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Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

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Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#191

Post by klodolph »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #171
klodolph wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wonder at that - you can clearly see the difference with an HDR and Dolby Vision image in a way that you can't "downsample", so, do they/can they downsample the HDR image to hit 1080p?

People are mostly concerned about content rather than picture quality. Netflix can deliver 720p and people will pay for it, some people will pay for 4K because of the marketing but don't actually notice that they're getting 720p, and only a small group of people left over actually care enough.

Just like how TVs come with default settings that mangle the picture quite a lot, and only some people will fix them.

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#192

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

klodolph wrote: post #191
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder at that - you can clearly see the difference with an HDR and Dolby Vision image in a way that you can't "downsample", so, do they/can they downsample the HDR image to hit 1080p?

People are mostly concerned about content rather than picture quality. Netflix can deliver 720p and people will pay for it, some people will pay for 4K because of the marketing but don't actually notice that they're getting 720p, and only a small group of people left over actually care enough. Just like how TVs come with default settings that mangle the picture quite a lot, and only some people will fix them.

I understand that. I was just wondering if the 4k streams (the ones that say 4k|Dolby Vision) are being converted down. I'd guess no.

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#193

Post by mncharity »

Why 8K? Perhaps VR.

VR can be bandwidth intensive. VR immersive-gaming low-end headsets are 60 fps, and high-end are 90 fps. And I've been told 120 fps is a noticeable "like butter" improvement on 90 fps. So a 8K@30 might mean 4K@120.

VR lenses piss away pixels. With a current 1440x1440/eye, you might get only a ~500 pixel circle of crisply clear pixels. So if you want screen-comparable resolution you're all set now... if that screen is a 1980's VGA IBM PC. With this wastage, 5K/eye might let you render virtual 1080p screens.

A headset providing both wide fov and this year's "high" resolution would be about 4K/eye. And I'm thinking about modding a narrow-fov drone headset (less lens blur) with two 4K panels, because I'm tired of waiting for the game-focused VR HMD market to get around to screen-comparable resolution.

"But won't 8K require an insane graphics card?" No. The old generation of VR headsets was doing brute force. Foveated rendering greatly reduces GPU load. And frankly, even without it, I've run a VR desktop (non-immersive low-fps with camera-passthrough) on a WMR HMD using a crufty old laptop's integrated graphics. GPU isn't a blocker for higher resolution HMDs.

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#194

Post by silvermast »

klodolph wrote: post #146
monocasa wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The N64 is also mainly hampered by it's texture memory. You only have 4KB total to play with for a texture (it's manually managed memory, not a cache) and with mipmaping, that's effectively 2KB. That's one 32x32 picture at 16bit color. Additionally, developers didn't have a great handle on how the more modern memory hierarchy (read high DRAM latency) affected things yet so a lot of techniques they used sort of fought…

To add to this, this is why GoldenEye N64 has so many grayscale textures... they use less memory.

They took this to the next level with bad fur day. By combining simple textures with plain color filters they could create complex visuals without using more memory. Eg: All the liquids (there are a lot!) look and flow the same, but have different color filters applied to differentiate them. They managed to squeeze in a full voice track too!

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#195

Post by pwthornton »

gspetr wrote: post #166
pwthornton wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, MSR…

Cross platform games that are based on high-level APIs are probably not going to showcase this well, but look at the work that Naughty Dog does and try to find a budget gaming PC that can compete with that. Big budget, cross platform games aren't that well optimized, but the really well optimized games can look really good on old console hardware.

Heck, look at what Nintendo has done with Breath of the Wild on the Switch hardware.

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#196

Post by baddox »

klodolph wrote: post #168
baddox wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you mean if you don't have a 4K TV and streaming device? Or if your bandwidth isn't enough? I'm not sure how they downsample their Dolby Vision streams, since my TV definitely switched over into Dolby Vision. I suppose the Netflix app may be able to stream lower resolution versions still with the Dolby Vision metadata.

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#197

Post by baddox »

klodolph wrote: post #191
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder at that - you can clearly see the difference with an HDR and Dolby Vision image in a way that you can't "downsample", so, do they/can they downsample the HDR image to hit 1080p?

People are mostly concerned about content rather than picture quality. Netflix can deliver 720p and people will pay for it, some people will pay for 4K because of the marketing but don't actually notice that they're getting 720p, and only a small group of people left over actually care enough. Just like how TVs come with default settings that mangle the picture quite a lot, and only some people will fix them.

Oh, are you suggesting that they're just straight up lying? They would need to not just trick me into thinking I'm seeing HDR (which is probably doable), but also trick my TV into thinking it's playing Dolby Vision, and also actually use significantly more bandwidth than a 720p stream would (I've checked at my router).

I'm sure all those things are possible, but it's also pretty likely that they're actually producing and distributing content in 4K and Dolby Vision.

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#198

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

baddox wrote: post #197
klodolph wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are mostly concerned about content rather than picture quality. Netflix can deliver 720p and people will pay for it, some people will pay for 4K because of the marketing but don't actually notice that they're getting 720p, and only a small group of people left over actually care enough. Just like how TVs come with default settings that mangle the picture quite a lot, and only some people will fix them.

Oh, are you suggesting that they're just straight up lying? They would need to not just trick me into thinking I'm seeing HDR (which is probably doable), but also trick my TV into thinking it's playing Dolby Vision, and also actually use significantly more bandwidth than a 720p stream would (I've checked at my router). I'm sure all those things are possible, but it's also pretty likely that they're actually producing…

Yeah, I can't see a way to fake Dolby Vision - it's pretty obvious when you're getting the extra dynamic range from the image - I'm surprised by how much more apparent it is than 4k. I can see resolution fakery, but that's why I asked if they thought it was possible to scale down the 4k Dolby Vision to 1080p Dolby Vision

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#199

Post by abrawill »

fisherwithac wrote: post #110
abrawill wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8K output support doesn't really cost much so I wouldn't worry about it. It doesn't matter to most of the GPU internals. Games will internally run at whatever resolution they think results in the best quality/responsiveness/fluidity/development-cost trade-off, supporting 8K doesn't change anything there.

Fair enough. My concerns were more rooted in performance than the cost of the console itself. But the performance gains they reported by switching to an SSD would more than likely trump anything lost by supporting higher resolutions.

Agreed! I'd say the SSD is a real, literal, game changer. Extra resolution is just more of the same really.

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#200

Post by PopsiclePete »

davrosthedalek wrote: post #123
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…

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.

When they talk about ray-tracing, they don't mean that real-time ray-tracing at 60fps is suddenly possible. We're a decade if not more away from that. They're talking about extremely limited applications for a few effects here and there, in specific scenes. That's what's been demoed so far.

NVidia has a bunch of demos with their newest hard-ware. The "Stormtroopers" demo was rendered in real-time, but on a very high-end >$60k workstation.

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