YOU PC BRO?!
Member
Ryan has been way off base on this from the offset. Good on him publicly admitting he was wrong.
It's obvious as CPU utilisation generally doesn't scale linearly along with GPU power. We see this all the time in game benchmarks on PC where CPU utilisation barely changes as GPU utilisation increases.
System IO would also be an issue if a game engine is designed with a minimum throughput in mind (imagine the quick portal transitions from Ratchet and Clank PS5 running on PS4 for example - they would probably take 10 - 20 seconds each and that is being generous).
RAM is not a problem as long as the old system has a reasonable amount, asset quality could be culled in line with the capabilities of the system.
GPU is not an issue though next gen hardware based features would have to be omitted on the base hardware.
Given the above, CPU and sytem IO is almost impossible to scale back if the game engine is designed to take full advantage. Notice I said almost as it would be possible with a lot of work to cut enough of a next gen feature rich game to get some version of it to run on the prior gen machine. We have already seen very demanding games like Doom and Witcher 3 running on Switch for example. The issue however is the cost and development overhead to such an undertaking. I imagine most game studios just wouldn't be able to achieve this given the stringent time budgets at play. Much easier for them to design the game with the previous gen machine in mind and scale up. This then robs us all of the true next gen bump we would expect given the sizeable bill of entry into the next gen space.
Additionally. The pending announcement of the Series S is safe from my above critique. As it is rumoured to be equipped with the same CPU, same SSD, enough RAM (adjusting for adjusted asset quality reduction) and the same feature set supporting GPU it wouldn't affect things in my eyes other than a little dev time in producing a scaled back performance profile for the game.
It's obvious as CPU utilisation generally doesn't scale linearly along with GPU power. We see this all the time in game benchmarks on PC where CPU utilisation barely changes as GPU utilisation increases.
System IO would also be an issue if a game engine is designed with a minimum throughput in mind (imagine the quick portal transitions from Ratchet and Clank PS5 running on PS4 for example - they would probably take 10 - 20 seconds each and that is being generous).
RAM is not a problem as long as the old system has a reasonable amount, asset quality could be culled in line with the capabilities of the system.
GPU is not an issue though next gen hardware based features would have to be omitted on the base hardware.
Given the above, CPU and sytem IO is almost impossible to scale back if the game engine is designed to take full advantage. Notice I said almost as it would be possible with a lot of work to cut enough of a next gen feature rich game to get some version of it to run on the prior gen machine. We have already seen very demanding games like Doom and Witcher 3 running on Switch for example. The issue however is the cost and development overhead to such an undertaking. I imagine most game studios just wouldn't be able to achieve this given the stringent time budgets at play. Much easier for them to design the game with the previous gen machine in mind and scale up. This then robs us all of the true next gen bump we would expect given the sizeable bill of entry into the next gen space.
Additionally. The pending announcement of the Series S is safe from my above critique. As it is rumoured to be equipped with the same CPU, same SSD, enough RAM (adjusting for adjusted asset quality reduction) and the same feature set supporting GPU it wouldn't affect things in my eyes other than a little dev time in producing a scaled back performance profile for the game.