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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
I have never seen such a concentrated effort to shoot down this article so much :messenger_grinning_smiling:.

The system is clearly hindering some developers progress out there. It's not the first time we have heard this, been heard surprisingly often over the last few years even from within MS first party studios.

Personally would have rather the Coalition had cracked on with developing a top class game rather than putting so much effort into getting a demo to run adequately, but that's just me.
Obviously you’re failing to comprehend. Besides, you don’t own the system so why are you talking about an unprecedented situation in the history of gaming and listening to system architects and game developers? Shame
 

Riky

$MSFT


"Even in the console space we have had different tiers of the same consoles for many years. The way Series S differs from Series X (memory amount and GPU horsepower, mostly) is for us much easier to adapt to than to for example the wide variety of PCs out in the wild or the way that the previous generation of consoles differed. Less memory and slower GPU are things that most game developers can dynamically scale for by scaling resolutions and graphics effects, while different storage solutions or widely varying CPU performance are much harder to adapt to. All in all we don’t think that the Series S will significantly limit the game development progress as a whole in any way.”


“With each generation of consoles, they’re still closer and closer to the PC,” said Zięba. “The structure and everything, so with new consoles and Xbox Series X and S, it was mostly a no brainer in a way, you know, like the engine is prepared for it and architecture is like normal, you know how this stuff works there, not like the PS3 or something. So no, it was a really pleasant experience, mostly.

“Yeah, I even played the whole game on Series S like one week ago and I was blown away because I thought I played on Series X. Somebody told me ‘man, this is Series S.’ What! Awesome, wonderful"



"
Sala called the console “a really great bit of kit,” saying that it “looks capable of doing everything its big brother does, just less of it.”

“And with some simple math one can see the jump from 1080p to 2160p is one of at least a factor of 4. So would a Series S be able to take a big AAA mid generation title and run it at 1080p or 1440p? I’d say that is highly likely,” he added."


"It’s important to remember that the majority of people don’t have a screen that does 4K120, so there’s an audience that the S is designed for,” said Bibby. “They perhaps won’t need some of the detail the X can achieve. However, it’s important to remember the S is an extremely capable machine, because those hardware differences are focused on delivering a similar experience at a lower resolution.”

"That is a really smart approach, the device has ray tracing, an SSD, nominally the same CPU as a Series X,” he said. “The only thing it lacks is the power to run at 4K- which simply isn’t always needed, the bedroom TV of some teenage gamer isn’t likely to be a 4K wallhanger beast, so its great for those situations. I would expect the Xbox Series S will be a real differentiator this generation.”

Seems other developers have no such issues.
 

FrankWza

Member
It's main memory, not scalable unless you alter gameplay (number of objects), and it required huge time commitment to change how it works.
This is pretty much what is meant by “holding back”
People try to manipulate that term. We live in a time of huge development cycles and costs. Crunch and delays are a common occurrence. Games shipping incomplete and needing patch after patch to be playable. Why would we add to that if we don’t have to?
 

Shmunter

Member


"Even in the console space we have had different tiers of the same consoles for many years. The way Series S differs from Series X (memory amount and GPU horsepower, mostly) is for us much easier to adapt to than to for example the wide variety of PCs out in the wild or the way that the previous generation of consoles differed. Less memory and slower GPU are things that most game developers can dynamically scale for by scaling resolutions and graphics effects, while different storage solutions or widely varying CPU performance are much harder to adapt to. All in all we don’t think that the Series S will significantly limit the game development progress as a whole in any way.”


“With each generation of consoles, they’re still closer and closer to the PC,” said Zięba. “The structure and everything, so with new consoles and Xbox Series X and S, it was mostly a no brainer in a way, you know, like the engine is prepared for it and architecture is like normal, you know how this stuff works there, not like the PS3 or something. So no, it was a really pleasant experience, mostly.

“Yeah, I even played the whole game on Series S like one week ago and I was blown away because I thought I played on Series X. Somebody told me ‘man, this is Series S.’ What! Awesome, wonderful"



"
Sala called the console “a really great bit of kit,” saying that it “looks capable of doing everything its big brother does, just less of it.”

“And with some simple math one can see the jump from 1080p to 2160p is one of at least a factor of 4. So would a Series S be able to take a big AAA mid generation title and run it at 1080p or 1440p? I’d say that is highly likely,” he added."


