What is it about the Xbox Series S that worries developers?
- Thread starter BlueXImpulse
- Start date
Jon Neu
Banned
It makes me think that is the only next gen trailer we have. Maybe it's all bullshit and are going to pull a Motorstorm on us, or maybe not. Time will tell.
No, they didn't. And I called it out before the Halo Infinite reveal that the graphics were really concerning and that the game had Xbox One tech written all over it. And turns out I was right.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/11511917/PBiCl4i.jpg)
This is all from that cinematic trailer. And it's pretty much the level of graphics shown in the gameplay reveal.
Phrixotrichus
Banned
Now that I rewatch these, you`re right. Those really don`t look promising.
GHG
Member
Old PC's need to get left behind at some point for new games and that usually coincides with the start of a console generation, it's just the way the cookie crumbles. The "cross-gen" period for the first couple of years enables people in that situation time to catch up and do so at a cheaper price comparative to upgrading their hardware right at the start of the new gen.
It also pushes GPU and CPU manufacturers to offer something affordable in line with what the baseline of the new consoles are ASAP. Now that the new baseline is 4TF instead of around 10TF both Nvidia and AMD are being let off the hook. The 40 series GPU's are going to make the 20 series look like they were good value since their primary concern will be offering "value" at around the 4TF mark. The value card for this generation was the 1050ti, take a look at the teraflops of the card. Prior to the 1050ti the card that was considered the "go to" card if you wanted to play console ports was the gtx 960:
(November 2017)
Again, look at the teraflops.
The wider reaching implication is that a lower TF entry point requirement can cause the mid/high end of the PC gaming market to shrink further which causes the prices to become even more exorbitant at that end of the market (yes, even worse than what we are witnessing from Nvidia now). The knock on effect is less innovation and advancement at the top end of the market. 4tf GPUs at cheap/mainstream prices already exist today - those cards are now potentially going to be rebranded and rereleased at around the same price for an entire generation.
Also something else to consider (from July 2015):
Steam Hardware & Software Survey July 2015, only 34% 1080p Gamers
Steam conduct in-depth surveys every month to find out which hardware and software gamers are using. Last month's survey report reveals that most gamers are still in dual core and 720p.
www.teckknow.com
Look at all those people being left behind at the start of what has been one of the most healthy periods for PC gaming.
It's not about being "realistic", this is how technology advances. Things get cheaper over time and the mass market eventually catches up due to being incentivised to do so. If the performance target for next gen is around the mark of the already popular GTX 1060, where is the incentive for those people to upgrade? It just results in less money being spent on PC hardware which is never a good thing.
Craig of War
Banned
I would not put too much into what they say and take it as actual fact when some of their indie games look like this and they said it won't run at 60 or 120fps on next gen hardware.
Azurro
Banned
This is not how development works. MS tells you the PR friendly way that everything scales down, no worries. However, as has been explained countless of times before, if you have a feature that requires x amount of memory/CPU time/GPU resources and those resources are not there, you can't "hard work" your way out of that, the resources simply aren't there.
That is why you work with the baseline and scale up, doing it the other way around increases risk for your project by a lot.
Jon Neu
Banned
It was allegedly in-engine.
Time will tell, but after seeing how "casually" close to those graphics the UE5 tech demo or the Horizon Zero Dawn 2 trailer are, I think we can expect somethings like that for true AAA next gen games.
Only the no worries part is PR. And yes, everything can be scaled down and ported to lesser specs doing sacrifices. It has been like this forever.
Kerotan
Member
Looking at games like warzone, God of war, Horizon, Spiderman the ps4 didn't need a pro either. It just makes too much sense as this gen will probably be 8 to 10 years and a ps5 pro half way through will make that possible.
It makes sense too because it could aim to boost games from 4k to 8k or 60fps to 120fps. 8k TVs will be mainstream by then too.
The 1st Xbox came out nearly 2 years after the PS2 and it's exclusives were what made it stand out.
What about Pragmata and Resi8 from Capcom running on PS5?
Agnostic2020
Member
Pragmata is the same till we see more. Resident evil had gameplay snippets and doesn't look so hot (many issues when u zoom )
Calverz
Member
Yes. But did the makers of Black piss and moan about the lack of power in ps2? Did the timesplitters team?
GHG
Member
You're attempting to find equivalence in a situation where there was none.
