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[K' Dash]

Nothing looks next gen this year.

Alan Wake does, just not on PS5... yet.

 

[Gaiff]

So you guy's entire idea of "next gen" experience is graphics?

Gameplay hasn't really evolved in years and it doesn't seem like it will anytime soon. The only hope I have for a true evolution in gameplay is when VR will truly take off. For the next few years, we'll just be playing better looking games at higher resolutions and frame rates.

 

[Dream-Knife]

Next gen started in 2018 with RTX.

 

[HeWhoWalks]

Nothing looks next gen this year.

Define next gen.

 

[Paulxo87]

Demons souls was there day one. And still top 5 tech/visually

 

[Danjin44]

Gameplay hasn't really evolved in years and it doesn't seem like it will anytime soon. The only hope I have for a true evolution in gameplay is when VR will truly take off. For the next few years, we'll just be playing better looking games at higher resolutions and frame rates.

I'm not VR player, so I dont care for that type of "evolution".

I'm more in to games giving me interesting combat like controlling two character at same time in action games like in Astral Chain.

 

[CamHostage]

- Alan Wake is presumably the first game in the west that uses Mesh Shaders (first one is some Chinese MMO called Justice) and barely works on older GPUs. It's completely broken on Pascal and isn't very playable on RDNA1 either.

...That we know of.

Alan Wake 2 is probably is first outside of UE5 releases using Nanite, but "mesh shader" (or "primitive shader", depending on the platform and parlance and how picky people are about the differences) actually isn't something that will get promoted in bulletpoints of tech the way raytracing has been. We almost didn't know about AW2 using mesh shaders until the specs came out and Remedy said, "Oh yeah, this game will probably not work on anything slightly outdated because of all the mesh shader use..." to which gamers went, "Wha-wha-wha, mesh shaders??"

Mesh Shader and its cousins hit gamers like a lightning bolt when we first saw "infinite polygons" in Nanite demos way back when, but you don't seem to see developers losing their minds the same way over this type of virtualized geometry system in their projects if you look around in development chats. And in launched UE5 games, you are arguably not seeing the radical reinvention of polygonal graphics that we expected when we saw Nanite demos back in 2020. It's cool shit, it's a big part of the future of realtime graphic implementation, (and it's apparently a lot of work to replace the company's whole geometry pipeline to move into mesh shaders full time, so even the big guys have been slow to bring their own flavor of it to use or even fully adopt UE5's Nanite system,) but it's not the magic all-graphics-are-now-infinitely-awesome technology we imagined it to be back when we first saw this tech.

BTW, PC Gamer did a nice layman's explanation of the current state of Mesh Shaders and why tech shown in 2019/2020 still is rare in our games (and is rarely blowing our f***ing minds even when it's used) in 2023.

Mesh shaders explained: What are they, what's the big fuss, and why are they only in Alan Wake 2?

Why it's taken so many years for mesh shaders to actually be used in a game.

www.pcgamer.com

And, here's a less user-friendly but still informative technical description of the Mesh Shader (and companion Amplification Shader) approach to a streamlined rendering pipeline.

Meshing around with shaders coming with DirectX Ultimate

Mesh Shading comes with DirectX updates; and UL benchmarks measure its value

www.jonpeddie.com

 

[CGNoire]

...And yet there still arent enough titles pushing the system that Im also interested in to even motivate me to buy one of these consoles.

 

[Raonak]

Or maybe it started when the consoles came out?

I mean, demons souls is still one of the best looking games out there.

 

[rofif]

Alan Wake 2 is not THAT good looking ... at least not on consoles due to worst image quality this gen.
The most consistently impressive game for me this year is hogwarts probably. perfect image quality and every mode is good which is a rarity.
The highest highs is FF16 or Alan Wake 2. But I am so soured on AW2 because of it's IQ and ending that I am having a hard time giving it credit.

 

[Feel Like I'm On 42]

It's only now that I'm starting to feel that the last-gen consoles and old PCs are really starting to become outdated.

- Alan Wake is presumably the first game in the west that uses Mesh Shaders (first one is some Chinese MMO called Justice) and barely works on older GPUs. It's completely broken on Pascal and isn't very playable on RDNA1 either.

- The Phantom Liberty expansion of Cyberpunk abandoned the last-gen consoles and playing it now, I understand why. The sheer scale and number of elements on screen would demolish their already frail frame rates. Kudos to CDPR for that.

- Playstation no longer releases AAA titles for the PS4. The last one was GOWR in November 2022. Since then, the focus has entirely shifted to next-gen with major titles such as FF XVI and Spider-Man 2.

- Xbox no longer releases AAA titles for the Xbox One either. All AAA games in 2023 have been Series X/PC-only.

- DirectStorage is seeing a slow but verifiable adoption with Forspoken pioneering its usage in January 2023 and Rift Apart following in May.

