Support NeoGAF

[Bojji]

Morality's personal, but pretending it's pure abandonment is just convenient justification

PS Plus Premium has hundreds of emulated PS1/PS2/PSP classics available right now. If they truly 'didn't give a fuck,' those games wouldn't be trickling in and generating sub revenue

They're slowly expanding it, even if it's not the full open storefront we all want

Those games are just tiny fraction of libraries of PS1 and PS2.

I counted ~17 games here for PS4/PS5:

List of downloadable PlayStation games (PAL region) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Most PS2 games are "unreleased" on PS4/PS5:

List of downloadable PlayStation 2 games - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[yogaflame]

Both Sony and publishers don't care about 90+% of PSX games (they are not on PS4/PS5 stores and there is no option to play used copies), who cares if I download some obscure PS1 game? No one is making money on it anymore and no one cares (besides you).



It will lead to CFW and homebrew first.



More like PS3/PS4 era where hardly anyone had CFW during the life of the console.

Ill be honest. I bought allot of pirated games last ps1 and ps2 era. Last ps3 era I did not jailbreak my ps3 because i was afrad to damage my ps3 and not able to play online. But for ps4 and ps5 era, i really preferred the original copy which helps supports game developers.

 

[slrbomber]

It is, due to latency and bandwidth. But, depending on the PCIe lanes and generation, it can fetch a decent amount of data.

You can watch these two videos for when there is a video memory deficit that pushes data into system memory. Using a PCIe 5.0 mobo isnt going to have any


In this video its clearly demonstrated, newer PCIe but lower memory bandwidth wont improve anything.
A 16GB 5060ti using PCIe 3.0 outperforms an 8GB 5060 on PCIe 5.0 by over 60% since no data has to be fetched from system memory, every necessary asset in resident in vram. If the Steam Machine hits vram deficit and places that data in system memory it wont be able to match a system with a better gpu more memory and memory bandwidth despite pcie 5.0.


This video just demonstrates fundamentally why a vram memory deficit is bad. even on the same pcie board, fetching data into system memory during a vram memory deficit yields no noticeable benefit in performance.

So the Steam Machine just physically has a narrower bus width, lower capacity and not even PCIe 5.0 can compensate for that, base PS5 alone will always outperform it despite PCIe 4.0 since no gaming assets are ever resident in low bandwidth memory. If it had more VRAM then there would be significant gains in terms of texture quality at least. Like say 10-12GB of gddr6, but there's about 4.5GB more high bandwidth memory in the base PS5.

Contention of memory bandwidth is a problem is having one single pool, accesses by the CPU and the GPU. It's just a fact that even Sony has addressed in their presentations of consoles.
PC has some duplication of data, between pools, but it's not that big of a deal. The real problem with having 2 pools of memory is going through the PCIe bus.

You're comparing a first order constraint(GPU bandwidth, VRAM size) to a second order theoretical challenge from early PS4 days. Memory contention between the CPU and GPU if unaddressed by the PS5 would still outperform the Steam Machine's first order contraints of lower VRAM and bandwidth. But Sony has actually addressed any potential theoretical issues by designing the memory controller to smartly schedule access such that the CPU and GPU never thrash each other. The PS5 unified memory has no memory contention issues. As well the software APIs have CPU/GPU scheduling so devs simply have to drop data into unified memory without any worry about such a second order constraint. Memory contention only came about during early PS4 days and even then it was about designing around a fixed budget than unified memory is fundamentally flawed.

Yes, 32Mb of L3 cache helps a lot with reducing memory accesses. Around 30% at 4K, Around 45% at 1440p and around 55% at 1080p.
This is AMD's own data. And was also corroborated by nvidia, when they started using a big L2 cache as well.
So in practical terms the APU in the Steam Machine will have as much bandwidth as the PS5. And it will have the advantage of lower latency for anything that hits the L3 on the GPU.

As you can see in the slide you attached, its estimated you'd need above 64MB of L3 cache to start seeing compelling bandwidth gains with 120MB being the sweet spot. 32MB doesnt hit that threshold. So its quite a stretch to say the Steam Machine will have as much memory bandwidth as the PS5.

