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Next-Gen PS5 & XSX |OT| Console tEch threaD

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Ascend

Member
First one in another thread.
Does that matter? All the threads are primarily talking about SSDs.

To recap (hopefully one last time):
- Unreal Engine 5 is a multiplatform game engine.
- It supports mobile, PC and console, always supporting the full array of features on high-end devices.
- Next-gen it will support the PS5, XsX, PC and mobile (again? What a surprise!)
- High-end PCs as well as the PS5 and XsX will support all features (I begin to notice a pattern here).
- The demo was shown running on a (considered extremely weak by some) PS5 console devkit, but which currently happens to have the fastest and most efficient I/O system among both consoles and PCs.
- Sony, although not directly participating, used this demo for marketing purposes.

So, the crazy conclusions:
- "They chose to show the demo on the PS5, that means this would never run on Xbox!" (LOL)
- "Maybe the geometry in some parts would have been scaled back on XsX. Higher resolution? Most probably." -> How dare you underestimate the Glorious Xbox Sex??!? (HINT: they didn't)
- The fact that this demo was marketing the PS5 fast data streaming invalidates the PS5 data streaming capabilities, XsX must be faster at that too! Sweeny (who kept his mouth shut per marketing agreement) is lying!
I can fully agree with that.
 

Andodalf

Banned
And in fairness the tweets pushing lossy texture compressor BPack as a silver bullet to match the IO complex and 2x raw SSD speed double down on that idea, because even if the XsX can largely match that demo, the use of 8K textures on PS5 is going to be less detailed on XsX (at possibly 4K or less) if they need to use the lossy compression of bpack to make up that IO deficit.

Too bad we have no remote idea what the actual demands of the demo are. For all that we know it only uses a quarter of the PS5s speeds and XSX is overkill too. They say it runs well in Sata SSDs after all. There’s absolutely no evidence to say that the PS5 is having its I/O tapped out, it’s speculation with as little basis as anything else. You can’t just definitively say that XSX will have downgraded textures
 

PaintTinJr

Member
Too bad we have no remote idea what the actual demands of the demo are. For all that we know it only uses a quarter of the PS5s speeds and XSX is overkill too. They say it runs well in Sata SSDs after all. There’s absolutely no evidence to say that the PS5 is having its I/O tapped out, it’s speculation with as little basis as anything else. You can’t just definitively say that XSX will have downgraded textures
I take the point you are making, and I agree with your assertion without trying to defend it. But in all honesty, do you believe they didn't push the console hard in key areas, or just wish it to be so?

If uncompressed 8K textures were so easy why even mention them? Why not get some 16K textures or 32K textures to stress it? The point of all UE demos is to fully stress the hardware it runs on, and has been that way whether showing on PC or consoles, why would this one be different?
 
SlimySnake SlimySnake

Did you see Dictator's post in the NXgamer thread? Absolutely hilarious, here it is:

[Regarding the SSD being a factor] We do not know that though as we do not know the Demos memory footprint :/

I think that is something we need to know before we start positing about it.

If anything, we learned that it is utilising much less texture memory than normal games presumably - no large normales and texture mips for that and no geo LODs. And virtual texturing as well.

We do not know at all how the memory load is for nanite, so I have no idea. We had a shorter conversation with Epic (Tim sweeney), but they (He) only mentioned nanite scales with Compute Power and they said nothing about other axes it scales along.

Even though in the first few minutes of the UE5 reveal where the developer specifically states that all of the polygon detail is made possible due to the SSD streaming polygons in, he's still on here trying to downplay it as though "we don't know how it scales". He even tries to downplay the SSD by saying that there's not as much normal map data and so forth. He even goes on to say specifically that UE5 should scale with GPU power to try and pain the narrative that SSD isn't hugely responsible for this but somehow a 15% difference in GPU power will be an enormous scaling of power.

It's amazing the lengths he's going to downplay Sony's SSD, though completely predictable.
 

Andodalf

Banned
Fucking this!!

This forum is full of losers who are happy with 30fps just to win a console war.

60fps should be standard next gen

In the 3rd party space it’s always going to be up to those devs, nothing platform holders can do but control their own games. We haven’t really seen anything from 1st parties on next gen so far, but we did see some games make the shift even last gen, like Halo and Gears. I’d be shocked if we don’t see more of the same.

I take the point you are making, and I agree with your assertion without trying to defend it. But in all honesty, do you believe they didn't push the console hard in key areas, or just wish it to be so?

If uncompressed 8K textures were so easy why even mention them? Why not get some 16K textures or 32K textures to stress it? The point of all UE demos is to fully stress the hardware it runs on, and has been that way whether showing on PC or consoles, why would this one be different?

