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Sony Consoles and Updates


Sly Reflex
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Cerny is always like this. He's clearly a very, very clever man, but his voice is placid it's hard to absorb what he's saying. I lost the tread a bit.

 

It all sounds very clever though, the 3D sound could be really cool. I'm increasingly doubtful it comes out this year, but I guess time will tell

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https://ogn.theonion.com/huge-announcement-sony-just-revealed-the-ps5-can-funct-1842401029

 

Actually I'm watching this again on giantbomb and I don't even think you need an onion article to point at how absurd this presentation is. The part where Mark talks about the systems that are used to prioritise a dying man's final words as he is shot. Like are they leaning into the creep factor lol

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This presentation might mean something to tech people, but to me perhaps the most encouraging thing I heard was about their philosophy. Mark saying he believes in console generations, and new consoles should be able to do things with games that the older console could not. For all the 12 inch teraflops that still sounds better than “No new games for 2 years” or whatever Microsoft said about the Series X. 

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You’re trying to defend the indefensible. He says it in the presentation, the new generation is about supplying tech to make games that were impossible to make before, a new generation isn’t just a power boost to play games that can be played on the older version. It’s just another premium console. If it runs on old gen, it’s still old gen. 

 

I want my new thing to do be able to do things the old one can’t do. Otherwise it’s a rip off.

 

2 years down the line that will change, but that means it’s a long time that a new console purchase isn’t really necessary and means people will have time to get really invested in the Playstation brand again.

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6 hours ago, Maf said:

 

I want my new thing to do be able to do things the old one can’t do. Otherwise it’s a rip off.

 

You mean rip-offs like Doom Eternal and Witcher 3, which both run on Switch, a portable last-gen machine basically?

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I’m not talking about the games being a rip off I’m talking about the box. Switch can’t do Gears 5 or Forza Horizon or a number of other games. Making the Xbox have immediate value because it can do something the other box can not. But if you bring out a new Xbox and say it can’t play anything the old Xbox can’t then...why?

 

Especially if PS5 has some killer games on it, even if just a few, it is immediately valuable and has a reason to be bought because it can do something none of the other boxes under my TV can. 


Also if games running on the SEX make the same games running on the Xbox One X look as crazy as Xbox One X games running on a Switch (Ori/Cuphead not withstanding) then maybe I have to review but I don’t think it will be like that. 

 

 

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My understanding of the SSD stuff is it's really a lot like the advantage the CELL CPU offered, it can only really be taken advantage of by certain first party games.

 

For a game to be designed around that insane I/O speed it can't really be ported across to Xbox. It might get to PC eventually but not until that shit is actually available on a consumer level. Apparently there are SSDs slower than the one Sony has which have big heatsinks mounted on them.

 

So it's hard to know how good an advantage it is really. Naughty Dog's next game will probably be incredible but it's not going to translate to much on the third party side other than better and faster LODs and stuff like that. Open world games might be better on PS5.

 

I'm no engineer just a dumbass trying to figure out what this all means.

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To me @one-armed dwarf it means 3rd party games could run faster and load textures faster on PS5 than XSX but what difference that’ll equate to and whether it’ll be more than a few seconds remains to be seen.

 

Jason Schreier on why the TFLOP advantage XSX has on PS5 is kind of irrelevant

 

Quote

JASON: ...The other really interesting thing that happened was, because they released this giant list of tech specs that maybe your average hardcore gamer who reads a lot of forums and Reddit and Twitter and stuff can kind of semi-parse this stuff--

KIRK: They can parse it just enough to have a super strong but not entirely informed opinion on this.

JASON: Yes, exactly. The number everyone's looking at is teraflops, which is essentially the maximum speed that a graphics card can run at. I believe it stands for floating point operations per second. So everybody's now seeing this spec sheet and they see PS5, 10.2 teraflops, and Xbox Series X, 12 teraflops. And it's like, oh my god, the Xbox is more powerful than the PlayStation. But meanwhile, the people I've been talking to over the past few months and the past couple years who are actually working on the PlayStation have pretty much unanimously all said: This thing is a beast. This thing is one of the coolest pieces of hardware that we've ever seen, we've ever used before. There are so many things here that are revolutionary, so many behind-the-scenes tools and features, APIs, and all sorts of other stuff that is way beyond my scope of comprehension. This is why I'm a reporter, and not an engineer.