"It’s important to remember that the majority of people don’t have a screen that does 4K120, so there’s an audience that the S is designed for,” said Bibby. “They perhaps won’t need some of the detail the X can achieve. However, it’s important to remember the S is an extremely capable machine, because those hardware differences are focused on delivering a similar experience at a lower resolution.”

"That is a really smart approach, the device has ray tracing, an SSD, nominally the same CPU as a Series X,” he said. “The only thing it lacks is the power to run at 4K- which simply isn’t always needed, the bedroom TV of some teenage gamer isn’t likely to be a 4K wallhanger beast, so its great for those situations. I would expect the Xbox Series S will be a real differentiator this generation.”

Seems other developers have no such issues.
Weren’t all those Xbox marketed timed exclusives? Unity hasn’t even implemented raytracing on series S or X, they have on PS5. Own goal?
 
Overly positive?
Failing to live up to the prelaunch expectations set by the systems developer and needing an additional studio to come in to get a demo to run after a gargantuan effort and scaled back features, graphics and resolution on what is to be a widely used engine going forward. Having developers report that it’s a pain to work on. I think you’re missing the point. Let me guess..When you watch titanic youre happy that the people in the half full life boats have room to stretch their legs?

I have never seen such a concentrated effort to shoot down this article so much :messenger_grinning_smiling:.

The system is clearly hindering some developers progress out there. It's not the first time we have heard this, been heard surprisingly often over the last few years even from within MS first party studios.

Personally would have rather the Coalition had cracked on with developing a top class game rather than putting so much effort into getting a demo to run adequately, but that's just me.
You are both fan boy crazy. Can you at least land on sensible?
Frank absolutely none of that was in the article you posted for me.

Dcmk7 please show us the so much effort that they are delaying games because of the extensive staff shortages due to the millions of man hours required to do some optimizations.
 

Riky

$MSFT
You are both fan boy crazy. Can you at least land on sensible?
Frank absolutely none of that was in the article you posted for me.

Dcmk7 please show us the so much effort that they are delaying games because of the extensive staff shortages due to the millions of man hours required to do some optimizations.

With so many games being on UE5 next gen to think that The Coalition having all this experience early on, sharing it with all first party studios and having an influence on the engine is not worthwhile is surely one of the stupidest takes yet🤣
 

FrankWza

Member
Frank absolutely none of that was in the article you posted for me.
Everything I wrote except for failing to live up to the developers prelaunch expectations of games on s being the same as x at lower resolution. (That has been covered in this thread as well and is plenty relevant) The thread is based on developers and the system being a pain to develop for. The same guy who is reporting that wrote the article I linked. He is not giving his opinion. These are comments made by developers to him. They had an inside look at the matrix demo.
Same guy who calls it a “gargantuan effort” also says he heard “it’s a pain” to develop for by developerS
Feature by Alex Battaglia Video Producer, Digital Foundry

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

 
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DeepEnigma

Gold Member
Everything I wrote except for failing to live up to the developers prelaunch expectations of games on s being the same as x at lower resolution. (That has been covered in this thread as well and is plenty relevant) The thread is based on developers and the system being a pain to develop for. The same guy who is reporting that wrote the article I linked. He is not giving his opinion. These are comments made by developers to him. They had an inside look at the matrix demo.
Same guy who calls it a “gargantuan effort” also says he heard “it’s a pain” to develop for by developerS

WTF, Xbros hate Alex now!
 

adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
You are both fan boy crazy. Can you at least land on sensible?
Frank absolutely none of that was in the article you posted for me.

Dcmk7 please show us the so much effort that they are delaying games because of the extensive staff shortages due to the millions of man hours required to do some optimizations.


My friend, you're making gargantuan amounts of sense here asking for evidence from the usuals :messenger_tears_of_joy:

Be careful, we might get a quote from Jason Roland in a few minutes now.
 