You (Epic, this is an unclear pronoun sorry) mention them because they’re (8k assets) so much better than what we use now, but we don’t go higher because of negligible returns and massive file sizes, and the fact that we have other bottlenecks to worry about. PS5 has somewhere perhaps a bit over 80-90x + faster I/O than a top spec game might take as it’s baseline on high end PC titles that simply assume you have a HDD, hopefully 7200rpm. You could double the I/O expectations of the best looking games 5 times and still have a ton of headroom. It’s not crazy at all to say that we just don’t have much tech to stress it, and that I/O can only scale so far up the stack before there just isn’t anything for it to do. If it’s loaded everything the GPU can handle in time for a frame, or all the RAM can hold, it just has to sit out. It isn’t the bottle neck. When one part of a platform increases 100x, it goes from being the bottle neck to being bottlenecked
 
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w6zGQgb.png



He makes a good addition to r/WatchPeopleDieInside

Microsoft ran their marketing through Dictator's and Richard's mouth.

Sony marketed their machine through EPIC's skills.
 

HAL-01

Member
Fucking this!!

This forum is full of losers who are happy with 30fps just to win a console war.

60fps should be standard next gen
the industry doesnt align with your personal preference, just quit whining and lashing out about it

perhaps make your own console, one custom tailored to your needs, where you control the graphics, framerate and resolution.
Maybe even make it so that you can upgrade it over time from off the shelf components. oh, wait..
 

PaintTinJr

Member
Fucking this!!

This forum is full of losers who are happy with 30fps just to win a console war.

60fps should be standard next gen
Any game that needs 60fps for gameplay feedback gets it on consoles, so I presume your issue is with games like AC or what was done in the UE5 demo.

So if you are mandating 60fps, are you also stating those games should be twitchy with animations that can be broken after a single frame? Depending on the length of animations (in frames) before you can break them, you could just as easily render a game at 60fps and it be less responsive than one at 30fps with animations that could be broken 2.5x quicker.
 

saintjules

Member
The only flaw in this (and it's a big one), is that the engine will be released in 2021. As of now, the older Xbox consoles are promised support for two years. So that means that by the time UE5 games come out, support for the older Xbox consoles might have already been dropped. But we'll see.

Interesting bit. Not too familiar on the process of acquiring engines, but is there any possibility that exclusive 1st party developers may already or will have UE5 prior to official launch in 2021? Surely there would be more of an incentive for them to get it early, especially if Sony / Xbox are working with Epic?
 
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SlimySnake SlimySnake

Did you see Dictator's post in the NXgamer thread? Absolutely hilarious.

Even though in the first few minutes of the UE5 reveal where the developer specifically states that all of the polygon detail is made possible due to the SSD streaming polygons in, he's still on here trying to downplay it as though "we don't know how it scales". He even tries to downplay the SSD by saying that there's not as much normal map data and so forth. He even goes on to say specifically that UE5 should scale with GPU power to try and pain the narrative that SSD isn't hugely responsible for this but somehow a 15% difference in GPU power will be an enormous scaling of power.

It's amazing the lengths he's going to downplay Sony's SSD, though completely predictable.
🤷‍♂️
 
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HAL-01

Member
Interesting bit. Not too familiar on the process of acquiring engines, but is there any possibility that exclusive 1st party developers may already or will have UE5 prior to official launch in 2021? Surely there would be more of an incentive for them to get it early, especially if Sony / Xbox are working with Epic?
Sony first party are more than likely already working with similar tech in their own engines, considering the architecture was designed with something like this in mind. As for MS first party, games built around UE4 can easily be transferred to UE5 once it launches.
 

Andodalf

Banned
Interesting bit. Not too familiar on the process of acquiring engines, but is there any possibility that exclusive 1st party developers may already or will have UE5 prior to official launch in 2021? Surely there would be more of an incentive for them to get it early, especially if Sony / Xbox are working with Epic?

I'm very interested as well, but one thing we do know is that migrating from UE4 to UE5 is supposed to be a relativity easy shift. Still a ton involved, but a lot cleaner than your normal engine shift. So some games might be on UE4 rn, but shift to UE5 before launch for cross gen applications
 

Audiophile

Member
"By claiming that nanite needs to be ditched on the XSX.."

...

This is straight up straw-man - barely anyone is saying that it needs to be ditched. Just that certain areas may need to be scaled back when the level of data throughput is contingent on the PS5's SSD & I/O capabilities. And that compromises may have to be made to get it to run at either the same asset complexity/density or with the same level of transition/traversal/loading capability.

