off. It looks really unprofessional for them to just punt it off like that when they can just say, "hey, we need more detail on this so we are going to contact Insomniac and see if we can get that."


I really don't understand why Alex is so against PlayStation and its features, is clear to everyone how powerful and quick PS5 is, Xbox also.
 

assurdum

Banned
That's funny, I've been following them for the past 2 years or so and Richard wasn't so biased towards to MS or against Sony as Alex is. Or maybe I didn't pay much attention to it.
If you pay attention to the Leadbetter narrative, he was shocked to the first face off result and turned around to the most desperate excuse to justify such miniscule gap when developers for months repeated how close both hardware were in terms of raw performance.
 

jroc74

Phone reception is more important to me than human rights
Small chance we get some nuggets about the PS5 hardware/software.


Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales provided a unique set of challenges for Insomniac. It had to push forward the state of the art on PS4. It had to deliver stunning PS5-only features. And it needed to be completed a scant two years after the first Spider-Man title. This talk looks at how we pushed our technology forward on multiple fronts to address these challenges. Among other topics, we'll discuss the multiple overlapping approaches to transforming our existing city into a fresh, wintry, holiday environment. We'll discuss how we removed perceptible loading on a platform that upended all the constraints we'd conquered in the previous gen. We'll cover how we delivered our first 60fps console title since 2009. And we'll pay special attention to the iterative development of the ray-traced reflections that became the game's standout technical feature on the PS5.

Takeaway
Attendees will understand how Insomniac approached development of a "next-gen" launch title, and how time constraints, creative solutions, and a few stumbles led to the unique advances seen in Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales.

Yeah, this is gonna be good, since its a cross gen PS4 and PS5 game. The one for Rift Apart (hopefully there will be one) will also be one to watch for.
 
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On the resolution matter: gone are the days of higher res = better image quality. Of course you can't simply run a game at 600p and expect it to look good, but I'll take 1440p + high res assets + all the bells and whistles over 2160p with medium res assets and gimped lighting, for example. Consoles have limited resources and compromises ALWAYS have to be made.
 
Because he is perfectly conscious about the Leadbetter preference. He think to need to kiss his ass and fit his narrative.
Alex is a PC-only player. He doesn't care about consoles, and that's ok. He certainly gets more excitement from new technology featured in the Xbox consoles since Windows will eventually benefit from those.

Regarding the whole "SSD in open-world games" topic, I can see where Alex is going in his argument. Watching recent GDC presentations from Guerrilla Games and Insomniac, it seems procedural placement/authoring is a technique that maybe wouldn't benefit much from the SSD's huge bandwidth. But who knows, things can change and I'm sure having a 100x improvement on storage performance can mean great things for the future.

Personnally, I'm a believer, in both PS5 and XSX (since both consoles were engineered with improved data streaming in mind). Surely the PS5's SSD isn't as fast as it is just to reduce loading times. There must be something much greater than this and I can't wait to see what it can be.
 
They really shouldn't dismiss this because the I/O is pretty important for Sony. I mean they have a ton of hardware just dedicated to it in the console. As people that do comparisons it would benefit them to understand the tech a little better.

Oh, Alex does understand the tech... but only as far as it benefits his platform of choice.

What is Alex's platform of choice, you ask? It's certainly not PS, nor Nintendo, nor even Xbox or even PC....

It's raytracing!!
goats GIF
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
On the resolution matter: gone are the days of higher res = better image quality. Of course you can't simply run a game at 600p and expect it to look good, but I'll take 1440p + high res assets + all the bells and whistles over 2160p with medium res assets and gimped lighting, for example. Consoles have limited resources and compromises ALWAYS have to be made.
Yep. Same here. I remember how DF had to be told that the UE5 demo was 1440p because they couldnt pixel count it. At that point, does resolution really matter?

I think Returnal using a 1080p image as base is very impressive. I certainly couldnt tell. I thought it was a 1440p 60 fps title like Demon Souls this whole time.

Whats intriguing is Insomniac going with a native 4k image for R&C. DS was always conceived as a 60 fps title according to Bluepoint, but Insomniac has shown R&C at 30 fps this whole time. I wonder why they went with native 4k over 1620p with TAA like PS4 Pro Spiderman games.
 

elliot5

Member
It's pretty pathetic seeing the mob crusade against Alex because he dares "question the power of the SSD" and Rift Apart (even though nothing he said in the video is obscene or downplaying Sony's precious system). He just wants more detail on how they did what they did utilizing that SSD, and what's loaded in RAM at any given time. Chill the fuck out.
 
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jroc74

Phone reception is more important to me than human rights
It's pretty pathetic seeing the mob crusade against Alex because he dares "question the power of the SSD" and Rift Apart (even though nothing he said in the video is obscene or downplaying Sony's precious system). He just wants more detail on how they did what they did utilizing that SSD, and what's loaded in RAM at any given time. Chill the fuck out.
I think its a lil more to it than that. Anytime ppl here can dumb it down for some of us on here to at least get an idea of whats going on, and he acts like there are no other ways to get the info he wants....well.....

Insomniac tweeted out in general terms what was going on. There is no way he can at least come with an educated guess? Like he did with Halo Infinite lighting/why it was looking flat?

I guess some folks pick n choose when to speculate, what to speculate on.

🤷‍♂️

Honestly, what I'm starting to see is ppl that originally doubted just how game changing the SSD's were going to be are in awe with what Insomniac has shown.


In a game that ships in a few weeks.
 
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elliot5

Member
I think its a lil more to it than that. Anytime ppl here can dumb it down for some of us on here to at least get an idea of whats going on, and he acts like there are no other ways to get the info he wants....well.....

Insomniac tweeted out in general terms what was going on. There is no way he can at least come with an educated guess? Like he did with Halo Infinite lighting/why it was looking flat?

I guess some folks pick n choose when to speculate, what to speculate on.

🤷‍♂️

Honestly, what I'm starting to see is ppl that originally doubted just how game changing the SSD's were going to be are in awe with what Insomniac has shown.


In a game that ships in a few weeks.
Well it's pretty easy to explain why Infinite looked bad in that lighting condition given the PBR materials and set up.

He wants more technical explanation like what you get from a GDC talk other than "haha SSD go brrr". It's much easier to commentate on what's presented visually than what is behind the scenes, literally.
 
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