• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

DF: The Secret Developers: what next-gen hardware balance means for gaming

P

Poetic.Injustice

Member
Have you ever wondered what developers really think about the latest gaming news and controversies? In this new series of Digital Foundry articles, it's game creators themselves who take centre-stage, offering a fresh, unique perspective on the issues of the day, free to write what they want about the subjects that they are passionate about, with a rock-solid assurance from us that their anonymity will be protected. In short, freshly served, informed opinion direct from the people creating the software we care about, with zero involvement from marketing or PR.
Click to expand...

At this point I should probably introduce myself. I'm a games developer who has worked over the years across a variety of game genres and consoles, shipping over 35 million units in total on a range of games, including some major triple-A titles I'm sure you've played. I've worked on PlayStation 2, Xbox, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC, PS Vita, Nintendo DS, iPhone, Wii U, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. I'm currently working on a major next-gen title.
Click to expand...

Dismissed by many as a PR explanation for technical deficiencies when compared to PlayStation 4, the reality is that balance is of crucial importance - indeed, when you are developing a game, getting to a solid frame-rate is the ultimate goal. It doesn't matter how pretty your game looks, or how many players you have on screen, if the frame-rate continually drops, it knocks the player out of the experience and back to the real world, ultimately driving them away from your game if it persists.
Click to expand...

With the new consoles coming out in November, the balance has shifted again. It looks like we will have much better GPUs, as they have improved significantly in the last seven years, while the target HD resolution has shifted upwards from 720p and 1080p - a far smaller increase. Although these GPUs are not as fast on paper as the top PC cards, we do get some benefit from being able to talk directly to the GPUs with ultra-quick interconnects. But in this console generation it appears that the CPUs haven't kept pace. While they are faster than the previous generation, they are not an order of magnitude faster, which means that we might have to make compromises again in the game design to maintain frame-rate.
Click to expand...

Will we see a lot of games using a lower framebuffer size?

Yes, we will probably see a lot of sub-1080p games (with hardware upscale) on one or both of the next-gen platforms, but this is probably because there is not enough time to learn the GPU when the development environment, and sometimes clock speeds, are changing underneath you. If a studio releases a sub-1080p game, is it because they can't make it run at 1080p? Is it because they don't possess the skills or experience in-house? Or is it a design choice to make their game run at a stable frame-rate for launch?

This choice mirrors the situation we previously had with the 60fps vs. 30fps discussion. It might not be what the company wants for the back of the box, but it is the right decision for getting the game to run at the required frame-rate. Again, it is very easy to point out this fact and extrapolate from there on the perceived 'power' of the consoles, but this doesn't take all the design decisions and the release schedule into account.
Click to expand...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...ware-balance-actually-means-for-game-creators
 
P

pooch

Neo Member
Article makes some good points about the pressures devs are under to make deadlines. Do I remember correctly that PS4 devs have had longer to prepare the launch titles? However it seems to be stretching to give credence to the 'balance' stuff as a legitimate plus point for the Xbox One.
 
D

DeFiBkIlLeR

Banned
Yay!!!....just what NeoGaf wanted, another opportunity for it's resident Richard Leadbetter basement dwelling haters to sound off.
 
D

demolitio

Member
I swear, I've never been one to make fun of the balance talk non-stop, but that word needs to disappear for a bit even if they replace it with a synonym.

We get it. That's the message you want to stick in people's heads, but it gets to a point where it's redundant, if not a little ridiculous.

Sony engineers must be drunk all the time because they have no balance.
 
M

Mung

Member
'Balance'
I know what their response will be when the truth comes out next month - blame the tools not the hardware.
 
S

shinra-bansho

Member
I'm sorry, but I'm finding it harder and harder to not see this as Digital Foundry acting as a PR mouthpiece for the XB1.
I expect we'll see a whole series of "secret developers" downplaying the hardware disparity, perhaps with one talking about it making a big difference... for balance.
 
F

fallagin

Member
Dismissed by many as a PR explanation for technical deficiencies when compared to PlayStation 4, the reality is that balance is of crucial importance - indeed, when you are developing a game, getting to a solid frame-rate is the ultimate goal. It doesn't matter how pretty your game looks, or how many players you have on screen, if the frame-rate continually drops, it knocks the player out of the experience and back to the real world, ultimately driving them away from your game if it persists.
Click to expand...