What was the power of the PS2 like compared to the previous generation?
There's your answer.
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The PS2 was very powerful for it's time of release and the most powerful console until nearly 2 years later. Xbox and Gamecube exclusives were what made them stand out when they got released later.
Azurro
Banned
As I mentioned, that's not how it works. Your customers are not only the people with the Series X, you want to make sure the people with the Series S get just as good of an experience, you can't just throw away features from that version just like that.
It will be much closer than when silly fanboys were saying everything was scalable for next gen, but it will still set the bar unnecessarily lower than it could be.
So they'll mostly use the Series S as a baseline, add some ray tracing for the higher end versions and tell marketing that the game is "made from Series X and then ported down" so that fanboys get their happy sound byte and marketing can say something that sounds nice.
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Phrixotrichus
Banned
Software complexity has changed a "tiny" bit since then....
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Birdo
Banned
It's all relative. It was just as complex to them at the time.
Phrixotrichus
Banned
Just no.
The sheer scope is incomparable. For every possible issue you had back then you now have a hundred.
I think 30% of my worktime by now is just keeping track of all the different issues before even fixing them......
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Stuart360
Member
All the concern trolling, but its the '4k Dream' that will hold back next gen, not the XSS. This will be the smallest jump purely graphics wise yet imo. Now if XSX and PS5 were 1080p-1440p machine, then yeah the jump would be real.
Taking into account 1080p vs 4k, XSX and PS5 have like twice the power of PS4, maybe 3 times at a push.
Taking into account 1080p vs 4k, XSX and PS5 have like twice the power of PS4, maybe 3 times at a push.
Birdo
Banned
Then I guess they had better learn to code better.
Jon Neu
Banned
The Series S is for the people who don't care that much about perfomance.
Of course you can throw away features from it like resolution, RT, effects and whatnot. If you want the best perfomance, buy the Series X.
supernova8
Banned
I really want to believe them but........... I think you're in for some major disappointment if you think it'll look anything like that.
The facial animation just looks beyond 'next-gen' to the point I call bullshit. I would love to be wrong (ie I would love for games to look like that) but yeah I call bullshit.
El Pistolero
Banned
It makes me think that is the only next gen trailer we have. Maybe it's all bullshit and are going to pull a Motorstorm on us, or maybe not. Time will tell.
No, they didn't. And I called it out before the Halo Infinite reveal that the graphics were really concerning and that the game had Xbox One tech written all over it. And turns out I was right.
This is all from that cinematic trailer. And it's pretty much the level of graphics shown in the gameplay reveal.
Are you lying to us or to yourself? Surely you must be snickering while typing the insane lines that you shower us with? Are you seriously suggesting that the horrid Halo realtime sequence that we saw recently is on the level of the initial Halo Slipspace engine demo?
...I have no words...Bravo, I guess?
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Kumomeme
Member
I would not put too much into what they say and take it as actual fact when some of their indie games look like this and they said it won't run at 60 or 120fps on next gen hardware.
some of devs that express concern is those who work with game like Doom Eternal and even Remedy studio.
if you want to judge them not based on their knowledge and experience but based on what kind of games their made, then to be fair on similliar point of view people also could said similliar stuff to MS for making this kind of game
I would not put too much into what they say and take it as actual fact when some of their AAA games look like this even if it run at 60 or 120fps on 'next gen' hardware.
TheGejsza
Member
It is not about code better. It's about code MORE. The sheer amount of stuff that is now in games requires thousands or workhours. And the bigger the team the harder is to keep the quality consistent.
Complex AI, motion-capture, inverse-kinematic, HDR, netcode etc - those are things that were mostly unheard of at the age of PS2. Some Polyphony Digital (Gran Turismo devs) said that that on PS1 it took them about 2 weeks to fully model a single vehicle and on PS3 it was 3 months.
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Azurro
Banned
They might not care about the specs that much, but they still expect to see a pleasant experience when turning on the machine, so you can't just throw away everything. It has to be as close to the other versions as possible.
MS made this machine to appeal to the cost conscious next gen adopter (I'm not sure that crowd exists, but let's see). Now they have to appeal to them even more than Series X, as more people will buy that. You don't just throw together a shitty version and then go "want something better? Get a Series X. Thanks for your money.".
