A couple of questions, because I feel like I've missed a lot of news here:
- If PlayStation didn't go down the power route, why do they need a "lavish and expensive cooling system"? Microsoft's cooling overkill is because they've packed their box to the rafters with as much power as they can. If Sony had a deliberate focus-shift away from power, like the Gamecube before it, wouldn't that also come with lesser cooling requirements, not more? Why would Sony spend money on something they don't need, only driving up the cost of the console?
- Do the controllers buttons actually light up? I haven't read that anywhere? I also kinda doubt it, because it's pointless - your fingers sit over the buttons, blocking the light?
- Link for the world record on their SSD please.
- Is the controller's haptics state-of-the-art? General opinion so far seems to place it somewhere around Valve's discontinued Steam controller? I'd appreciate some further information.
- Maybe I've misunderstood - in built PSU doesn't mitigate cooling. That's why Microsoft used power bricks on their previous consoles - to get the heat out of the console. In the case of the Xbox 360, that still wasn't enough to stop the console overheating.
- Sony have not announced any backward compatibility plans for functionality that "
encompasses all previous generations of their library
". In fact, even as of today, Sony haven't clarified if we're getting more than 100 PS4 titles at launch. Did I miss a press release?
- Which respected "Audio Industry" personality has described the Tempest Engine as a rival to the "crème of the crop"? Because the audio industry has some seriously lavish shit that's worth millions of dollars that goes well beyond my technical understanding. All I've seen it compared to is the implementation of binaural audio in Resident Evil 2... which was done in software with Dolby Atmos. The Tempest Engine is also limited to heaphones… and they're hoping to one day make it work with TV Speakers, but they can't provide a timeline on that.
That's not really how this works, and I believe you've misunderstood the point that that image makes. Firstly, the image can paint an incorrect view of the concept of diminishing returns, if you don't understand what it's actually saying. Taken correctly, it's highlighting that if you wasted a x10 triangle count on improving ancillary details of only existing objects, you're an idiot who has no place in asset design. Luckily, most development companies are staffed by really smart and talented people. So, that's not how games work in the real world. In fact, one of the major contributing factors in the overall visual improvements we see from generation to generation is a huge bump in renderable triangle counts. While a good amount of this is used to provide higher quality hero assets, most of it is actually used to provide bigger levels with fewer compromises, and more NPCs, and at further distances, all to create not just the sense of bigger worlds, but actually bigger worlds. We went from box castles in Quake to the open road of Los Santos in GTA5 because of bigger triangle counts. Past the raw geometry, it means more NPCs on a battle field, more cars on the road, more trees in the forest - even more effects and sprite billboarding - it all comes from higher triangle counts. I'd go as far as to say that this generation's fixation with open world games is almost entirely facilitated by the ability to render hundreds and hundreds of millions of triangles.
To break it down a little further and provide context, the PS2 could render somewhere in the ballpark of 15-44 million triangles, depending a lot on what you were trying to do. The PS4 is closer to 1.5
billion.
To bring it home, with a 20% power differential, that would mean the Xbox Series X can render more on-screen triangles. For the sake of discussion, let's call it 20% more triangles (it's really not, but whatever at this point). At the PS4's power level, that would be 300,000,000 more triangles - somewhere around 10 or 15 PlayStation 2's worth of triangles
more. And the PS5 and XSX can render a whole lot more than 1.5 billion triangles. So, that's... actually a pretty big difference when you look at what it all means.
Also, last correction - the PS5 won't "load" it's triangles in half the time as the XSX. It'll load the raw models into RAM faster, sure. Getting from RAM to the GPU, the XSX has a distinct advantage, and getting from the GPU to your TV screen, the XSX also has an advantage. If the PS5 will load its levels in 4 seconds, the Xbox Series X will load it in 7... and then render the game at higher resolutions and higher frame rates.