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Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

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Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#161

Post by hombre_fatal »

izzydata wrote: post #158
davrosthedalek wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raytracing is a good thing, not so much because of the better graphics, but because it enables produce nice graphics with less sophisticated engines and less artist input. A lot of the lighting etc. is currently baked into textures, hard coded, hand-optimized. This takes a lot of time. With raytracing, a lot of this comes "for free", so smaller / indie dev teams can produce games with AAA level graphics.

At the high cost of performance. As a consumer I am not really concerned with how easy it is to develop for. I'd rather see high frame rates than bleeding edge graphics. It's a good technology, but if we can't even manage 60 FPS minimum in 2020 I will be highly disappointed.

> As a consumer I am not really concerned with how easy it is to develop for.

I don't see how this could possibly be. Ease of development could mean the difference between your next favorite game existing at all. Or having the funds to become your next favorite game instead of cutting scope into a mediocre game that never got to realize its full creative ambition.

All upstream concerns contribute to the end result that you do care about.

Anything that helps people create AAA-quality games without needing the coffers of Electronic Arts is good for gamers.

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#162

Post by teddyh »

melling wrote: post #126
teddyh wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve no idea what your argument is. My point is that a “Minority Report interface”, which you specifically wanted, is hampered by the “gorilla arm” problem. You pointed to the Google Soli thing, but that does not (from what I can tell) seem to solve the gorilla arm problem either, and even if it did , a “Minority Report interface” would still have the gorilla arm problem.

I guess I should have simply said gesture UI. Of course, I'd like eye-tracking and voice UI too. I simply said "Minority Report interface" to help people visualize the idea. How about Iron Man's Jarvis? Would you have had a silly little rant over that too? [Update] Jarvis video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx7RCJvoCMc

> I guess I should have simply said gesture UI.

I would think that it’s hard to do those without the gorilla arm problem, since I haven’t seen any without it. If you have, please elaborate.

> Of course, I'd like eye-tracking and voice UI too.

Sure, those are no problem for the arms. But, IIRC, people whose job it is to talk all day have been shown to have a higher rate of vocal cord cancer. But, sure, that’s a different problem.

> How about Iron Man's Jarvis?

The movies (of which your linked clip is a representative sample) essentially show a Minority Report-style interface with a holographic display instead of a large flat display. Nothing about the gestures themselves changes, so from what I can tell, it, too, would have the gorilla arm problem if it were to be used for any length of time.

> Would you have had a silly little rant over that too?

I really don’t think anything I wrote deserved that jab.

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#163

Post by linsomniac »

fisherwithac wrote: post #102

After reading the more detailed Wired article, I can assuredly place myself in the "cautiously optimistic" car of the hype train for the PS5 (I myself own a PS4 Pro that I've been happy with). There are a lot of solid boxes that Sony's ticking: backwards compatibility with the previous generation, sticking with physical game copies instead of moving towards a "games-as-a-service" cloud model, updates to hardware that…

8K seems like a good bet, since 6+ years ago when the PS4 came out 4K matched your statements about 8K today. :-)

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#164

Post by alexisread »

e1ven wrote: post #28

The inclusion of ray tracing hardware is interesting to me, and sounds like good news to Nvidia, who has been pushing ray tracing as part of their RTX cards. Even though this uses a custom GPU, if consoles don't support ray tracing, PC games are unlikely to be designed for it, since most games have cross platform releases. It's also interesting to me that they're supporting the existing PSVR - The new hardware will r…

Just a shout out to a coder who has managed realtime raytracing on a stock Atari Falcon (16mhz CPU):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTGnZTDUKd0

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#165

Post by ihuman »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #161
izzydata wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the high cost of performance. As a consumer I am not really concerned with how easy it is to develop for. I'd rather see high frame rates than bleeding edge graphics. It's a good technology, but if we can't even manage 60 FPS minimum in 2020 I will be highly disappointed.

> As a consumer I am not really concerned with how easy it is to develop for. I don't see how this could possibly be. Ease of development could mean the difference between your next favorite game existing at all. Or having the funds to become your next favorite game instead of cutting scope into a mediocre game that never got to realize its full creative ambition. All upstream concerns contribute to the end result th…

I don't understand what you are talking about. You don't need AAA-quality graphics or a 2019 AAA-size budget for a game to be great. The boom of indie games has shown that great games can have great gameplay and performance, but without the fancy graphics of an AAA game.

Do you have any examples of the complexity of AAA graphics caused a game to either have its scope cut, or not exist at all? The only one remotely close to that is Destiny 1's devtools making created/editing levels difficult. However, that game had more fundamental problems, like needing to support the PS3 in addition to the PS4.

