Are you impressed by the PS5 or the XSX so far?

[0078265317]

BTW those who bought a ps5 or xbox did they at least come with a game or did you have to buy / download one to start?

[OldSchoolRetroGamer]

4 minutes ago, 0078265317 said:

BTW those who bought a ps5 or xbox did they at least come with a game or did you have to buy / download one to start?

My understanding is PS5 comes with a game that gives you a good taste of what the new controller can do with haptic feedback. 

Astros playroom - 

Astro's Playroom is a 3D platformer in which the player controls Astro Bot using the DualSense controller. ... The haptic feedback of the controller is used to provide realistic tactile vibrations from actions such as walking on different types of material, walking through rainfall and into wind.

Edited November 22, 2020 by OldSchoolRetroGamer

[IntelliMission]

14 hours ago, IntelliMission said:

Apparently, Jim Cerny explained the magic in a previous interview: instead of a truck that is able to carry 12 tons at a traditional speed, they decided to create one able to carry 8 tons at a very high speed. It looks like it's also super developer friendly. Some people are now pointing out how awesome that "Tomb Raider style" PS5 real-time Unity demo looked a few months ago.

Correction: It was either Mark Cerny or Jim Ryan who explained that. Jim Cerny doesn't exist.

[zzip]

On 11/21/2020 at 4:12 PM, IntelliMission said:

Apparently, Jim Cerny explained the magic in a previous interview: instead of a truck that is able to carry 12 tons at a traditional speed, they decided to create one able to carry 8 tons at a very high speed. It looks like it's also super developer friendly. Some people are now pointing out how awesome that "Tomb Raider style" PS5 real-time Unity demo looked a few months ago.

Yeah it seems like MS focused on the "marketing friendly" specs.    Marketing always pushes tech specs that are misleading  (like Mhz,  8/16/32 bit,  and now teraflops)   It's like saying "our new car can hit 300mph!"  Never mind that there's almost no highway that can handle a 300mph car, so it's wasted potential.   Things like tight curves insufficient lanes, and poorly-designed on/off-ramps would be the bottlenecks.    Sony's approach is more like "our car can only hit 220mph, but we are designing new highways where you can actually come close to that speed".   But it's hard to boil down "eliminating bottlenecks" to a simple quantifiable number like you can with "teraflops".  

 

And there are so many gamers out there who know very little about system design, but think they are experts.   They will quote things like the teraflops rating as if it's the be-all, end-all, and claim that the other stuff that Mark Cerny talked about is just BS. It was making excuses for having a lower TF rating. 

[adamchevy]

Yeah it seems like MS focused on the "marketing friendly" specs.    Marketing always pushes tech specs that are misleading  (like Mhz,  8/16/32 bit,  and now teraflops)   It's like saying "our new car can hit 300mph!"  Never mind that there's almost no highway that can handle a 300mph car, so it's wasted potential.   Things like tight curves insufficient lanes, and poorly-designed on/off-ramps would be the bottlenecks.    Sony's approach is more like "our car can only hit 220mph, but we are designing new highways where you can actually come close to that speed".   But it's hard to boil down "eliminating bottlenecks" to a simple quantifiable number like you can with "teraflops".    

And there are so many gamers out there who know very little about system design, but think they are experts.   They will quote things like the teraflops rating as if it's the be-all, end-all, and claim that the other stuff that Mark Cerny talked about is just BS. It was making excuses for having a lower TF rating. 

 

 

I don’t think their are any next Gen titles that show the performance differences enough yet. It’s going to take a couple years for programmers to learn how to play to the strengths of each consoles design. So far I think the PS5 will lend itself to better performance at 4k/120 with the possibility of Raytracing, and the Series X will perform better at 4k/60 with Ray tracing options the PS5 won’t be able to utilize.

 

I also think that both manufacturers are going to utilize the SSD strengths mostly this generation, which with standardization of this tech on both consoles(both having SSD) it will hopefully lead to some more creativity than in the last Gen.

 

The PC space hasn’t been able to use SSD as a game design factor because of the wide variety of hardware. Or they didn’t want to separate themselves to far from consoles.

[zzip]

2 hours ago, adamchevy said:

The PC space hasn’t been able to use SSD as a game design factor because of the wide variety of hardware. Or they didn’t want to separate themselves to far from consoles.

SSD is also bottlenecked on PC by the architecture.    You can find load tests of various PC games on hard drive vs SATA SSD vs NVME SSD.   The specs of the NVME drives are much faster than SATA SSD drives, yet when it comes to actual use like loading games, they barely outperform the SATA drives.    This is an area the PS5 did a lot of work to eliminate bottlenecks.  It will take PC a few years to catch up.