This is quite gross to read.
 
G

goonergaz

Member
So sub 1080p = better balance...I understand now that I would have a better bank balance if I hadn't bought a 1080p TV.
 
G

Gemüsepizza

Member
- balance
- downplaying PS4's massive GPU advantage
- quoting Carmack and not getting that he meant architecture and not performance
- lots of general / basic stuff (which is uninteresting) to make it sound authentic
- several spinning attempts

I doubt that's from a multiplatform developer or from a developer at all.
 
G

GrotesqueBeauty

Banned
"the target HD resolution has shifted upwards from 720p and 1080p - a far smaller increase"
Click to expand...

"Far smaller" than 420p > 720p? Proportionally it's not that much smaller of an increase, and in absolute terms it's a larger increase.
 
M

mrlovepump

Neo Member
Balance is not always a good thing.

Ill refer to something I know much about. Motorsport. We often talk about wanting to get the car into balance. This is the idea that the level of grip and the way the car feels being the same at the front and back. So you can turn it into a corner comfortably and also be confident the back end is not going to swing out.

The thing is... having a balanced car does not make it the quickest over all. It just means its more predictable. The analogy here is more predictable framerates. But... Having an out of balance car and learning how to drive it to its strengths and it will be quicker.

It may seem like complete BS but its actually a very 1:1 analogy.
 
T

toddhunter

Member
I found:

While one console might have a better GPU, the chances are that this performance increase will then be offset by bottlenecks in other parts of the game engine. Maybe these are related to memory transfer speeds, CPU speeds or raw connectivity bus throughputs. Ultimately it doesn't matter where the bottlenecks occur, it's just the fact that they do occur.
Click to expand...

Particularly jarring. It seems the article is based around the premise that the PS4 has better components, but it must have a problem "somewhere" when you factor in targeting the xbox one for multiplatform development.

Whilst that is a reasonable assumption for the 360 and PS3 (two very different consoles), you would like to think the secret developer could give a concrete example given the similarity of the two architectures. I don't believe developers will really be taking a radically different approach to "take advantage" of the CPU in the xbox one.
 
V

velociraptor

Junior Member
toddhunter said:
I found:



Particularly jarring. It seems the article is based around the premise that the PS4 has better components, but it must have a problem "somewhere" when you factor in targeting the xbox one for multiplatform development.

Whilst that is a reasonable assumption for the 360 and PS3, you would like to think the secret developer could give a concrete example given the similarity of the two architectures. I don't believe developers will really be taking a radically different approach to "take advantage" of the CPU in the xbox one.
Click to expand...
It's an utterly retarded premise. So it seems like he (Leadbetter) is suggesting that the Xbox One is perfectly designed to run at maximum efficiency between components, while the PS4's more powerful GPU is going to be bottlenecked by other components? You couldn't make this shit up, lol.
 
T

TheD

The Detective
As someone that defended DF in the past.... this is clearly biased rubbish from a MS fanboy.

Having a faster GPU may not always up the framerate (if the game is CPU limited), but it is moronic to ignore the times it would not be CPU limited and the free increase of rendering quality per a frame even if it is.
 
L

lunlunqq

Member
This is really an independent DF article? Not an official MS PR piece?? "Balance," "GPU difference not matter," "difference between 720p and 1080p is smaller..." So many points taken directly from xbone's current PR strategy board. Man, it's really hard to tell....
 
A

Artorias

Banned
I wonder how the balance discussion will go when launch games are higher res and the same framerate on PS4. I know they would like people to think that 1080p games will have lower framerates or other problems but what reason would people have to think that?
 
M

Mung

Member
The funny thing is that they have the balls to still say this in view of resolutiongate. But yeah, plan B will be to blame the tools and deny any hardware deficiency whatsoever.
 
M

MesserWolf

Member
elite09 said:
DF wants clicks, please don't.
Click to expand...
For sure .... they live off those and console war is how DF came to light ( comparisons)

goonergaz said:
So sub 1080p = better balance...I understand now that I would have a better bank balance if I hadn't bought a 1080p TV.
Click to expand...

yeah, so now sub HD (1080p) in 2013 is good because means better framerate and more mystical balance. Too bad that in 2013 is actually reasonable to expect 1080p & stable frame rate .

