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Digital Foundry: Heard that Xbox Series S Is A "Pain" For Developers Due To Memory Issues

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FrankWza

Member
The sub optimal fps was an engine bottleneck, not a memory bottleneck.
They basically just got it running with a gargantuan effort from an extra studio brought in to help. Detailed account according to the same person who this threads comments are based and the “pain” he might be referring to:
Series S obviously runs at a lower resolution (533p to 648p in the scenarios we've checked), using Epic's impressive Temporal Super Resolution technique to resolve a 1080p output. Due to how motion blue resolution scales on consoles, this effect fares relatively poorly here, often presenting like video compression macroblocks. Additionally, due to a sub-720p native resolution, the ray count on RT effects is also reined in, producing very different reflective effects, for example. Objects within reflections also appear to be using a pared back detail level, while geometric detail and texture quality is also reduced. Particle effects and lighting can also be subject to some cuts compared to the Series X and PS5 versions. What we're looking at seems to be the result of a lot of fine-tuned optimisation work but the overall effect is still impressive bearing in mind the power of the hardware. Lumen and Nanite are taxing even on the top-end consoles, but now we know that Series S can handle it - and also, what the trades may be in making that happen.
Bottom line…This^^ is not a description of great success AFTER a ton of effort.
 

yamaci17

Member
They basically just got it running with a gargantuan effort from an extra studio brought in to help. Detailed account according to the same person who this threads comments are based and the “pain” he might be referring to:

Bottom line…This^^ is not a description of great success AFTER a ton of effort.
i'd say its a success though

demo runs @10 fps on 4 gb 5500xt and 580 and 1650 super

so they did something all right ! maybe with tunes and tweaks on the demo we may get more perf out of those GPUs but I don't know if those efforts will ever translate to PC state
 

ChiefDada

Gold Member
There might be a point in time, maybe 5 years from now, when the entire Cerny sauce is gonna get squeezed in a first party Playstation game.

Lol, 5 years from now? Spiderman 2 comes out in 2023. By Insomniac Games, by far the best developers at the forefront of current gen.

But third parties will never fuck with it, the 2.4GB/s (or 4.8 GB/s) from Xbox will always be the maximum target.

Wake up and smell the M&A. 3rd party is a dying concept and as the years roll on the remaining mega multiplatform developers will be making uninspiring games for the masses (think Madden) .

Sony will produce contracts with smaller, creative independent developers for exclusive second party games as they have successfully done in the past. No need for MS consoles to be the baseline in this sort of environment.
 

Riky

$MSFT
They basically just got it running with a gargantuan effort from an extra studio brought in to help. Detailed account according to the same person who this threads comments are based and the “pain” he might be referring to:

Bottom line…This^^ is not a description of great success AFTER a ton of effort.
"What we're looking at seems to be the result of a lot of fine-tuned optimisation work but the overall effect is still impressive bearing in mind the power of the hardware. Lumen and Nanite are taxing even on the top-end consoles, but now we know that Series S can handle it"

I would say that is a great success, "impressive" is hardly negative 🤣
 
They basically just got it running with a gargantuan effort from an extra studio brought in to help. Detailed account according to the same person who this threads comments are based and the “pain” he might be referring to:

Bottom line…This^^ is not a description of great success AFTER a ton of effort.
The demo runs like a piece of shit on all platforms. It's not even close to optimized, so the future is still looking very bright for Little Beast :messenger_smiling_with_eyes:
 
Lol, 5 years from now? Spiderman 2 comes out in 2023. By Insomniac Games, by far the best developers at the forefront of current gen.
Is it confirmed that Spiderman 2 is gonna be using the entire sauce? Or will it be more of a Ratchet situation?
Wake up and smell the M&A. 3rd party is a dying concept and as the years roll on the remaining mega multiplatform developers will be making uninspiring games for the masses (think Madden) .
Bruh, what? Playstation lives off of 3rd party.
Sony will produce contracts with smaller, creative independent developers for exclusive second party games as they have successfully done in the past. No need for MS consoles to be the baseline in this sort of environment.
And those smaller indie games will be what, 2% of the entire market?
 

yamaci17

Member
SlimySnake SlimySnake

well im actually getting more frames here at exact same settings, of course i have a chonky 270w tdp card so that may play a factor. are we cool now?

gIF0kwZ.png

usBmvBy.jpg



4zvYuR8.png

ZKNsmPk.jpg



these ultra RT settings are brutal. the card dies at native 1440p. at that point, i bet you can feed this GPU with a ryzen 1600 or i7 4790 or something. they're also useless though. i did tons of visula comparisons at high rt and ultra rt. i simply couldn't notice any meaningful difference. just a fyi

cIX2qtf.jpg
 
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They basically just got it running with a gargantuan effort from an extra studio brought in to help. Detailed account according to the same person who this threads comments are based and the “pain” he might be referring to:

Bottom line…This^^ is not a description of great success AFTER a ton of effort.
That actually doesn't sound like much work. You keep saying gargantuan but no one is listing much work.
 