The CPU on the Steam machine is a Zen4 CPU. And this has huge advantages to the Zen2 CPU on the PS5.
One is IPC, due to 2 generations of improvements. The other is that Zen4 is a monolithic CPU. While the Zen2 on the PS5 is a 4+4 core CPU, so when data has to be shared across the 2 core complexes, there is a big performance hit.
The Zen4 CPU on the Steam deck probably has the full 32MB of L3 cache. While the PS5 only has 4Mb+4MB.
Worst yet, the PS5 CPU has to deal with high latency GDDR6, that hovers at around 140ns. The Zen4 CPU will deal with DDR5 with a latency of around 70ns.
So the CPU on the PS5 not only will have a lot more cache misses, due to having much less cache and having an older CPU front-end, but when it has to go to system memory it takes a bigger performance hit due to high latency.
The other problem is that the CPU on the PS5 runs with a max clock speed of 3.5Ghz. While the CPU on the Steam machine has a boost of up to 4.8Ghz. That is another 37% deficit, on top of the IPC.

I agree the Zen 4 cores are better and the CPU in the Steam Machine will be better but I think in games like GTA 6, PS5 CPU will provide the edge with the 2.5 extra cores considering the game engine is built for highly parallel multithreaded workloads. So yes in the vast majority of games Steam machine CPU is better. I dont want to go into too many cpu related things for example only 2 of the 6 cores in the steam machine can boost up to 4.8Ghz, but yes steam machine has better cpu.

 

[SScorpio]

Try harder. Delisting a game is it no longer being available for purchase most likely due to an expired license. Everyone that has a copy of it still has a copy and can continue to play it.

Instead, a game you purchased, that you might physically have the disk for and can install, and had single player elements. Which you can no longer play in any way because a company turned off servers. That's complete and utter bullshit.

And who said anything about piracy being morally correct? Piracy is the crime of copy infringement. It's not stealing or "theft". Theft is the act of taking something from someone which deprives them of that. An example would be a company taking away a person's ability to play a single player game. That's a pretty good example of stealing something.

All this legal mumbo jumbo can be confusing. But if you are going to mount up on a moral high horse and proclaim yourself superior to others via your virtuous actions. You really need to have your argument's ducks in a row. Else you just come off as a smooth brained Nintendiot.

 

[SScorpio]

Morality's personal, but pretending it's pure abandonment is just convenient justification

PS Plus Premium has hundreds of emulated PS1/PS2/PSP classics available right now. If they truly 'didn't give a fuck,' those games wouldn't be trickling in and generating sub revenue

They're slowly expanding it, even if it's not the full open storefront we all want

Tons being a small fraction of what was offered for purchase on the PS3 and is locked to systems that are no longer supported.

Sony does get props in that you can claim the PS4/PS5 copy for free if you owned the older version for a majority of these new releases, but not all.

And less than two dozen about of thousands of games for the PS1 alone isn't a "ton".

While the PS4 and PS5 don't support Audio CDs, their drives are still able to read the disks. Sony could have an software emulator that played any disk, and let you download digital copies of any of the games you previously bought. There's no need for updates for trophies, the original games just didn't have them.

Over the past decade we've seen many older games be ported or remastered to modern platforms. These include collections that were mostly just a frontend for an emulator and a handful of ROMs. And what happened? I don't have numbers but they kept coming so people must have bought them, I sure bought a bunch that I was interested in.

It's almost like not complaining that people are pirating old games, and instead making them commercially available will have people give you money for them instead.

Though I do see several "game developers" complaining in this thread. I have to wonder if they have brightly dyed hair and are just upset that people want to play good old games rather than the modern slop that they created. No one cares that your parents don't "get you". They still paid for your college and are still playing for your apartment so you can push out crap with "modern ideals" that no normal person actually wants to buy.

 

[kpopSuperstar]

And who said anything about piracy being morally correct? Piracy is the crime of copy infringement. It's not stealing or "theft". Theft is the act of taking something from someone which deprives them of that. An example would be a company taking away a person's ability to play a single player game. That's a pretty good example of stealing something.

Which games took away the single-player? apart from The Crew and licensed games.

 

[Fabieter]

Such a hypocrit quote from him considering most big games have steam drm on his platform.

 

[slrbomber]

I hope we get better BC with this ROM leak. I really miss a lot of old games on the PS2 and PS3 and it would be fun to play them on the PS5

 

[SportsFan581]

It's the same as when the master key for Blu-ray disc was leaked. There was no patching that without bricking all of the many millions of BD players already sold. There are already 80 million PS5's sold, Sony can't brick all of those consoles to create a new master key for PS5. It's Joever from the standpoint of preventing games from being decrypted. But PS5 owners who cares about this need to all unplug their consoles from the Internet now and not take any firmware updates since you still need an exploit pathway to get to the point of running decrypted games on a custom firmware

These units will go up in value now. Ebay scaplbers are probably looking around for the right units as we speak.

 

[SScorpio]

Such a hypocrit quote from him considering most big games have steam drm on his platform.