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sobaka770
Banned
Here is the big problem with Series S. Imagine that it works well and the whole "upscaling"/"downscaling" from X to S is not a lot of dev work. Best case scenario.
It still leads to the same issue that mid-gen refresh of Xbox X - the powerful console is nothing more than an upres of the original box. How many times did we see Microsoft push the angle that XboX X is a TRUE 4k machine? It's true - it ran a vast majority of games at 4k native, and technically had better looking third-party versions outside of PC. But in a lot of cases that power advantage that it had over PS4Pro was almost wasted as going from 720p to 900p to 1080p is much more visible than 4k checkerboarding vs native. TLOU2 was 1440p and it looked crystal clean in motion. Considering how powerul Xbox One X was compared to the original it definitely was overtuned for most of the games it had to only upscale to 4k. Especially for Xbox One exclusives that were supposed to run on original hardware it was an overkill.
Now you might say, that MS wanted to push the native 4k and use it as marketing for One X vs Ps4Pro instead of fighting on level ground on pricing which is fair for a mid-gen refresh. But what do we see with the new gen? Series S is the lowest denominator. It may only run at 1440p max (and 1080p), it might have a very similar processing power, but it also has a ridiculously small pool of slow RAM which would mean that it's the minimum to which all cross-console and XboX exclusive games must adhere. And let's be honest, no big publisher in their right mind would go PS5 exclusive because of this. So what will happen is that PS5 exclusives will have a chance to experiment more, to use faster better RAM and SSD and even graphics card power maybe not to just output true 4k but 4k checkerboarding with better effects without worrying about any downscaling. If LotU2 looked already good at 1440p, how will a PS5 1440p 30FPS game look in terms of raw graphics? With freed up RAM what new systems and living worlds would Sony be able to generate on the fly? New gen has to be about new possibilities and they are not defined only by Teraflops but in conjuction with the overall CPU-RAM-Storage pipeline. Games with 100s of characters, complex AI systems, asset rendering on the fly - this is the bottleneck for Series S and from specs I see RAM as a major bottleneck in the throughput and that bottleneck will affect everything.
Ratchet and Clank and Spiderman will both have 60FPS mode. This will probably be achieved by both dialing down some heavy post-process effects as well as lowering the resolution. How will this work on Series S? If a game is done for a baseline of 30FPS on high-end console with all bells and whistles, then even downscaled it should run only at 30FPS on the Series S. On Series X you can then drop the resolution to enable higher framerate mode but what do you do on the already downscaled Series S? Lower the resolution even more to 1080-720p? Make the game look like Xbox One title with all effects disabled? Or just not allow high-FPS mode on base console? It's a weird proposition and a huge limitation for console marketability. No wonder Xbox pushes lower graphics and 60FPS baseline for its games including Halo because this issue will come up for every 30FPS game with 60FPS option.
As a sidenote: Yes I know GoW5 runs at 120 FPS on both consoles but it's a pretty static game which already ran at 60 on Xbox One X and the video has such bad compression I couldn't understand whether the graphics looked terrible on the Series S or was the recording quality destroying the picture IQ.
It still leads to the same issue that mid-gen refresh of Xbox X - the powerful console is nothing more than an upres of the original box. How many times did we see Microsoft push the angle that XboX X is a TRUE 4k machine? It's true - it ran a vast majority of games at 4k native, and technically had better looking third-party versions outside of PC. But in a lot of cases that power advantage that it had over PS4Pro was almost wasted as going from 720p to 900p to 1080p is much more visible than 4k checkerboarding vs native. TLOU2 was 1440p and it looked crystal clean in motion. Considering how powerul Xbox One X was compared to the original it definitely was overtuned for most of the games it had to only upscale to 4k. Especially for Xbox One exclusives that were supposed to run on original hardware it was an overkill.
