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Team Asobi Says Astro Bot Pushed PS5 Processing Power "To Its Limits"

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
But who care if it is pushing PS5 to limits or not, the fact it’s doing something fun with tech to give fun experience but no only thing GAF cares about is if it’s using ray tracing or hight texture or other nonsense.

And then they go back complaining why games are less interactive.

I agree, but the supposedly "contentious" point of the dev saying they had to optimize really well to achieve their goals is something that he should rightly be proud of.

And seeing people disregarding that on the basis that "x game looks better to them" is so staggeringly ignorant that I'm really having to restrain myself from stating the full extent of my disdain in the harshest possible terms.

It just shows that despite claims of modern software "not being properly optimized" a lot of the audience wouldn't recognize actual optimal code if someone beat them over the head with it!
 

nemiroff

Gold Member
It's fine for the developer to talk about it and feel good about what they've done. The weirdness mostly come from using it as a main headline.
 
I'm talking relative performance

jaguar became a meme because high end desktop CPUs was 3x-4x faster than it. and guess what, high end desktop CPUs at the moment have started to become 3x-4x faster than a zen 2 cpu



and that is with 3600 having more cache and higher frequency than consoles (a 3700x wouldn't change this result much)

if something that is 3x faster than a 5800x launches tomorrow, I'd call 5800x a jaguar tier performance CPU too. just saying.

The performance we see on the 3600 is bad but not because of the chip itself but because of horrible programming.
 

Danjin44

The nicest person on this forum
There's little to get.

What I don't get is why it bothers people so much?
It's just how I see the game. It's not even meant as a negative.
giphy.gif
 

PaintTinJr

Member
The first one is literally starfield. Those kind of blobby water effects came and went because there aint a lot of use to them. Even in astrobot its there mostly for visual fluff, since they could've just done it like portal 2 (and some would argue it looks better that way too)
But all the toilet rolls are just instancing, are they not? They aren't individually unrolling, deforming or animating differently, are they - just different rotations and positions?

Astro bot's simulations aren't just fire the inconsequential fx to the GPU, they are particles that are unique and feedback with impact to the surrounding for the duration of the simulation - as in the sponge Astro bot IIRC.
 

ArtHands

Thinks buying more servers can fix a bad patch
Well yeah. It shows. The amount of interactivity with the environment is fantastic. Some of you have forgotten that video games are supposed to be fun and whimsical sometimes.

I guess so. I wouldn’t have guess since I also play on PC. Now I know what is the technical ceiling of PS5 here.
 

reinking

Gold Member
I guess so. I wouldn’t have guess since I also play on PC. Now I know what is the technical ceiling of PS5 here.
I also play on PC. I enjoy all platforms for what they offer. PC has its benefits but that doesn't dismiss what consoles offer and what Team Asobi achieved with Astro Bot.
 

ArtHands

Thinks buying more servers can fix a bad patch
I also play on PC. I enjoy all platforms for what they offer. PC has its benefits but that doesn't dismiss what consoles offer and what Team Asobi achieved with Astro Bot.

Ok? I also play on all platforms (and I literally have this game too), which gives me a larger scope of things to see from the technical standpoint, just not from the console-only technical standpoint. But now we have a visual representative of the technical ceiling of what PS5 has to offer, can't say this is what I expected. But if that's impressive to console fans, great for them.
 

Guilty_AI

Member
But all the toilet rolls are just instancing, are they not? They aren't individually unrolling, deforming or animating differently, are they - just different rotations and positions?

Astro bot's simulations aren't just fire the inconsequential fx to the GPU, they are particles that are unique and feedback with impact to the surrounding for the duration of the simulation - as in the sponge Astro bot IIRC.
Both starfield and astrobot here are spawing physics objects with proper, full physics simulation - and yes, both are also instancing the same object in the same scene, or a few variations of the same object with astrobot, this does not make much difference.

If what you meant by "instancing" was that Starfield was sharing the same physics calculation for all the toilet papers, its very clearly not.
 

jroc74

Phone reception is more important to me than human rights
How many others games, on consoles, pushed physics the way AtroBot did and at locked 60fps?
Thank you.

Drive by hot takes from ppl that clearly didnt play the game....lol.

And if they did....I can safely start dismissing their opinions on games. Astro is a technical achievement when you factor in everything going on in the game. The mouse level alone is a wtf moment. Sound design included.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Ok? I also play on all platforms (and I literally have this game too), which gives me a larger scope of things to see from the technical standpoint, just not from the console-only technical standpoint. But now we have a visual representative of the technical ceiling of what PS5 has to offer, can't say this is what I expected. But if that's impressive to console fans, great for them.
Equivalent of “some of my best friends are PS5s”… who said this was “visually” the top end of what the console can do? You keep trying to spin this into negative news or find a negative point here. You do you…
 
Astrobot is fun.

It uses the graphics and cpu power for fun things

Having a 5000 skulls on the floor you can knock around is fun.

Spraying a load of shit with water cannons and watching them topple over is fun.

Having 300 little bots following you around and getting stuck is fun.

Gliding around on ice at a rock solid 60fps is fun.

It’s the antithesis of ray-tracing which costs soo much GPU power yet adds zero to the enjoyment of a game.
 

PaintTinJr

Member
Both starfield and astrobot here are spawing physics objects with proper, full physics simulation - and yes, both are also instancing the same object in the same scene, or a few variations of the same object with astrobot, this does not make much difference.
I'm pretty sure Astrobot is doing a bit more than that and not just forward rendering on the GPU. Cycling even between two different instances in different frames is significantly more involved than the cheap same toilet paper instance of that Starfield mod.
If what you meant by "instancing" was that Starfield was sharing the same physics calculation for all the toilet papers, its very clearly not.
No, as you should be able to tell from the words rotation, position I'm well aware that the shader is instancing them differently, but it isn't exactly meaningful feedback or new, it is just at large counts because of the GPU.