But the general consensus is that these things are both extremely powerful and both very similar in a lot of ways and both do different things in really cool ways. These are both extremely impressive pieces of technology. But because of the way Sony has actually presented this thing and marketed this thing, now the narrative is 'The Xbox is way more powerful than the PlayStation,' and I think that is such a -- maybe fatal flaw on Sony's part for this console generation. Maybe it'll all be forgotten if the PS5 comes in cheaper, or it has a killer launch lineup, and maybe none of this will matter in November. Or maybe these consoles won't even be able to come out in November. But right now, it's such a dropping the ball after so many years of smart decisions on Sony's part.

KIRK: Yeah, I wonder about that, only because yes this is a messaging thing right now. The real question for me will be when the consoles are out, and there are multi-platform games on them. Because as much as I generally do feel that the number of teraflops isn't a huge deal, 12 versus 10, if you have great games on it, it's fine. It does, and I wrote about this at Kotaku back when the last consoles launched, I remember trying to articulate this as a very difficult needle to thread, by saying that basically yes, graphics aren't everything, but at the time the PS4 had this clear graphical advantage over the Xbox One. I remember Battlefield 4 was out on both systems and it was running at 1080p on one and 900p on the other. There were just these numerical ways you could say well here's the same game running on both, and they could only get it running this well and not the other.

JASON: So let me be clear. So what I'm hearing from people actually working on these things is that the Xbox is not significantly more powerful than the PlayStation, despite this teraflops number, and that the teraflops -- it might be a useful measure of comparison in some ways, but ultimately it's a theoretical max speed, and there are so many things that could come between where you are trying to get and what you are actually able to do, to the point where the GPU could have X number of flops that it can actually perform, but if the developer isn't able to actually access all of it for whatever reason, then it doesn't even matter, and there are so many other variables here that go into it.

At the end of the day, that is fundamentally the big question -- when Assassin's Creed Kingdom, or whatever it's called, Assassin's Creed Vikings comes out this fall, presumably, corona aside. Presumably it comes out this fall on both Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 -- which one will it look better on, which one will have a better resolution and better framerate on? I don't think we can know the answer to that question just from the spec sheet, and that's the point I'm making. 

Right now, Sony is dropping the ball so hard in that they haven't talked about what games can actually do with this stuff, because their SSD advantages -- the stuff I'm hearing from developers is very different from what I'm seeing in Sony's marketing strategy, and that is mind-boggling to me. Because I don't want to be like, carrying Sony's water and be like "no, look at what this thing can actually do" but they're just failing so hard to convey that. It's frustrating to watch.

MADDY: Do the developers think the SSD does pose a lot of advantages? Because that's the bulk of what Mark Cerny talked about. He did talk about taking photos of people's ears and that's very funny to me, but he also spent time talking about the SSD and how it works, and I barely understand it, but the various ways that the PS5 is set up -- it makes it so games load faster is the shorthand version of all the things he was saying, so you don't have to have a long elevator level or a super-windy path that makes it so two different areas can load.

KIRK: RIP elevator levels.

JASON: One important piece of context here is that both machines have a solid state drive as opposed to the traditional hard drive they've had in the past. So this is going to -- the whole super-short loading times thing is going to affect all next-gen games. I think that in itself is just going to make a huge difference. It's important to be clear -- the Xbox is a beast of a machine and that is going to do some incredible things. Both of these machines, I think, are going to do some incredible things.

I'm looking at the notes I took when I was talking to one person who's technically minded and works on this stuff, and this person was telling me that A) it's going to be hard to market this stuff because it's very hard to convey what makes a difference, as we're now seeing with Mark Cerny talking about it...

The speed of the PS5's SSD is significantly higher than the speed of the Xbox's SSD, and I don't think that's only going to affect loading times. The way this person was conveying this to me was that it can also affect the way games are designed, because if you're designing an open world, you no longer have to think about certain constraints you had to think about in the past... The obvious example is like in Jedi Fallen Order crawling between spaces, but I think it goes beyond that, I think it's the type of thing where developers have to get in front of this and start talking about like, here's what we can actually do with this open-world triple-A massive game now that we're no longer constrained by the CPU and hard drive of the past. I think ultimately the fact that people are fixated on these teraflops is doing us all an injustice because there's so much more.

KIRK: Hang on, let me just jump in here for a second. Don't you think this is the type of thing people are going to talk about for a month and then they're going to show more stuff and then talk about the console, etc etc?

JASON: Sure. I'm talking about what's happening right now. Yes, 100%. But to go back to what we were talking about earlier, what we saw with the Xbox One was that the narrative you start with can make a huge difference.

...