Now you might say, that MS wanted to push the native 4k and use it as marketing for One X vs Ps4Pro instead of fighting on level ground on pricing which is fair for a mid-gen refresh. But what do we see with the new gen? Series S is the lowest denominator. It may only run at 1440p max (and 1080p), it might have a very similar processing power, but it also has a ridiculously small pool of slow RAM which would mean that it's the minimum to which all cross-console and XboX exclusive games must adhere. And let's be honest, no big publisher in their right mind would go PS5 exclusive because of this. So what will happen is that PS5 exclusives will have a chance to experiment more, to use faster better RAM and SSD and even graphics card power maybe not to just output true 4k but 4k checkerboarding with better effects without worrying about any downscaling. If LotU2 looked already good at 1440p, how will a PS5 1440p 30FPS game look in terms of raw graphics? With freed up RAM what new systems and living worlds would Sony be able to generate on the fly? New gen has to be about new possibilities and they are not defined only by Teraflops but in conjuction with the overall CPU-RAM-Storage pipeline. Games with 100s of characters, complex AI systems, asset rendering on the fly - this is the bottleneck for Series S and from specs I see RAM as a major bottleneck in the throughput and that bottleneck will affect everything.
Ratchet and Clank and Spiderman will both have 60FPS mode. This will probably be achieved by both dialing down some heavy post-process effects as well as lowering the resolution. How will this work on Series S? If a game is done for a baseline of 30FPS on high-end console with all bells and whistles, then even downscaled it should run only at 30FPS on the Series S. On Series X you can then drop the resolution to enable higher framerate mode but what do you do on the already downscaled Series S? Lower the resolution even more to 1080-720p? Make the game look like Xbox One title with all effects disabled? Or just not allow high-FPS mode on base console? It's a weird proposition and a huge limitation for console marketability. No wonder Xbox pushes lower graphics and 60FPS baseline for its games including Halo because this issue will come up for every 30FPS game with 60FPS option.
As a sidenote: Yes I know GoW5 runs at 120 FPS on both consoles but it's a pretty static game which already ran at 60 on Xbox One X and the video has such bad compression I couldn't understand whether the graphics looked terrible on the Series S or was the recording quality destroying the picture IQ.
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thismeinteil
Member
Well, MS wanted to push cross-gen games. Now, they have a cross-gen console to do it with.
Dontuseducks
Member
My guess is that the idea is to devellop for SS and then optimise it for SX, hence the 'Optimised for Series X'-emblem. That would work the same as with Xbox One S and X. That could give some problems with multiplatform games i think.
Humdinger
Gold Member
I doubt there will be any XSX exclusives. In a few years, there will be next-gen MS first-party exclusives, but they will be built to run on the XSS as well. From what the devs are saying, that could limit what the game could have been, had MS only offered the XSX. However, there is hope that with first-party, MS will push studios to develop the best game they can for the XSX, rather than starting with the S and upscaling.
I don't think it'll work that way with third-party publishers, though. They won't have MS's incentive for making the XSX version shine, particularly if the S is the big seller.
If I were someone planning on enjoying the 17% TF advantage for XSX in third-party games, I'd be disappointed with the XSS. From what these devs are saying, the need to develop around the lower specs of the XSS will reduce any such advantages (which weren't going to be all that noticeable to begin with).
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sxodan
Member
In a lengthy thread over on Twitter, Stevens (Co-owner/Design Lead at Indie Studio TeamBlurGames) explained why Series S won't hold back next-gen gaming in any way. He states that despite having less raw GPU power, the console is still packed with a ton of features that will help push games to the max.
"When you add in all the other areas of improvement that the XSX has, such as sampler feedback streaming, IO improvements, faster memory, ray tracing capability etc, the XSS eats the past gen X1X alive, and it really is no contest," he wrote in one of this tweets.
"4K rendering is expensive. It comes with a lot of trade-offs for decent perf and rarely do we get games on the current generation that are 4k/60. It's a mammoth task in terms of raw GPU power and the games that push this are usually graphically simple in rendering," Stevens explained.
"But a game that is targeting much lower resolution? Do the math. It requires MUCH less GPU power devoted to resolution alone. Of course, rendering at a lower resolution will also mean other visual effects are cheaper to render, too."
There's a lot more stuff in the Twitter thread below.
www.altchar.com
"When you add in all the other areas of improvement that the XSX has, such as sampler feedback streaming, IO improvements, faster memory, ray tracing capability etc, the XSS eats the past gen X1X alive, and it really is no contest," he wrote in one of this tweets.
"4K rendering is expensive. It comes with a lot of trade-offs for decent perf and rarely do we get games on the current generation that are 4k/60. It's a mammoth task in terms of raw GPU power and the games that push this are usually graphically simple in rendering," Stevens explained.