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#166

Post by gspetr »

pwthornton wrote: post #48
notTyler wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ray tracing hardware being included kind of worries me actually. Unless they're selling it at a loss I can't see it being below 500 dollars with the prices of ray tracing capable cards being as high as they are. As far as PSVR, the herculean amount of effort required to get something in the vein of backwards compatibility going between PS3 and PS4 makes me think it was designed from the ground up to work with basical…

Almost all video game consoles are sold at a loss -- sometimes a huge loss in the first few years. Making money on console hardware has never been the name of the game. Every game sold for a Playstation comes with a licensing fee. It's in Sony's best interest to sell as many games as possible, which often means selling consoles at a loss. Sony and other hardware makers also sell a lot of accessories, which often have…

> Selling hardware at a loss is one reason that consoles have always punched much higher graphically relative to price.

Here's a 2 year old video comparing a $550 PC (with RX480) to PS4 Pro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HueyUmSHrdo

Also, PS4 Pro specs list its GPU perf at 4.2 Tflops, while a GTX 1080, worth $499 and predating PS4 Pro by half a year has 8.2 Tflops. It's in the ballpark of 3.8Tflops of GTX 1060, MSRP $249.

The PS4 Pro's CPU at 2.13 GHz is also not what one would call punching above your weight. There are cheap i3's more powerful than that.

A console's value is a very dubious proposition if you are in a country which is given a favorable regional pricing by Steam.

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#167

Post by jjoonathan »

vvillena wrote: post #160
fisherwithac wrote: post #102

After reading the more detailed Wired article, I can assuredly place myself in the "cautiously optimistic" car of the hype train for the PS5 (I myself own a PS4 Pro that I've been happy with). There are a lot of solid boxes that Sony's ticking: backwards compatibility with the previous generation, sticking with physical game copies instead of moving towards a "games-as-a-service" cloud model, updates to hardware that…

PS5 will support 8K just like PS3 supported 1080p: it was there but almost no one used it. Nearly every game opted for 720p instead. It's a way to future-proof the generation, allowing for a future enhanced version of the console.

Cautionary tale: the PS4 Pro retroactively dropped support for many early 4K displays, including my own, in a software update. The updates were hardware fused to prevent downgrading, of course.

My plan for 8k is to wait for mass market adoption before buying one and hooking it up to a DRM-box built by a company with foreseeable financial interest in "stimulating" display upgrades during a down quarter.

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#168

Post by klodolph »

baddox wrote: post #152
klodolph wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding 8K... even though 4K TVs are readily available, my guess is most of those TVs don't display 4K content. Netflix will often give you 720p. Game consoles have a difficult time simply pushing 4K pixels down the pipeline. Some games have taken to something akin to interlacing, except with the pixels divided in a checkerboard pattern.

Netflix is actually probably the most common source of 4k home video for most people. Nearly all of the Netflix original content is 4k, increasingly in Dolby Vision. Unfortunately (and bizarrely, to me), you do have to buy the most expensive monthly plan to have access to the 4k content. I don't understand why they would choose to make video quality the main object of price discrimination (it seems like associating N…

While it is available in 4K, even if you are paying for access to 4K you are not necessarily getting the stream in 4K.

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#169

Post by Dylan16807 »

ricardobeat wrote: post #56
frou_dh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PS5 rendering games at 8K as a matter of course is not going to happen. We always get outlandish supercomputer hype preceding every console generation. It's a story as old as time!

Neither will a PC, that's what I wanted to know about from the previous commenter.

The claim was that the PC has similar specs to the actual console, not the hype ghost of a console.

I believe it does, but I bet they didn't pay $500.

I'm sure "8K" in practice just means "HDMI 2.1"

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#170

Post by izzydata »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #161
izzydata wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the high cost of performance. As a consumer I am not really concerned with how easy it is to develop for. I'd rather see high frame rates than bleeding edge graphics. It's a good technology, but if we can't even manage 60 FPS minimum in 2020 I will be highly disappointed.

> As a consumer I am not really concerned with how easy it is to develop for. I don't see how this could possibly be. Ease of development could mean the difference between your next favorite game existing at all. Or having the funds to become your next favorite game instead of cutting scope into a mediocre game that never got to realize its full creative ambition. All upstream concerns contribute to the end result th…

Because when people look to buy something they are judging the end product and not the process. If indie studio A and massive studio B both create a nearly identical game, but studio A spend 100x less on development because of ease of development due to raytracing it still doesn't concern me. I'd expect studios A and B to get similar sales. If studio A used raytracing tech to develop the same game, but it only ran at half the framerate I would go with studio B regardless of whatever processes they used to create the game.
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