FingerBang

Member
Have you been there when we had 2 thread simultaneously arguing about wither the switch should be considered a home console and thus compared to PS5 and XSX?
Oh god, how long ago was that? I normally take the high road, saying something relatable such as "I don't debate poor people. We the rich simply buy every single console that comes out" while leaving, covering my ears.
 

adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
A demo designed, in part, around the Series S memory limitation does not have a memory bottleneck.


[1] citation needed. Please provide.


Per a developer, in 2020, for a system or game that has not even come out yet at the time, nor he has worked on. His game being... Bugsnax, that utilizes nothing that R&C does. A third party game, mind you. Regardless of that Marlon guy's click bait title.

pLaYsTaTiOn dEv tHo Fascinating.

Yes, a developer with first hand knowledge and developer tools.

I feel disappointed you didn't just reply with that fight club gif again DE. :messenger_tears_of_joy:
 
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FrankWza

Member
i'd say its a success though
Sure.After a gargantuan effort and an additional studio.
That actually doesn't sound like much work. You keep saying gargantuan but no one is listing much work.
I didn’t. It’s in the article. Gargantuan.
The extra work is implied. See the extra studio and cut backs needed just to get it running. See halo infinite needing an extra 6 months to have 120 fps support after a year delay and god knows how much more $.
See thread title and the use of the word “pain”
 
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yamaci17

Member
Sure.After a gargantuan effort and an additional studio.

I didn’t. It’s in the article. Gargantuan
okay but its unreal engine 5. most of those gargantuan efforts will probably accumulate into a big pile of knowledge and that kind of valuable effort and knowledge is probably re-usable. I think engine will have specific knobs and switches to easily tune an UE5 game for Series S. at least that's how I imagine things will go.

after all, UE5 itself is there to make game dev easier for other devs, no? considering most devs nowadays started abandoning their own custom engines
 
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adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
Bro, you ae being disingenuous and you know it.

I mean is it any more or less than the three dozen times the word gargantuous has been used in this thread ?

We're being asked to take the word of a DF article author as gospel that all development must be a pain and require gargantuous effort. But me posting an actual developer, who shipped a PS5 game, is disingenuous ?

Come on bro. This whole topics become a parody of itself by now.
 
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yamaci17

Member
I mean is it any more or less than the three dozen times the word gargantuous has been used in this thread ?

We're being asked to take the word of a DF article author as gospel that all development must be a pain and require gargantuous effort. But me posting an actual developer, who shipped a PS5 game, is disingenuous ?

Come on bro. This whole topics become a parody of itself by now.
i wont be shocked if we end up talking about world hunger in this topic btw
 

elliot5

Member
Yep.





See above.

i'm confused... are you considering TC helping out with optimization for the xbox platform / series s as "designing the demo around the series s' memory limitations"? Like you think they choreographed the scenes and interactions with the Series S memory in mind...? They already made the demo and it came down to making it work/run.
 
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There has been no indication that the XSS will be unable to handle similar physics, AI, or level design. The lower amount of RAM could cause problems if a developer chooses to not use the included features both Series consoles have to deal with that. Again I've never seen a console do worse as a generation goes on; look at early and later PS3 titles for example.

SFS will help but the thing is, there will ALWAYS be a hard-set difference in memory capacity between the Series S and Series X. Series S will always have 8 GB of VRAM, Series X will always have 10 GB of VRAM. Series S VRAM bandwidth will always be peak 224 GB/s, Series X VRAM bandwidth will always be peak 560 GB/s. Series S will always have less than 2 GB RAM for CPU and audio data, Series X will always have 3.5 GB of RAM for CPU/audio.

Those differences don't go away simply due to SFS, and it'll be something worth keeping in mind.
 