The same could be said of the reverse, let's say theoretical tech demo running on XSX is running at 1620p; that 1620p resolution for that particular demo would likely be contingent on the XSX's ALU capabilities and the PS5 version of said demo would likely require a compromise to the tune of scaling back to ~1440p.

The difference is that the former has functional, gameplay implications and worse case scenario, to maintain those gameplay functions on XSX you may have to cut asset density/complexity in half. Also, in an exclusive, the PS5 will get to have its cake and eat it too, devs won't have to pick between assets and the speed at which those assets are moved in and out of memory to anywhere near the same extent.

In regards to the latter, worst case scenario is something like 20% less native pixels, a compromise that is mitigated further by temporal reconstruction. This is a purely visual compromise.
 

PaintTinJr

Member
You (Epic, this is an unclear pronoun sorry) mention them because they’re (8k assets) so much better than what we use now, but we don’t go higher because of negligible returns and massive file sizes, and the fact that we have other bottlenecks to worry about. PS5 has somewhere perhaps a bit over 80-90x + faster I/O than a top spec game might take as it’s baseline on high end PC titles that simply assume you have a HDD, hopefully 7200rpm. You could double the I/O expectations of the best looking games 5 times and still have a ton of headroom. It’s not crazy at all to say that we just don’t have much tech to stress it, and that I/O can only scale so far up the stack before there just isn’t anything for it to do. If it’s loaded everything the GPU can handle in time for a frame, or all the RAM can hold, it just has to sit out. It isn’t the bottle neck. When one part of a platform increases 100x, it goes from being the bottle neck to being bottlenecked

Your statement about it being bottlenecked is only valid if everything else stays the same, and in the UE5 demo it all changed at a paradigm level. I've said already about how it was truly amazing when the character steps outside and you can see to the horizon - because at that point they've most likely had to switch from one type of space partitioning algorithm to a different one, and done it in less than a frame with 10 billion polygon source objects mostly being switched out and crunched down in that same frame . rendering polygon per pixel level with fresh data from IO every frame doesn't sound very lightweight SSD streaming. In fact it sounds like the entire IO complex was being used pretty hard, hard enough that when it had to, it needed to use a dynamic resolution.

What do you think? There's lots of info in the video to instinctively extrapolate from. Do you think it was pushing the PS5 IO at more than 50% at any time in the video?
 

HAL-01

Member
It seems those "world tours" Cerny made to ask developers what they wanted paid off.
Now we can confirm Epic was one of them. Which other studios you guys think were visited by Cerny? (excluding the Sony first party ones which are kinda obvious)
they probably went to kojima and he ordered them "let me render every hair in mads mikkelsens nose" and they could do nothing but heed
 

Bo_Hazem

Banned


nice break of the UE5 tech demo we, really detailed stuff especially how Global Illuminations and Dynamic Lighting differ from ray-tracing.

He says a lot of interesting stuff which makes sense when you think about it, the UE5 devs specifically said and I'm paraphrasing "the PS5 tech demo does not use hardware accelerated ray-tracing", what they were apparently trying to say was "look at the level of global illumination we've been able to achieve without using PS5's dedicated hardware"


Just wow! Amazing video from him as usual, but we could expect even native 4K@30-60fps or 1440p@60-90fps with the same demo when HW RT is utilized! What a madness!
 
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Why a "like" to that post would make you that/xbox fan?

Tim Sweeney is basically confirming there that UE5 is tailored for the PS5 SSD I/O unit 👇

ZVEd9Lb.jpg


We already knew that Nanite and Lumen tech will be fully supported on Xbox Series X. Pretty sure that XSX will show its own UE5 tech demo soon too :)
.
Basically because Tim say 'Cerny listen to me not like others'
 
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Andodalf

Banned
Your statement about it being bottlenecked is only valid if everything else stays the same, and in the UE5 demo it all changed at a paradigm level. I've said already about how it was truly amazing when the character steps outside and you can see to the horizon - because at that point they've most likely had to switch from one type of space partitioning algorithm to a different one, and done it in less than a frame with 10 billion polygon source objects mostly being switched out and crunched down in that same frame . rendering polygon per pixel level with fresh data from IO every frame doesn't sound very lightweight SSD streaming. In fact it sounds like the entire IO complex was being used pretty hard, hard enough that when it had to, it needed to use a dynamic resolution.

What do you think? There's lots of info in the video to instinctively extrapolate from. Do you think it was pushing the PS5 IO at more than 50% at any time in the video?