[adamchevy]

SSD is also bottlenecked on PC by the architecture.    You can find load tests of various PC games on hard drive vs SATA SSD vs NVME SSD.   The specs of the NVME drives are much faster than SATA SSD drives, yet when it comes to actual use like loading games, they barely outperform the SATA drives.    This is an area the PS5 did a lot of work to eliminate bottlenecks.  It will take PC a few years to catch up.

Isn’t the bottleneck the motherboard bus speed?

[zzip]

36 minutes ago, adamchevy said:

 

Isn’t the bottleneck the motherboard bus speed?

In part, but for games in particular, copying stuff into video ram is a bottleneck.   PS5 can pretty much DMA large objects into the equivalent of video memory, but the PC needs to first load into main RAM and do relatively slow copies into video RAM.

[0078265317]

Saw this at target today.

 

[HammR25]

On 11/21/2020 at 9:03 PM, 0078265317 said:

BTW those who bought a ps5 or xbox did they at least come with a game or did you have to buy / download one to start?

 

My Xbox Series X came with all the games I played on my Xbox One X.  The Master Chief Collection got an automatic upgrade as did Forza Horizon 4. I've only bought one game so far, Dirt 5.  I bought the console mainly because loading times would be reduced and they are.  Forza Horizon 4 loads a ton faster than it does on my PC even when not using quick resume.

[IntelliMission]

Microsoft has clarified some of the mysteries:

 

- They were late on manufacturing due to a deal with AMD

 

- Dev kits arrived later to developers than the PS5 ones

 

- They are aware that most games look better on PS5 and are working with the developers to fix that

 

In the meantime, Jason Schreier, video games journalist who pointed out months ago that the XSX was not significantly more powerful than the PS5 because "sometimes, more power is not useful if developers don't have full access to it for some reason" and was accused of being a Sony fanboy by some people, has posted a message on Twitter where he ironically hopes that his attackers will now apologize.

 

Finally and no less importantly, VGChartz says that 2.1-2.5 million PS5 have been sold over the launch days. This means that the console has already sold 2x what the WonderSwan sold at the end of its life.

Edited November 25, 2020 by IntelliMission

[adamchevy]

Microsoft has clarified some of the mysteries:  

- They were late on manufacturing due to a deal with AMD

 

- Dev kits arrived later to developers than the PS5 ones

 

- They are aware that most games look better on PS5 and are working with the developers to fix that

 

In the meantime, Jason Schreier, video games journalist who pointed out months ago that the XSX was not significantly more powerful than the PS5 because "sometimes, more power is not useful if developers don't have full access to it for some reason" and was accused of being a Sony fanboy by some people, has posted a message on Twitter where he ironically hopes that his attackers will now apologize.

 

Finally and no less importantly, VGChartz says that 2.1-2.5 million PS5 have been sold over the launch days. This means that the console has already sold 2x what the WonderSwan sold at the end of its life.

 

 

I fail to see how a late dev kit is affecting this? I’m not a Sony or Xbox fanboy, but that makes no sense to me.

 

They released a game and it didn’t measure up. Did you forget to toggle the add extra Teraflops button in your Series X dev kit?

 

The differences are so minuscule in the hardware that it’s laughable. Maybe there’s some differences in the OS but that’s about it.

[IntelliMission]

Well, the other explanation would be a design bottleneck.

 

Digital Foundry suggested that the Series X peformance issues "might be due to some unknown API bottleneck".

 

And 6 months ago, a Crytek employee explained that Microsoft's new console has clear design bottlenecks due to its complex design (a bit like the Saturn's 2 processors, but this time in the shape of split RAM and almost twice the PS5's calculation units).

 

On the other hand, the PS5's apparent ease to achieve impressive results is consistentwith what both Mark Cerny, Jim Ryan and developers have been saying for months, such as this article about the CPU automatic optimization in Sony's new console.

[IntelliMission]

Spain: Microsoft sent around 15K Xbox Series S/X consoles, Sony sent around 45K PS5 consoles. All units are sold (except for some Series S units that you can still see in some stores, according to some sources).

[Guest]

On 11/21/2020 at 10:49 AM, IntelliMission said:

People are already theorizing what the issue with XSX could be. Some talk about a potential bottleneck, but others point out that the XSX developer tools arrived a bit late to developers. Another theory is that the Series S inferior capabilities are dragging Series X versions.

I wish microsoft did what sony did and made one without a drive and the other with drive and both models with the same specs. 

Yet at the same time the Series S with that $300 price point feels like a smart move. I'm really conflicted about this decision.  

[zzip]

5 minutes ago, Zeptari1 said:

Yet at the same time the Series S with that $300 price point feels like a smart move. I'm really conflicted about this decision.