FrankWza

Member
okay but its unreal engine 5. most of those gargantuan efforts will probably accumulate into a big pile of knowledge and that kind of valuable effort and knowledge is probably re-usable. I think engine will have specific knobs and switches to easily tune an UE5 game for Series S. at least that's how I imagine things will go.

after all, UE5 itself is there to make game dev easier for other devs, no? considering most devs nowadays started abandoning their own custom engines
That’s a really positive outlook on something that didn’t need to exist to begin with. Like many have said many times, It’s not the fact it’s able to run. I’m pretty confident you can get any game running on any console from the last gen or even 2. It’s a matter of how much you need to dial back and how much work is required. That’s been the criticism from day one. It’s been proven that this whole theory of sliding and scaling is not happening. It’s happening with 3rd party and first party games. It’s time and effort that wasn’t necessary just so people could save $100. They could have made a disk less x and been done. There’s a reason this has never been done before and now we are seeing, 18 months in, that developers are also concerned. It’s too late now as they have anchored to it, but, it’s still a talking point in the industry because there is no precedent and many people in the industry predicted this and continue to be critical according to DF.
 

adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
Yep.





See above.


That literally just talks about bringing in The Coalition to help run it on Series S, which we've already all discussed.

There was nothing in there about the other consoles versions being compromised because of it.

When they say clawing back memory, they're talking about on the Series S side, hence you have some effects missing on top of the expected lower resolution.
 
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Riky

$MSFT

It clearly says here Epic made the demo and reached out to The Coalition to help with Ray Tracing on Series X and memory management on Series S.

The demo was designed by Epic, it was not designed around the Series S, more FUD from the usual suspects.
 

DaGwaphics

Member
SFS will help but the thing is, there will ALWAYS be a hard-set difference in memory capacity between the Series S and Series X. Series S will always have 8 GB of VRAM, Series X will always have 10 GB of VRAM. Series S VRAM bandwidth will always be peak 224 GB/s, Series X VRAM bandwidth will always be peak 560 GB/s. Series S will always have less than 2 GB RAM for CPU and audio data, Series X will always have 3.5 GB of RAM for CPU/audio.

Those differences don't go away simply due to SFS, and it'll be something worth keeping in mind.

Isn't the slow 2GB for the system memory? I think the 8GB faster portion has to handle all the game memory on XSS (CPU and GPU). I guess they've never specifically stated that, but almost everyone that has covered it has painted it that way, however. Even DF and they had access to a lot of information about it. At any rate there would need to be some memory set aside for the OS somewhere. Even the 2GB would be thinned down from the 2.5 that is reserved on XSX (maybe why we can't do 1440p captures 🤷‍♂️).

The audio is an interesting point, I wonder if the XSS sees some cutbacks there as well to help reduce memory usage.

3GB is a small upgrade from last gen (8 vs 5 available to games if that's the way it's working), no one could deny that. MS really betting on the SSD boosting the memory efficiency.
 
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FrankWza

Member
A demo designed, in part, around the Series S memory limitation does not have a memory bottleneck.

The Wire Reaction GIF
You’re going to have people not wanting to interpret how that could be possible. It’s seems to reason that, if an extra studio has to come in to work on one console specifically, there was at least an attempt by epic beforehand. Either way, it’s a pretty damning indictment. They either tried and it was too much work or didn’t even bother and knew it was going to be too much work.
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
I mean is it any more or less than the three dozen times the word gargantuous has been used in this thread ?

We're being asked to take the word of a DF article author as gospel that all development must be a pain and require gargantuous effort. But me posting an actual developer, who shipped a PS5 game, is disingenuous ?

Come on bro. This whole topics become a parody of itself by now.
That’s between you and him, ReRe. I’m not involved in that conversation.
 

elliot5

Member
admins should make threads show their ad revenue i can only imagine tech related ones like this pop off compared to others lol
 

THE DUCK

voted poster of the decade by bots
I think it's clear from Matrix and Metro that devs do not care about the s enough to hold back the XSX or the PS5. Just the fact that it drops to 512p or significantly below 533p tells me that the baseline is the XSX and they are just going to treat the S like the switch. Downgrade until they can get it running. No real thought put into the user experience. No bar is too low. 720p, 640p, 560p, 420p? As long as the game runs, who cares? There seems to be no outrage from the xss crowd so they clearly love it. If anything, the extended cross gen period might have helped the console because aside from Matrix and Metro, every other game released is pretty much last gen running at a miniumum of 720p. If next gen games were the norm, id suspect we would have seen a little more outrage.

This will just show Sony to simply extend the cross gen period again and try and sneak a half step console without people noticing. Like I said before, the problem is the board room at these corporations. The people at the top are not the passionate folks that made the OG Xbox or the 360. The Seamus Blackley or all those Sony execs from the 90s coming out of Japan. Shu. Layden, Andrew House. Both Phil and Jim Ryan have been with the company for decades but they are not the same. The mentality is not the same. And it shows.