[lots of talk about the messaging]

...

This is going to lead to weeks and weeks of talk about how Xbox is the most powerful console, and so on. Meanwhile I'm getting texts even today from developers being like this is such a shame -- the PS5 is superior in all these other ways that they're not able to message right now or can't talk about right now. I heard from at least three different people in the past couple of hours since the Cerny thing being like, wow, the PS5 is actually the more superior piece of hardware in a lot of different ways, despite what we were seeing in these spec sheets. So, again, yes, plenty of room to talk about this, for all these companies to keep messaging and showing games, but I do think Sony has really dropped the ball from what we've seen so far.

 

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It’s not that they don’t matter per se, it’s that they’ve come up with two different solutions to the same problem @Nag. Microsoft’s was to just brute force through issues with sheer power really and Sony’s is to make everything as efficient as possible so there are no possible bottlenecks. The end result is they’ll both be incredibly similar power-wise really. It’s just the XSX might run some games better than the PS5 but PS5 might load textures faster and have slightly reduced loading times.

 

Proprietary cards have issues as they’re pretty much a monopoly, if you want extra storage you have no choice but to buy a card and they’re usually very expensive. Sony’s solution is better on paper because you can buy whatever compatible SSD you want, the catch is they have to be certified first and there’s none that have been yet, which means you won’t be able to get one at launch.
 

The PS5 SSD is 825GB.

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@Nag don't be like that. This gen seems like we're getting actual different machines, like with the PS3 and 360, so the comparisons could be a lot more interesting. It's hopefully not just going to be the same '900p-1080p-1440p-4k' breakdown as this gen has been. With upscaling improving so much, straight up resolution is less of a problem, particularly once you're getting close to 4k. 

 

Truth is, we've no idea whether Sony are all talk with this stuff, it might well come down to the Xbox performing better because it has more raw power

 

 

for storage, I'll worry about that way after. Whatever is on there will be fine for the first year I suspect, and if not I've a spare SSD that I could stick some stuff on hopefully (might need to house it somehow?). Then I'd probably spend the money and get another NVME drive

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No ‘damage control’ here @Nag, the XSX on paper is a little bit more powerful, no qualms about it. For reasons mentioned above though the power difference probably won’t matter in real terms at all though as the efficiency of the PS5 and SSD speed and tech make up for its shortcomings. 
 

As Ben said I’d imagine that 825gb is a 1TB SSD minus the partition space but who knows, would be a strange number otherwise. 

 

 

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Regarding the resolution discussion, personally I think HDR is far more impressive and important than actual 4k. So I’ve actually found the talk about being able to implement HDR into SDR games without much, or any, extra work a lot more exciting (on the SX). Should mean there won’t be any non HDR games next gen. 

 

I’d also much rather have a smoother and faster frame rate. I always pick Performance mode on the Pro and X over graphical quality. Take Horizon 4 as a example, I’ve swapped between the 2 modes lots of times for comparison and the frame rate mode just feels so much better and there’s very, very little noticeable difference in the quality of graphics, it’s barely a difference at all. I hope they keep the ability to choose between them in future games. 
 

The proprietary hard drives thing does sound worrying in a way. In the past this has always made them incredibly expensive just because there’s no competition/alternative. Take the PS Vita and original 360 hard drives as examples. However they never held a advantage over just a regular hard drive, whereas this time it does sound like the SX (& to a slightly lesser extent the PS5) hard drive does provide a genuine, real difference so I’m a bit more willing to take the price rogering. Or I’ll just have to only have a couple of games installed in the future instead of a load and learn to deal with it for instant loads, it may just be worth it. 

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I will say, I suspect Microsoft's solution is a decent bit cheaper than getting the NVMe card for the Playstation, for the first couple of years at least. Hopefully they let you stick a normal SSD in for the meantime so you can move files over quickly or play PS4 games from that, but another 1tb NVMe card that will fit the PS5, I suspect we're talking £200 for the first year or so?

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I’m pretty sure the 825gb will be 825gb and not 1tb, they mentioned it matches a certain part of the system... also if it was 1tb they would have said 1tb.

 

they said you’ll be able to play PS4 games from an external drive.

 

im sort of glad the ps5 seems a little less powerful as it might be cheaper, although maybe not if the fancy ssd adds a lot of cost to ps5. Bit worried the Xbox could be really pricy, well they both could be. They both sound ace anyway.

 

edit, I’m sure they’re both going to be a massive bargain compared to a similar spec pc too, even if they are very expensive.

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