"But a game that is targeting much lower resolution? Do the math. It requires MUCH less GPU power devoted to resolution alone. Of course, rendering at a lower resolution will also mean other visual effects are cheaper to render, too."
There's a lot more stuff in the Twitter thread below.
Xbox Series S won't hold back next-gen gaming, dev says
TeamBlurGames Design Lead Gavin Stevens has offered his opinion on the recently announced Xbox Series S, a less powerful but cheaper next-gen console from Microsoft. He claims that Series S won't hold back next-gen game development in any way.
www.altchar.com
MarkMe2525
Banned
NEOGAF, home of the developer hot take!
In a lengthy thread over on Twitter, Stevens (Co-owner/Design Lead at Indie Studio TeamBlurGames) explained why Series S won't hold back next-gen gaming in any way. He states that despite having less raw GPU power, the console is still packed with a ton of features that will help push games to the max.
"When you add in all the other areas of improvement that the XSX has, such as sampler feedback streaming, IO improvements, faster memory, ray tracing capability etc, the XSS eats the past gen X1X alive, and it really is no contest," he wrote in one of this tweets.
"4K rendering is expensive. It comes with a lot of trade-offs for decent perf and rarely do we get games on the current generation that are 4k/60. It's a mammoth task in terms of raw GPU power and the games that push this are usually graphically simple in rendering," Stevens explained.
"But a game that is targeting much lower resolution? Do the math. It requires MUCH less GPU power devoted to resolution alone. Of course, rendering at a lower resolution will also mean other visual effects are cheaper to render, too."
There's a lot more stuff in the Twitter thread below.
Xbox Series S won't hold back next-gen gaming, dev says
TeamBlurGames Design Lead Gavin Stevens has offered his opinion on the recently announced Xbox Series S, a less powerful but cheaper next-gen console from Microsoft. He claims that Series S won't hold back next-gen game development in any way.
This doesn't support the neogaf narrative so prepare for a ton of unnecessary hate.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
This is odium from GAF. GAF>Twitter>GAF?
VincentMatts
Member
But bloomberg said it would!
I dunno who to believe anymore!! Someone who writes articles for a living or developers?? Please help me Gaf.
I dunno who to believe anymore!! Someone who writes articles for a living or developers?? Please help me Gaf.
jimbojim
Banned
Problem is Gavin doesn't have devkits.
Edit :
He was banned on ERA saying similar crap
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GHG
Member
And as explained above the situation was different. Here's a summary of the series of events if you don't remember or weren't around at the time:
- PS2 launches. No complaints from consumers or developers because it's a giant leap over the consoles in the previous generation.
- Gamecube releases a year later. Is more powerful than the previous generation and slightly more powerful than the PS2. No developer or consumer complains because again, it offers a substantial leap over the previous generation.
- Xbox releases around the same time. Is orders of magnitude more powerful than the previous generation and more importantly it's more powerful than both the gamecube and the PS2, nobody complains.
Hence we saw plenty of Xbox exclusive games that quite simply couldn't be achieved on the PS2 or Gamecube. When a developer decided they were going to build only for the Xbox they made the console sing and it was clear the other 2 consoles wouldn't be capable of running the same games. The Xbox even got certain PC ports exclusively because it was the only console that was capable of running those PC games without significant cuts and compromises.
With the Xbox Series S and Series X:
- You cannot build a game around the Series X without considering whether it will run or not on the Series S - you have to develop for both, no choice in the matter
- You will not see any games that are fully built around the Series X and are not possible on the Series S
- The Series S does not represent a huge jump over the current generation, especially not the pro consoles. In fact by virtue of the Series S being part of the same generation, it's the smallest "jump" we have ever had from a computational point of view on home consoles when going from one generation to the next
What about actual devs like id software engine devs?
Mr. PlayStation
Member
DonJorginho
Banned
pawel86ck
Banned
I agree XSS will not hold back XSX, but what Gavin Stevens has said in regards to XSS GPU power is just wishful thinking. MS has said they would never design a console taking architecture gains into account (because in the early stages of design architecture gains are unknown), but even if we take RDNA 25% gains it's still not enough to match 6TF polaris X1X.
GHG
Member
Remedy have actually shipped games. Remedy are actually working on next gen games and have dev kits.
Not to be disrespectful, but there are levels to this.
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