No clue. We have no idea what it takes. What you describe sound amazing, What if it's 30 times what we saw on last gen? If It's 30 times as demanding, which is a revelatory increase, then no, PS5 is hardly breaking a sweat. There's just no point of reference for this. The I/O leap from 5400 rpm drives as a baseline to SATA ssds is about as big a jump as we've seen in gaming, and the new consoles are jumping far past Sata to NVMe.
 
The xbox twitter fanboys are pushing that SFS 'streaming speed advantage' harder than ever.

Gh50gE8.png


I'm not very tech savvy but this doesn't make any sense. If SFS actually gave Series X the upperhand in I/O-speeds (am I understanding their point right here?), how on god's green earth hasn't this made MAJOR headlines yet? I mean shit, if true Sony just invested in that monster SSD for nothing.
Just to put all that nonsense of that tweet to rest. Let's start from the basics. The Velocity Architecture as Microsoft calls it has 4 main components fused together to form it. 2 hardware (the ssd & the decompression block) & 2 software (SFS & DirectStorage). The ssd is responsible for streaming in data quickly with a compressed data speed of 4.8 GB/s and a raw(decompressed) data speed of 2.4 GB/s. The decompression block has an effective upper limit of more than 6 GB/s, let's just be a little bit generous and say 6.6GB/s as an example scenario. That upper limit of the decompression block is your bottleneck, if you try to push more data through than the decompression block can theoretically handle you'll essentially run into trouble .You cannot circumvent that limitation set by the decompression block no matter how much code you write and how optimised that code it, So that argument of it the 2-3x multiplier making it 9.6GB/s and 14.4GB/s essentially breaking the laws of physics and Engineering borders on astroturfing and some people are falling for that PR fluff that essentially makes zero sense whatsoever and it's just Microsoft tossing around their usual outrageous PR like they do some times ,to hype up something that doesn't make any sense to begin with.
 

Tiago07

Member
Just wow! Amazing video from him as usual, but we could expect even native 4K@30-60fps or 1440p@60-90fps with the same demo when RT HW is utilized! What a madness!
I watched this video. And yes, Global Illumination is a RT Feature, but PS5 does not use the hardware acellerated part like Epic says, (because they are promoting Unreal 5 and Unreal can do this by software) so its possible to PS5 run this game in 60fps or even some resolution near to or in 4K.
 

Bo_Hazem

Banned
I watched this video. And yes, Global Illumination is a RT Feature, but PS5 does not use the hardware acellerated part like Epic says, (because they are promoting Unreal 5 and Unreal can do this by software) so its possible to PS5 run this game in 60fps or even some resolution near to or in 4K.

That's the pure madness! We all know how software-based RT is so taxing, we can expect much, much more than what we've seen! I would pick 4K@30fps over 1440p@60fps myself though, but still can't 100% tell without seeing it in practice as youtube does heavy compression, even though it's using the smartest way with VP9 for WebM files.

If we can get that demo insane image quality AND 60fps by lowering resolution, count me in.

No need, just use the PS5 HW RT instead of software like in the demo! RT implementation for PS5 isn't ready for UE5, you can imagine what 1st party studios are cooking!
 

DForce

NaughtyDog Defense Force
A few weeks ago, people were saying how Microsoft was getting all the mindshare going into next gen and now people are talking about the PlayStation 5 and the summer lineup for 2020.


I said before that people going to forget about waiting for so long as soon as Sony starts revealing more about the PlayStation 5.
 

Dargor

Member
A few weeks ago, people were saying how Microsoft was getting all the mindshare going into next gen and now people are talking about the PlayStation 5 and the summer lineup for 2020.


I said before that people going to forget about waiting for so long as soon as Sony starts revealing more about the PlayStation 5.

That will be the case if what they show is great, if not, I'm sure people won't be forgetting anything.
 

Audiophile

Member
If you're displaying one triangle per 1 pixel, then Nanite's compute-based software rasterisation makes more sense and is more efficient. However, when you approach one triangle per 4 pixels the implication seems to be that it will fall back to hardware-based rasterisation and be more efficient in that respect.

When it comes to RT, hardware is absolutely more effective across the board. But even with hardware acceleration you're only accelerating one of the required calculations (traversal of Bounding Volume Hierarchies), the conventional GPU hardware still has to cast, render the result and denoise the rays which could potentially steal a good chunk of ALU away from other functions. As mentioned before, I expect that in your average AA+ title, screen space solutions will remain dominant and RT will be plugging the occlusion/off-screen leaks.

Nanite will be culling a crap-tonne (technical term!) of assets/geometry to remain efficient; and for RT to work you'll need those for reference. So they'll likely have to find a way to store and easily access those assets/geometry, perhaps in a much-reduced fashion.

