@kalade: That part of the demo was kind of vague. The narrator says they dump in movie quality assets (generated through photogrammetry, sculpting or another process that generates meshes with 30+million polygons), and Nanite chops it down to something manageable (and allegedly lossless) and that model is stored on disk. Nanite also calculates LOD on the fly, and presumably, we won't see jumps in geometric detail as we approach irregularly shaped or complicated objects. OK.
The narrator then states that they are using 8K textures, 8K normal maps, etc., for each object. He doesn't clarify if this is 8K source tossed into Nanite in development, chopped down and compressed "losslessly", stored on disk for in-game use. He just repeatedly touts "8K textures". How large will a game be if that is the case? Good luck with 825-1000 GB SSDs.
Also, Series X and PS5 have 16 GB RAM in total, I believe. How much RAM are those textures going to eat up in a game?
@kalade: It's definitely a good thing that consoles have stepped it up and closed the gap a bit with PC this generation, at least for the first year. That will give developers a standard to hover around -- not a magic bullet, but it will help to lift requirements out of the doldrums. I still feel it will be years before SSDs on any platform do much more than alleviate annoying load times and pop in/up.
My contention was with Sweeney's comments and 1 or 2 questionable comments by the devs. He acts as if he's never seen an SSD before -- there's a ton of throughput and IOPs difference between a rotary disk and today's SSDs. Yes, the consoles have the advantage of using APUs to reduce some latency and PS5 is using 12 lanes.
Still, there are consumer-level PCIe 4.0 sticks around 5 GB/s available today. There are PCIe SSDs (though expensive) and ES.1 coming. At the consumer level, the console SSDs will be eclipsed before the end of the year, maybe before launch. Sweeney said something along the lines of "the PS5 SSD made the demo possible" or maybe even "the demo could only be done on the PS5 SSD". I don't but it. Somehow, when it comes to PC, specs are peak, ideal or theoretical values, yet on consoles clocks and data rates are rock solid and conditions are always ideal.
Tech demos always sow doubt in my mind -- toss in the hyperbolic comments, a new engine to promote, and the Sony advertising partnership, and I'm highly suspicious. This is a rodeo I've been too many times. The Emotion Engine, The Graphics Synthesizer, Cell, the Tekken Tag Tournament reveal, the Killzone 2 reveal, the Watchdogs demo, Aliens Colonial Marines...
@kalade: It's more that the blatant pumping up of consoles (specifically the PS5 and more specifically it's SSD) and UE5 by Sweeney who is suffering from selective amnesia, apparently that is the issue. He disingenuous. A few months ago, he made comments about the PS5 SSD (and no mention of Series X) and now it is known that Epic and Sony had a partnership for this reveal.
PCs have had affordable SSDs pre-dating XB1 and PS4. In the almost 7 years of their existence, SSDs have only gotten faster and cheaper. More affordable PCIe 4.0 boards will be available next month. The newest NVMe stick in my machine runs over 3200 MB/s read on the last scan. It's an ADATA stick and not high-end.
Sweeney's words suggest he couldn't do anything impressive all these years, and now, magically, the PS5 SSDs makes UE5 possible. I'm incredulous. He's even suggested that PC tech needs to catch up. LOL. Consoles spent decades reading at 100-200 MB/s and discs speeds before that. PS5 doesn't release until October and UE5 won't even be in preview until early 2021.
PCIe 4.0 has been available, cheaper boards arrive in June, and drives get faster every few months. Sweeney doesn't have access to pre-release PC hardware? Anritsu release the PCIe 5.0 spec, which will likely arrive in the next 2 years.
@brxricano: It's not a competition. People will watch what interests them. Devs could be the greatest show of the decade, and millions of viewers wouldn't watch it because they're not into sci-fi.
You and I have watched all four of the series you mentioned, apparently, so for those involved in the production, mission accomplished.
@Jinzo_111887: They want games locked on their platform of choice, so they can exaggerate the merits of the game and the platform, encouraging more people to buy that platform, earning the manufacturer more capitalize to develop or lockdown more games.
@santinegrete: I never finished RE3 or Code Veronica (which I think I owned on 3 different systems). That's why I was a little disappointed to hear the Clock Tower portion was cut out. That was one of the few sections I remember, and where I think I left off.
Still I'm having fun with RE3make, even if there are shortcomings.
@Berserk8989: The article said source code and test files/drivers where stolen. This is the code used to design the chip circuitry, lithography, and microcode.
@reznik00: Your thinking is flawed and your point is irrelevant. Microsoft owns Xbox and Windows on those PCs. The only reason to build a console is to have a dedicated path for selling games to a customer. Funding console R&D, building, shipping and handling hardware is a monetary burden. It's a burden on resources.
Console sales are a hard cap on potential software sales. No game sells 1:1 with a console, not even close. So what company would think it was a good idea for a game to be tied to a single platform, when the company controls multiple platforms of similar technological capabilities?
@Pwnslaught: I don't care about what they do with Ellie -- I never liked her character, long before the DLC or the sequel trailer. However, I did try to protect her in the first game and let her maintain her childhood...then the game forced her to kill someone, and that went out the window. She's a rip-off of Ellen Page, both are miserable, so it's not a stretch that the writer made her bi or a lesbian. Funny that there's no trepidation being expressed over whether the so will be any good, or they'll sell a 5' 100 lbs. person fighting zombies and murderous marauding gangs.
The "agenda" the other guy is referring to, I imagine, is the push to stuff so many gay characters and gay love scenes into film and (cable/streaming) television as possible, in vain attempt to "normalize" it. It will never be normal, because it isn't.
No heterosexual man wants to see male-on-male love scenes. Ever. They're usually met with an audible and exasperated "WTF..." and fast forwarding of the media or shutting it down entirely. I don't know...at least I'm not aware of any straight male who feels differently. Is the hope that one day men will just sit there and watch like it's normal? Good luck with that. There are still heterosexual people that are offended by straight sex scenes.
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