- Path tracing on PC has also come to a few select titles such as Alan Wake 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Portal 2

- The adoption of UE5 (lol) along with its new features such as Nanite and Lumen.

- SSDs are increasingly becoming highly recommended, if not mandatory in the latest games.

So, has the transition period finally ended? I think that when we'll do a retrospective a few years from now, 2023 will be considered the year where next-gen started and 2024 when it really took off. I'd say Late 2014 to Late 2020 was last-gen. Early 2021 to Early 2023 was cross-gen. Mid 2023 to now is next-gen. Of course, this means that the concept of "generation" is even more nebulous, seeing that the PS4 was released in November 2013 and in 2023 is still somewhat supported. I can easily the PS5 being supported well into 2032 and the transition period getting even longer with the PS6.

That's a waste of two years then. We're two years behind with these consoles in terms of how powerful they could be. If Sony and MS had waited until 2023 to launch ps5/sx we would've actually had a generation that can handle REAL ray tracing, dynamic gi, and next gen geometry all at the same time at 30 fps and with performance mode that doesn't have to sacrifice so much.

 

[Feel Like I'm On 42]

Define next gen.

PC with a 3080 and above ...able to do a full suite of RT with great image quality, close to 60 fps, with lots of geometric density and with real time gi.

 

[Tams]

The next gen starts when I say it does.

 

[phant0m]

Yes, and sadly it seems this gen is already tapped out on horsepower. Anything that does actually look next gen runs at 30fps.

 

[Dream-Knife]

That's a waste of two years then. We're two years behind with these consoles in terms of how powerful they could be. If Sony and MS had waited until 2023 to launch ps5/sx we would've actually had a generation that can handle REAL ray tracing, dynamic gi, and next gen geometry all at the same time at 30 fps and with performance mode that doesn't have to sacrifice so much.

Probably not.

AMD Radeon RX 7600 Specs

AMD Navi 33, 2655 MHz, 2048 Cores, 128 TMUs, 64 ROPs, 8192 MB GDDR6, 2250 MHz, 128 bit

www.techpowerup.com

Only about 9% faster in raster, and 8% in RT.

 

[Thick Thighs Save Lives]

The next gen starts when I say it does.

 

[CamHostage]

That's a waste of two years then. We're two years behind with these consoles in terms of how powerful they could be. If Sony and MS had waited until 2023 to launch ps5/sx we would've actually had a generation that can handle REAL ray tracing, dynamic gi, and next gen geometry all at the same time at 30 fps and with performance mode that doesn't have to sacrifice so much.

Not for $500 still, and not in greater quantities/qualities that would separate a generational divide definitively beyond the leap already taken.

If you want to wait forever, sure, in 2030 or 2050 we're going to have machines which will make these current boxes seem like relics of the past (...hopefully.) But you can miss everything by waiting for the perfection.

 

[SF Kosmo]

Path traced Alan Wake and Cyberpunk are the first glimpses of the NEXT generation.

 

[roosnam1980]

The next gen starts when I say it does.

 

[64gigabyteram]

Gameplay hasn't really evolved in years and it doesn't seem like it will anytime soon.

1 word. Physics.

 

[Rickyiez]

I'm waiting for ND or Rockstar game for this gen for some visual fest

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

Next gen as defined by slightly better graphics? Sure, maybe, who cares?

Next gen as defined by enabling new types of games to be made not possible on prior gen systems? No. Hell no.

Hopefully we see some special stuff in 2024.

 

[semiconscious]

mesh shaders, path tracing, & nanite & lumen, eh? it's unfortunate, but i'm beginning to think that i wouldn't recognize a next-gen game if you shoved my head into it...

 

[darrylgorn]

I mean, next gen could've started at the beginning of the cycle but we needed time to get people used to 20 fps stutterfests.

 

[Bernardougf]

Next gen for me started with Demons Souls as soon as I bought my Ps5 and also was able to play every game that I wanted to play at 60 fps .... so... couldn't give a bigger fuck about people that wants pretty pretty lights at 15 fps

 

[HeWhoWalks]

PC with a 3080 and above ...able to do a full suite of RT with great image quality, close to 60 fps, with lots of geometric density and with real time gi.

Ehhhhhhhhh, plenty of next (current) gen games that don't do all of that

 

[NinjaBoiX]

But the Next-gen wouldn't fully start until 2030. So a PS5 Pro makes even MORE sense now.

Yup, as evidence by this very thread's existence, this gen is going to be more drawn out than previous ones imo.

It's just come about as a huge shift in rendering has, I'm seeing the Pro models being a stop-gap in lieu of the usual 5-6 year console generations, I think it could be an 8 year generation with Pro models slapped in the middle.

 

[Pimpbaa]

Diminishing returns have kicked in hard. The last big graphical leap for consoles will be full RT (PS6 and the next xbox). Biggest bottlenecks now and more so in the future are the capability of devs and bloated engines like UE5.