That Steam DRM that's extremely easy to crack? It's little more than a disk check. Nothing like the garage that is Denuvo that affects game performance and causes stuttering.

Valve does have some tech that's deeper but it's used for Vac which is anticheat. That needs to be able to find things than could be running at higher permissions.

Once a game is installed and ran once, it can be played offline without intermittent license checks or other BS.

It's not DRM free like GOG. But it's a far better compromise than the other solutions out there. Some publishers won't release with DRM and aren't on GOG.

 

[SScorpio]

Which games took away the single-player? apart from The Crew and licensed games.

The Crew is the major one that's recent. There are older games that have online DRM where the servers are now gone. You need to crack the game to play then even if installing off a legit disk.

Most games will lose multiplayer, or some type of leaderboard or other functionality when servers go away. But the game still works.

Though there are cases like the console game Rock Band Blitz. Without the server you can't earn power ups and multipliers which cripples the game. Sure you can still play it, but the experience is broken.

Again the licensed games were delisted so they aren't sold anymore. But anyone with a copy can still play them. It stinks if it was only available digitally as new people can't buy it and there's no used market they can turn to. But the game can still be legally played. So it's not even remotely the same thing as having something you bought taken away from you.

This is also an entirely different argument from online multiplayer only games going offline. At least with that you know there's something external going in. You don't expect a single player game to stop working one day after the publisher stops supporting it

 

[Fabieter]

That Steam DRM that's extremely easy to crack? It's little more than a disk check. Nothing like the garage that is Denuvo that affects game performance and causes stuttering.

Valve does have some tech that's deeper but it's used for Vac which is anticheat. That needs to be able to find things than could be running at higher permissions.

Once a game is installed and ran once, it can be played offline without intermittent license checks or other BS.

It's not DRM free like GOG. But it's a far better compromise than the other solutions out there. Some publishers won't release with DRM and aren't on GOG.

The point was gaben isnt any better as other cooperate suits so quoting him seems weird.

 

[Crayon]

Bazzite on a ps5 would be pretty cool. Wouldn't be the greatest for the heaviest aaa games with that setup, but it would still run them. Would be cool as htpc or at a desk. I think it's nice hardware for the price. Especially the pro with 2tb and the gpu headroom to make up for the assumed loss of efficient utilization and be able to keep up with current gen games.

Well we'll see how far this goes. They'll probably need to just eat shit on it. Wouldn't be the first console that got prolifically hacked and was still a success.

 

[Tobimacoss]

The console itself has a security processor that's got a private key burned into it's read only memory (ROM). This allows the console to verify (and thus, play) games that are inserted into the console from discs or to verify the authenticity of digital games while offline. This has to be possible unless Sony is ready to require an internet connection and disallow any offline play.

As it's engineered now, you can purchase a PS5 console and a game on a disc, never connect it to the internet, and still play that game. The console itself is the state of authority to determine what is genuine, such as the game on that disc. If they used a central online public key, the console could potentially be hacked using a man-in-the-middle attack that would tell the console that arbitrary code was actually valid.


They can absolutely patch this with a firmware update by generating a new security key and flashing it to this chip, but the problem of being able to run existing disc-based games offline (as I outlined above) goes into a catch-22 state. If you change this key, all existing disc-based games will now be considered unauthorized code. Every game (both disc and digital) would also have to be patched online to work with the new security key. Trying to run a disc based game offline (without the latest title update that has the new keys) on a patched console would throw an error.

They'll have to weigh doing this against the potential fallout of piracy vs the number of customer support issues they would face. Either way, this means people who are offline or on a firmware version that hasn't patched the new security key should be able to run whatever code they want. Having root-level access even means potentially installing modified (cracked) versions of the consoles later firmware revisions, as it is possible to do with the Switch and was popular on the PS3.

What about physical games that don't have full game on disc and require an internet download? Isn't that most physical AAA games these days?

Could Sony do some sort of trade in program for older discs to get the patched Digital licenses? That's one way to fix the older software, but yea, it's a PR and customer support nightmare to be able to pull it off.

They will just want to move to PS6 gen faster.

 

[Bojji]

What about physical games that don't have full game on disc and require an internet download? Isn't that most physical AAA games these days?

Could Sony do some sort of trade in program for older discs to get the patched Digital licenses? That's one way to fix the older software, but yea, it's a PR and customer support nightmare to be able to pull it off.

They will just want to move to PS6 gen faster.

I remember when PS3 was hacked and everyone was saying that "Sony is doomed" or that it can't be fixed... It was literally fixed by the next firmware.

IF something happens because these keys are now known it will be small group of people that will use CFW compared to normal paying customers that want access to PSN.