1080p is not such high resolution ! It is actually quite modest nowadays.

Hyunashi said:
I swear 'balance' is becoming the next 'cloud'.
Click to expand...
indeed.

It is all spin / marketing and click hunting.
 
sono

sono

Member
The engine designers for consoles need to do a job to make use of great hardware features that consumers are paying for.

Its my understanding that the main "newer" things on these consoles is gpu compute and unified memory opportunities.

So get on it, dont give us excuses.

Your competition wont.
 
M

Mad_Ban

Member
I don't see the point of this being a "secret interview" when nothing new was revealed and it was a regurgitation of stuff we've seen over the last few months.
 
A

AyaisMUsikWhore

Member
I absolutely love this. I wish this was something you can sue for tbh. Since the start of this gen there has been nothing but Microsoft defending back to back... But Nintendo nor Sony never get articles like this defending them. Where was this when Microsoft claimed the 360 was more powerful? Where were these devs who defended Sony? It's good because this is continuously dragging me away from an Xbox One. I'm just about sick of it now. This is absolutely ridiculous.....
 
S

shinra-bansho

Member
It's also somewhat amusing that this goes up right around the time we get confirmation of Ghosts being 1080p on the PS4 and 720p on the XB1, with BF4 also being 720p on the XB1.

720p the more balanced resolution.
Watch out for those framerates on the PS4 games.

/tinfoilhat
 
dr_rus

dr_rus

Member
"Balance" is a relative term. Your hardware can be balanced in relation to some workload which your hardware will do. On consoles this is a rather pointless term because most of workloads of a console are created specifically for that console. The point of intersection which allow you to compare different consoles is the software which is made for several consoles at once - multiplatform titles. So you can say for example that 360 had better balance for multiplatform titles than PS3 - it ran them better while costing less. Now lets look at the XBO vs PS4 situation - everything points to PS4 being better balanced for such workloads this time around. So all this talk of "balance" from MS is somewhat strange because once the hardware and software will be out everyone and their dogs will see what platform have better balance - and I'm sure as hell that it won't be Xbox One. PS4 have better balance than XBO - that's clear as day from specs/price comparision.
 
D

Dizzy

Banned
Lol that just sounds like damage control, for the guy to address his critics and save face. He even says something alone those lines right near the start.
 
K

kitch9

Banned
"Balance"

Developer says cpu is shit on both machines.

One machine has an abundance of gpu compute to help the other does not.

"Balance. "
 
D

Darkwaknight

Banned
There is nothing here we don't already know, and it just comes across as more damage control PR.

It spreads FUD that in some way the ps4 has bottlenecks in areas the x1 doesn't, this is simply untrue the base level of the ps4 parts are higher in just about everything (clock speed possibly aside but very small even if so) from GPU grunt, sheer bandwidth, reduced "bubble", much higher scope for Gpgpu etc etc.

Sorry to say this is too be taken as it comes across, another Manufactured article!!
 
R

Racer1977

Member
So then, another wall of text explaining the benefits of "balance", and underplaying the power differences.

From Digital Foundry..........again.

Meanwhile, we are actually hearing about this "balance" being for shit, as even launch games are displaying notable differences.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

DF Direct: Immortals of Aveum - First Console FSR3 Frame-Gen Game
44
3K
Fbh replied
Insider Gaming has learned of the developer requirements that need to be met to have the ‘PS5 Pro Enhanced’ label
Rumor 2 3 4
177
13K
sachos replied
Immortals of Aveum set to receive HDR and FSR 3 console frame generation (High dynamic range imminent, frame-gen "in just a few short weeks")
Game Dev 2 3
101
7K
Thick Thighs Save Lives replied
Nintendo Reportedly Added Support For VRR & Up To 240 FPS To Its Internal Game Engine
2
69
3K
bender replied
  • Locked
Pentiment Reportedly Runs Better on PlayStation 5 than on the Xbox Series
Community Platform
4
1K
LordCBH replied
Top Bottom