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Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

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Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's roughly 4X the bandwidth, not 2X... though 4K at roughly double the size with h.265 or even close to the same size is often "good enough" looking and better than 1080p. Though, I still tend to mostly use 720p h.265 for TV watching as, again, it's "good enough" that I often don't notice too much. 65" TV at about 10' away. I do notice from 720p to 1080 and from 1080 to 4k (UHD). It depends more on what I'm watchin…

Once you're already at HD, 4x the resolution is not 4x the bandwidth.

It's pushing 4x the number of pixels, unless you're magically not pushing data for a large portion of those pixels?

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#212

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.

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-…

you are absolutely right, the systems we have today are not fast enough. But they will get faster with every generation, and the fact that is is available in at least one next-gen console makes it more likely that the industry will indeed go in that direction.

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#213
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cl…

The point is that with ray tracing the indie game and the AAA game might not look all that different in terms of graphics. Right now AAA games use crazy 40-50 pass shaders and mountains of custom tweaked texture maps to get stuff looking like it does. With ray tracing you can accomplish a lot of that with almost zero effort.

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you're already at HD, 4x the resolution is not 4x the bandwidth.

It's pushing 4x the number of pixels, unless you're magically not pushing data for a large portion of those pixels?

When increasing the level of detail, most nearby pixels are similar enough that it takes less than 4x the bits to split each pixel into four. Most guidelines that I can find seem to agree that 4K needs about 2x as much bandwidth as 1080p. Here's some random ones, because I can't find a proper study:

https://support.video.ibm.com/hc/en-us/articles/207852117-In...

https://www.howtogeek.com/338983/how-much-data-does-netflix-...

https://help.yitechnology.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005742328...

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stereo headphones all the way. I've done both, and (for me) it's the opposite. You're probably right for "accuracy of sound", but when gaming having a bunch of powerful speakers making sound effects gives a better "experience". :) eg You can feel decent sized speakers with your whole body, which you're missing when using just headphones

Having a subwoofer that shakes the literally structure of your house and makes low frequency effects thud into your chest is something that headphones can't replicate. For a movie or really cinemenatic game, I can't imagine headphones being anywhere near the experience.

Product idea: headphones with an external subwoofer vest so those low-frequency effects literally thud into your chest. :)

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#216
post #136

Given that the current Playstation and Xbox are based on (more or less) the same AMD platform, is it reasonable to expect that the next Xbox will too (with an identical feature set)?

Yes, it is rumored that PS5 is Zen 2 + Navi and Xbox Scarlett is also Zen 2 + Navi. That leaves room for different RAM, different numbers of CUs, different accelerators, etc. but they're expected to be pretty similar.

And who's first to market, and is cheaper.

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#217
post #152

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…

> I don't understand why they would choose to make video quality the main object of price discrimination

I think this is how perfect society should work when marginal cost is zero.

Netflix cannot directly charge proportionally to your income.

But the cost of your TV set is somewhat proportional to your income.

If you have 4K TV then you are rich, and you can afford to pay more. To allow poor people who cannot even buy FullHD TV to pay less.

So everyone can watch movies, poor folks can afford it, and rich people won't mind the price.

In another word, it would be worse (from a society point of view), if the price was constant, but only rich people could use Netflix.

(BTW this is how people pay for government services with taxes: rich people pay more money (even with flat tax rate) but get the same service).

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#218
post #172

8K doesn't make sense, anywhere. I'm middle-aged, and I can't at 2 meters distinguish 4K from 1080p. Nobody in the world can see the difference between 8K and 4K. It's a shameful waste of resource and ridiculous planned obsolescence. In fact, it should probably be forbidden for wasting precious resources for no good reason.

VR I think?

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#219
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…

Doesn't 4k content both cost them more to deliver and generally go to a demo that is more price insensitive? Seems like an obvious play.

No, most of the money Netflix spends on buying content, servers and network cables are cheap.

I've just googled: Netflix yearly revenue is 16B and Netflix spent 12B on content.

Re: Sony reveals PlayStation 5 details

#220
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming that there are basically two reasons to support 8K now. One is that it gets them higher resolution for a potential future VR headset. The other is that it is bigger than 4K and that sounds good in their marketing.

Another possible reason, now that I think about it more, is future proofing. If that's the case, then props for forward thinking on their part. Recently on a whim I decided to plug in my N64 to a 1080p TV, and I was surprised how terribly the graphics scaled to the higher resolution.

The N64 the console with the worse video output and it poor texture quality doesn't help. The only thing that really improves it is an expensive internal HDMI mod.
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