I'm not a fan of having multiple hardware specs for consoles.    It's nice when all the console hardware is the same, and you can do deep optimizations based on that spec.   When you have two specs, then you have to optimize for both, and maybe a change that improves performance on one hurts it on the other.  Then if they do mid-gen updates again, that could be 3 or 4 different specs.  Soon it becomes PC-like with too many specs and it starts to get too complex to do the deep optimizations.

[IntelliMission]

The Series S move feels weird to me and it looks like it's consistent with what consumers are feeling too, because it's the one that was most easy to get of the new "3" consoles.

 

For the first time in history, not only Nintendo is not part of the generation change, but a company decides to release 2 versions of a console with different graphical capabilities from the start.

 

This normally happens after a few years either with add-ons or with Pro versions, so it definitely feels like an outdated product since it hits the stores.

 

The debate of whether we should count the sales of these machines together also exists: why should we count the Game Boy Color sales figures together with the original Game Boy? Why should we count Series X and S together? I think the PS4 Pro, Xbox One X and Xbox Series X can count as the same consoles as the PS4, Xbox One and Xbox Series S as long as all the games are compatible, but the Game Boy Color had dozens of games that were not compatible with the original and I don't think its sales figures should have been added to the original.

 

(Please correct me if there were many "PS4 Pro only" or "Xbox One X only" games, but I don't think there was any)

Edited November 28, 2020 by IntelliMission

[zzip]

6 hours ago, IntelliMission said:

(Please correct me if there were many "PS4 Pro only" or "Xbox One X only" games, but I don't think there was any)

I know Sony doesn't allow games to be Pro only,  I don't think MS did either.

[adamchevy]

One of the defining differences I’ve noticed so far is that the PS5 doesn’t need an internet connection to function and the Series consoles do. I don’t own either, so maybe someone can correct me on that. I came across it while watching a few reviews on YouTube.

 

[DJ Clae]

On 11/27/2020 at 1:06 PM, Zeptari1 said:

I wish microsoft did what sony did and made one without a drive and the other with drive and both models with the same specs. 

Yet at the same time the Series S with that $300 price point feels like a smart move. I'm really conflicted about this decision.  

I wish the Series S didn't exist. Another platform for devs to optimize for, and padding for the Digital Foundry head to heads. All we care about is XSX vs PS5. Get that Series S out of there.

 

Also Series S isn't living up to MS's promise of having the same experience as XSX but at lower resolution.

[slab0meat]

As stated before, the Series X "came" with the hundreds of Xbox games I already had, and could still play.  Bought the new COD, even though I don't play that series much anymore, more for zombies with friends.  However, between new or old games on the SSD, the load times are awesome.. so nice to play a game within a a few seconds.  And quick resume, where applicable.

 

Will get Cyberpunk soon, as well.

 

(and as a side note, an added bonus is doing Microsoft/Bing rewards for awhile and saving up points... bought a shock blue controller, a new rechargeable battery pack with USB-C cord, and COD was free as well... all those for no cost.  Was nice.)

[IntelliMission]

It loks like Forbes is not particularly impressed with the Series X either:

 

Forbes: Why The Xbox Series X Is 2020’s Biggest Gaming Disappointment

[adamchevy]

I wish the Series X could really show that TFlop power, and I really mean that. I was hoping for another 360/PS3 type era minus the difficulty in PS3 game development due to the cell.

 

It’s strange to me that they have a slower SSD but are able to pull of quick resume the way they do. It must be a ui thing? I hope the PS5 decides to implement a similar solution for switching between games. Maybe it’s proprietary?

 

 

I’ve said this before, but the Series X cooling solution looks better to me. I don’t like the liquid metal giant heat sink PS5 solution. I wish they would have went vapor chamber. Maybe it would have cost to much? And they couldn’t copy Series X?

 

I don’t own either console yet, but from watching tear downs the Series X looks to be the better hardware design for cooling. And this has been a huge problem over the last 2 gens, so it’s a big deal. I’d almost buy a Series X just for that reason alone. I have little kids so I can’t have an airplane take off in the living room every time I want to get my game on as fun as they might think that would be.

 

I have more to say but I need to go discipline some children....

 

 

 

[youxia]

These consoles have only been out for few weeks. It really is too early to tell what the real differences regarding their performance might be. The handful of available titles aren't proof of anything, since the devs had little time to learn these machines.

 

These difference will never be big in multiplat titles anyway, since the publishers push for parity. As always, they will come out in 2nd wave exclusives, though even then I doubt it will be something where you can clearly say "oh, this could've never be done on ......".

[AtariLeaf]

15 hours ago, IntelliMission said:

It loks like Forbes is not particularly impressed with the Series X either:

 

Forbes: Why The Xbox Series X Is 2020’s Biggest Gaming Disappointment

I guess Forbes hasn't heard of the Atari VCS