For eg. if you're trying to RT reflect a rock that has been culled due to being off screen, you can't reflect it... There are still problems to be solved here.
 
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TLZ

Banned
I don't feel like going through pages to find back these statements. And yes, I am exaggerating a bit, and even if no one stated that directly, it is completely implied if you start talking about requirements of 'scaling back'. And to be honest, considering the level of knowledge here. I doubt many here would know the difference between scaling back within nanite and reverting back to classical ways of rendering. Just as a hint, the demo was running with dynamic resolution for a reason.
No. That's not cool of you to play the victim to prove a point and accuse a group of people falsely like that. Not cool man. Not cool.

And I'll be bluntly honest with you here, this exact behaviour is precisely why I find *certain Xbox fans pathetic. This inferiority complex, playing the victim, spreading lies and false accusations really puts me off. You don't have to do that to prove a point. I just don't understand why this is prevalent among certain Xbox fans, especially now when they should be happy they have the upper hand in teraflops and have a very capable and nice device in XSX.

It's like no fun allowed for the competition. No wins allowed. It's all us. Nothing allowed for them. No!

So much hate blinds you from celebrating all the technological advances both are bringing nextgen.

(Yes I am fully aware certain fans of PS and Nintendo have their own complexes as well. Certain PS fans may come off as show offs and certain Nintendo fans may come off as manbabies. Though I'm not sure they downplay and hate the competition as much as certain Xbox fans do)

*Certain Xbox fans = trying my best not to use that certain word.
 

Sinthor

Gold Member
Let me clarify something... And I can be wrong, but from what I understood... Either the hardware is good enough and nanite works for practical application, or it's not and then it doesn't. The 'scaling down' everyone is talking about means reverting to the old method of rendering. That's what consoles and PCs with HDD have to do. It's not about lessening details at the same resolution. The dynamic resolution of the PS5 was there because the nanite system adapts the resolution based on the amount of triangles being handled. If the GPU cannot handle the amount of triangles, or the SSD cannot throughput the triangles, the resolution will be scaled down to maintain the same level of detail at a lower resolution to keep the specified framerate. That means that if you run the same demo from the HDD, assuming the SSD is 10x faster, you'd run the same demo on 144p (technically 144p is not 10x less pixels, but you get the point I'm trying to make. I'm too lazy to calculate right now).

For everyone speaking about 'less details', take note of that.


All true.

Ok, from the outside of this contest or whatever it is.... From what I've seen about the demo and the comments about 'scaling down' I think that both sides are correct in the crucial details. First, this demo COULD run on an Xbox Series X. Hell, it should be able to run on a base PS4. Yes, there would be some 'scaling down' on other platforms as this was built with the PS5 strengths in mind. BUT, that doesn't mean the same thing for each platform. For a PS4 to run this, the textures and objects would have to be 'scaled down' and would not be 8k as they were in this demo. The resolution would also be scaled down. For a current high end PC or the Xbox Series X, it might be scaled down but in regards to those assets. Maybe the SSD on the XBsX can't stream 8k objects as fast...so maybe they'd use 4k objects. You likely wouldn't be able to tell the difference but there would be some difference there at least technically. THAT is how I understood Epic's comments to be meant.

Look, they design their engine to BE scalable to all platforms they support. But, some platforms have specific strengths. Maybe the XBsX would be 'scaled down' from using 8k to 4k objects but maybe it runs a bit higher resolution? Bottom line, we don't know. We WON'T know about this specific demo either unless I miss my guess. I believe Epic was saying this specific demo was targeting and ONLY FOR the PS5. So I think we'll have to look elsewhere for comparative examples to say 'Aha, bitches! TOLD you the XBsX would do better with THIS!' or 'Aha, bitches! TOLD you the PS5 would do better with THIS!'

Seriously, I think a lot of us are going just a tad bit crazy with all these restrictions from Covid-19. :) But, and before someone looks up every post I've ever made here....yes I plan on getting a PS5, but I don't HATE Xbox and I think I've at least pretty consistently said that both are going to make people very happy and that I expect minimal if any difference between the games that come to them, at least technically. That's just what this demo and Epic's statements appear to mean IMHO.
 

ZeroFool

Member
John Carmack was calling for this need in IO improvement during the PS3/360 years, but it is only now that prices are low enough to allow the proper pieces.

Nvme raid setups can achieve 11GB/s for example, still not apples to apples.

So tinfoil hat theory time on my part, is the weird storage amount on the PS5 due to a possible raid like setup and would that also lead into the 12 channels?

Thanks for indulging my secret sauce comment. 🤗
 
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