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honestly dont see the big deal. Maybe the S is a bit trickier to get the most out of, so what. In the past the PS3 was a pain in the ass for developers to work with but games still got made and were not held back by it.
At the end of the day the Series S is just another console to make games for, once developers get used to working with it, it will be fine. I don't think it will hold anything back.
Microsoft knows its limitations with RAM and they have given developers tools and techniques to mitigate the RAM issues. That probably is harder to implement than just having RAM to spare. Developers will take it in their stride and deal with it.
Some times the Series S version might not have ray tracing or 120 hz mode but again so what, its an entry level console at least you have the game to play, once games stop releasing on X1/PS4 the series S will be the cheapest way to play next gen games. The way I see it, in the past people used to play home arcade ports on their spectrums games like street fighter people were just happy to be able to play the game at home.
The Series S allows you to play next gen games for a cheaper price , maybe paired back with less features that the Series X version maybe not, just be happy to play the games, if you want the bells and whistles get the series x or ps 5 and get the decent TV to take advantage of the extra features. Not everyone has the TV to best use a series x not everyone is that bothered about graphics
 
My friend, you're making gargantuan amounts of sense here asking for evidence from the usuals :messenger_tears_of_joy:

Be careful, we might get a quote from Jason Roland in a few minutes now.
Figured it'd be pretty easy to list the titles that negatively affected OTHER systems due to the XSS. It must not be worth the gargantuan effort. Jason Ronald is spinning in his grave.
 
Everything I wrote except for failing to live up to the developers prelaunch expectations of games on s being the same as x at lower resolution. (That has been covered in this thread as well and is plenty relevant) The thread is based on developers and the system being a pain to develop for. The same guy who is reporting that wrote the article I linked. He is not giving his opinion. These are comments made by developers to him. They had an inside look at the matrix demo.
Same guy who calls it a “gargantuan effort” also says he heard “it’s a pain” to develop for by developerS

See you are still missing the point. I think and I've shown evidence that the quote of gargantuan effort could and to me does mean a huge result. Please argue that because you are using gargantuan effort to mean a huge amount of resources when again to me the section of the article is pro xss and has nothing to do with the amount of time was required to do it.
 
You must understand that if a dev is saying memory constraints are a pain the easy 'quite scalable' options that are deemed acceptable are not the issue and it wouldn't be a pain.
Resolution, texture size and raytracing are all very scalable (or even removable in the case of RT). Furthermore, since consoles now have fast SSDs, devs can easily stream large amounts of data in and out of the RAM, which turns the upper limit of the RAM into a much more managable constraint. The future is looking bright.
 
Resolution, texture size and raytracing are all very scalable (or even removable in the case of RT). Furthermore, since consoles now have fast SSDs, devs can easily stream large amounts of data in and out of the RAM, which turns the upper limit of the RAM into a much more managable constraint. The future is looking bright.
Things can very easily be issues without being detrimental. You can get a flat in your race and still win the race.
 
do we have any up to date quote directly from a developer saying this that isn't from 2 years ago?
Fantastic question. I'm certain Frank or Ray can produce a quote from someone this year about the pain of XSS development. Didn't Alex provide a list of devs he was specifically talking about?
 

FrankWza

Member
See you are still missing the point. I think and I've shown evidence that the quote of gargantuan effort could and to me does mean a huge result.
Naturi Naughton Lol GIF by Power

Please argue that because you are using gargantuan effort to mean a huge amount of resources when again to me the section of the article is pro xss and has nothing to do with the amount of time was required to do it.
I’m not using anything. The same guy that chose to use the word gargantuan is also using the words “pain to develop for”
Just because you choose to see it that way doesn’t make it so. I see words like:
“pared back”
“lower resolutions”
“Effects faring poorly”
“compression”
“Effects reined in”
“Pared back and reduced detail levels”
“Particle lighting cuts”
It's Xbox Series S where there's a real story here - just how did the junior Xbox with just four teraflops of compute power pull this off?

First of all, Epic enlisted the aid of The Coalition - a studio that seems capable of achieving results from Unreal Engine quite unlike any other developer. Various optimisations were delivered that improved performance, many of which were more general in nature, meaning that yes, a Microsoft first-party studio would have helped in improving the PlayStation 5 version too. Multi-core and bloom optimisations were noted as specific enhancements from The Coalition, but this team has experience in getting great results from Series S too, so don't be surprised if they helped in what is a gargantuan effort.

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.
 
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Naturi Naughton Lol GIF by Power


I’m not using anything. The same guy that chose to use the word gargantuan is also using the words “pain to develop for”
Just because you choose to see it that way doesn’t make it so. I see words like:
“pared back”
“lower resolutions”
“Effects faring poorly”
“compression”
“Effects reined in”
“Pared back and reduced detail levels”
“Particle lighting cuts”
Has any of this affected your PS5 Frank? You do realize the XSS was always going to have reduced effects as it's only $300.
 
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