I still remember over 20years ago when NaturalMotion was still a Oxford University start-up downloading an interactive physics room demo of under 100MB that ran comfortably on a 350Mhz CPU with about a 20th of the instance count with more meaningful feedback - as items that went through the basketball hoop inside the room registered as a bucket IIRC.
 
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Guilty_AI

Member
I'm pretty sure Astrobot is doing a bit more than that and not just forward rendering on the GPU. Cycling even between two different instances in different frames is significantly more involved than the cheap same toilet paper instance of that Starfield mod.

No, as you should be able to tell from the words rotation, position I'm well aware that the shader is instancing them differently, but it isn't exactly meaningful feedback or new, it is just at large counts because of the GPU.

I still remember over 20years ago when. NaturalMotion was still a Oxford University start-up downloading an interactive physics room demo of under 100MB that ran comfortably on a 350Mhz CPU with about a 20th of the instance count with more meaningful feedback - as items that went through the basketball hoop inside the room registered as a bucket IIRC.
Reading this, i'm coming to the conclusion you don't even understand why having that many physical objects in the same scene is difficult. Rendering them isnt the problem here, the problem is having to calculate their position each new tick as they move with the physics. Thats what hogs resources in this scenario.
 
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PaintTinJr

Member
Reading this, i'm coming to the conclusion you don't even understand why having that many physical objects in the same scene is difficult. Rendering them isnt the problem here, the problem is having to calculate their position each new tick. Thats what hogs resources in this scenario.
You can do it all with shaders/compute shaders in the GPU, and I'd take issue with the description "physical objects" when they don't feedback to the control logic of the game/simulation running on the CPU, are they really "physical" when their purpose is purely as an inconsequential fx?
 

Guilty_AI

Member
You can do it all with shaders/compute shaders in the GPU, and I'd take issue with the description "physical objects" when they don't feedback to the control logic of the game/simulation running on the CPU, are they really "physical" when their purpose is purely as an inconsequential fx?
Yes they do, and it was already plenty obvious in the toilet video

 

PaintTinJr

Member
You can pick it up and decorate your house that you can buy in game. Or make an outpost with a view of the alien ocean.
Can you kill an NPC with them, fill the inside of half a spaceship with them, so that the ship's levelling system has to compensate, making its flight less efficient effecting flight range, etc, etc?

My main reason for assuming they are inconsequential is that the count of particles would exceed the game logic update performance on any CPU by the look of things, meaning they don't feedback meaningfully, and if they do, it will be in much coarser groups, which undermines the visual spectacle's impressiveness in terms of physics.
 
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Guilty_AI

Member
I'm not seeing what you are getting at, as it all looks shader based. How do they feedback in a non-inconsequential way?
They individually hit surfaces, each other and other objects, reacting accordingly with real world physics or something close to it. In case you still dont understand, calculating all of that is where the challenge of having 1000s of objects on-screen lies.
 
My main reason for assuming they are inconsequential is that the count of particles would exceed the game logic update performance on any CPU by the look of things, meaning they don't feedback meaningfully, and if they do, it will be in much coarser groups, which undermines the visual spectacle's impressiveness in terms of physics.
They roll down if you place them on slanted surfaces. Can pick them up and throw them.

Thats the extent of how interactive this stuff is in all these games. Which is still more than what most games allow.
 

Guilty_AI

Member
Can you kill an NPC with them, fill the inside of half a spaceship with them, so that the ship's levelling system has to compensate, making its flight less efficient effecting flight range, etc, etc?
You're talking about gameplay applications, but nothing of what you said would be particularly computionally expensive to implement unless done very poorly. The main challenge remains calculating real world physics since its multiple vectors that have to be calculate for every one of these objects in every logic update, with most forms of optimization for this being very tricky.
 

PaintTinJr

Member
They individually hit surfaces, each other and other objects, reacting accordingly with real world physics or something close to it. In case you still dont understand, calculating all of that is where the challenge of having 1000s of objects on-screen lies.
It isn't a challenge inside a Nvidia flagship GPU where data can be stored as textures by compute shaders and can access in scene geometry for collisions and updated and instanced without much in the way of feedback leaving the card. If you can indeed pick up cartons, that will be the engine tracking those ones for that interaction, not track every carton for every tick, or are you suggesting it is doing exactly what Minecraft does when explosions happen?
 
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Guilty_AI

Member
It isn't a challenge inside a Nvidia flagship GPU where data can be stored as textures by compute shaders and can access in scene geometry for collisions and updated and instanced without much in the way of feedback leaving the card. If you can indeed pick up cartons, that will be the engine tracking those ones for that interaction, not track every carton for every tick, or are you suggesting it is doing exactly what Minecraft does when explosions happen?
This is Havok, it is not specifically utilizing anything specific to nvidia gpus. Besides, offloading part of the physics calculation to the gpu is one of the ways to optimize these kinds of calculation, and not exactly a perfect one either as there are limitations for physics calculations done in parallel. I guarantee astrobot is also doing it to some degree.
 

PaintTinJr

Member
This is Havok, it is not specifically utilizing anything specific to nvidia gpus. Besides, offloading part of the physics calculation to the gpu is one of the ways to optimize these kinds of calculation, and not exactly a perfect one either as there are limitations for physics calculations done in parallel. I guarantee astrobot is also doing it to some degree.
And yet the info in the tweet suggests optimisation - beyond starfield's lowering particles or slowing down the simulation in the background - was needed, more like the problem Minecraft has when frame-rate tanks because it is CPU, Memory or CPU to GPU bandwidth bound

/editted lower to lowering
 
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