My theory is still that Sony promised Epic that Sonys upcoming games for PC will be exclusive to EGS.. or that Sony paid Epic a decent amount of money for this partnership.
I very much doubt Epic would spend thousands of hours producing a tech demo of this sort, just because the CEO is a "nerd" who gets "excited" about this stuff.
Unreal is used by numerous dev studios, although not Sony's first-party. Still, marketing it as an easy tool to develop is in Epic's best interest. Just taking into consideration their own Fortnite, that means tens of millions of people using their tech on Sony's consoles. That partnership will print them a lot of money.
I think Microsoft might have a similar demo at their event but it won't be the same thing. Maybe a Gears 6 teaser? They depend on UE even more, including their first party. If they don't show their own take at that technology, they'll lose a lot of ground.
Microsoft ran their marketing through Dictator's and Richard's mouth.
Sony marketed their machine through EPIC's skills.
I just realized how bad it is. Microsoft has a lot of money... No, I'm not going the warchest way. They in fact use a lot of money to market their products. Remember that eerie Circus de Soleil show for X1? Remember Reeves at last E3? That's what I mean. And now what: a bunch of tech-illiterate clowns who run a semi-popular YT channel? Streams from bedrooms with $5 cameras while the biggest feature was changing backgrounds in Skype? They can do much better, at least in the marketing department.
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?
Of course, that's why they give it free to small dev studios. User input is the best input for testing new features. UE5 will gain market share like crazy. It saves small and mid-level studios piles of cash, which will be godsent in the current situation.
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)
I'm sure he went to Japan to Squeenix, Capcom and Namco. He speaks Japanese, which probably opens a lot of doors.
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.
This is an interesting part. They said it'll run on lesser hardware but what about asset culling? Is Nanite software-based or hardware-based? In the latter option, it will surely run but you won't be able to use high-def assets just like that. Just one statue from the demo would choke current hardware to death. I'm not even starting with the GI implementation, Chaos physics. You'd see one frame per second or less and PS4 Pro would launch for Mars.
I see that even tech-savvy people scratch their heads as to how Nanite works. No draw calls sounds like magic. Billions of dollars have been spent on optimizing the rendering path and asset workflows. DX12, Vulcan, all those "code to the metal" ruckus at the end of the last gen. And suddenly, there comes Epic and puff! Magic! I'm not proficient enough in 3D graphics to even guess how they did that but my guess is: hardware-based. We need to know more and I'm sure they'll tell us about it soon. If they have a patent for that, other engine devs might have a problem. But I bet that Sony's first parties are currently implementing similar solutions in their own engines.
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.
RAID means you sacrifice half capacity for performance or data safety (using redundancy). They certainly don't need redundancy so that'd be the former. Then the PS5 SSD would need to be 1650 GB, which I highly doubt... Or around 400 GB, which I doubt even more. What they did is a bit similar to RAID because it uses multiple channels but in a smarter way. Of course that solution has drawbacks. You are tied to a specific storage capacity, it's expensive and possible expansions will cost a leg. But it's a good compromise for a console.
It will go live when Sony announces the price... they can do that up to September for a November release imo.
I think I know why Sony's event has been pushed back even though they confirm the hardware/software part hasn't been much affected by the pandemic. If you looked at exchange rates of major currencies like dollar, euro and yen in March and April, you might have got a headache. The situation was very unstable and unpredictable. Since the first psychological shock passed (which has nothing to do with the actual situation, but that's a different topic), global economy, though shaken, will resume its course and so will financial forecasts and the ability to calculate all costs. The price they announce is there to stay for a few years, which means billions of dollars of profit or loss. So they wait.
It's wonderful, indeed, but here's what I notices: (Note I'm watching it on my 55" 4K tv about 2.5m away)
You're watching a YT video with terrible compression. You shouldn't make any assumptions based on that.