I think if your going to say this it's important to realize they sacrificed frame rate for resolution when it comes to metro. They could have easily hit higher resutions at 30fps. I'm not sure it was so much a disregard for the platform as it was a preference to run at 60fps, at least when to comes to metro.
 

THE DUCK

voted poster of the decade by bots
This thread has been like entering a time warp, reading the exact same thread and individual exchanges that have gone on for the last 2 years. I wonder if people just copy and past their previous comments?

Thank you everyone.

tenor.gif
Wait, I could have done that? Damn.
 

ChiefDada

Gold Member
That literally just talks about bringing in The Coalition to help run it on Series S, which we've already all discussed.

There was nothing in there about the other consoles versions being compromised because of it.

When they say clawing back memory, they're talking about on the Series S side, hence you have some effects missing on top of the expected lower resolution.

James Farris, Epic Tech Director:

"We were looking at the Series S and that was a challenge.. But we absolutely wanted to make this work. It was super important to have PARITY across the different hardwares".

Tell me, how do you achieve parity between consoles with different specs? Surely you don't believe Epic had to call the Coalition over to help scale back some particle effects.
 
True, the lego game is an outlier, there generally isn't this much of a difference. Whether it is a bug or just this particular engine or this particular game, who knows.

Definitely agree that it’s really strange. I know the PS5 is weaker in some ways to the XSX but it definitely isn’t on par with the XSS. There’s no way that the XSS should push the PS5 hard in any situation.
 

phil_t98

#SonyToo
This is what Metro looks like at 512p.

1bZYrCX.png


I dont care if you are watching this on your 1080p work monitor or your 1080p tv screen or a 4k lg oled with vrr or a 720p switch screen. This should not be acceptable. It was not acceptable in 2006 when PS3 games were blasted for resolutions under 720p, and it should not be acceptable 3 gens later.

to be fair its different in motion. also the big consoles in the series x and ps5 run mostly lower than their max resolution to on a lot of games. no idea why people just use the series s as the example of games running lower than the hardware advertises it can do
 

DaGwaphics

Member
Definitely agree that it’s really strange. I know the PS5 is weaker in some ways to the XSX but it definitely isn’t on par with the XSS. There’s no way that the XSS should push the PS5 hard in any situation.

It doesn't necessarily push it hard here either, since I guess the XSS uses a different DRS setting, but it probably does average a few more pixels than the 10 to 4TF specs would seem to make possible. (In this game when it was reviewed)
 

azertydu91

Hard to Kill
to be fair its different in motion. also the big consoles in the series x and ps5 run mostly lower than their max resolution to on a lot of games. no idea why people just use the series s as the example of games running lower than the hardware advertises it can do
I don't think it is just about res but all the other things that were dialed down to run on Xss.Sure we are at the start of the gen and I am sure that devs will push it hard towards the end of the gen but at what cost....I mean if it was only resolution that was lower than XSX then it would be amazing but sadly it is rarely the case.
 

phil_t98

#SonyToo
I don't think it is just about res but all the other things that were dialed down to run on Xss.Sure we are at the start of the gen and I am sure that devs will push it hard towards the end of the gen but at what cost....I mean if it was only resolution that was lower than XSX then it would be amazing but sadly it is rarely the case.

look at games the start of every generation. look at ps4 games at the start of the gen and ps4 games the end of the gen and see how much improvement there was when they got used to programming the machine. same will happen with the ps5 the series x and series s. they will get used to working with it and know how to code for it better

also I will add that the developer did an interview somewhere and said they weren't happy how their engine was running on the series s and they know that can can improve it to run better on the S
 
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adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
Tell me, how do you achieve parity between consoles with different specs? Surely you don't believe Epic had to call the Coalition over to help scale back some particle effects.

You achieve parity by bringing in a studio that specializes in Xbox hardware to port the engine over with as minimal cutbacks as possible.

Again, nothing in any of the quotes or that interview states that they had to cut back or sacrifice spec overhead on the bigger consoles for the sake of Series S.

to be fair its different in motion. also the big consoles in the series x and ps5 run mostly lower than their max resolution to on a lot of games. no idea why people just use the series s as the example of games running lower than the hardware advertises it can do

Added to that, that screen is from the one of the stress areas of the game, the game does not run in the 5xx resolution range on the Series S at all times.



It clearly says here Epic made the demo and reached out to The Coalition to help with Ray Tracing on Series X and memory management on Series S.

The demo was designed by Epic, it was not designed around the Series S, more FUD from the usual suspects.

Didn't you know Riky, Series S is the biggest cause of the Great Recession in 2007. Jason Roland made every engineer take out multiple mortgages so they can concept the Series S.

Get with the times, man.
 
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