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i remember when the cpu and ssd were so praised at the reveal of the consoles specs

samoilaaa

Member
When the specs of the consoles revealed all the gaming sites , journalists , tech experts were saying that the ssd and cpu are the biggest upgrade and they will allow developers for detailed worlds with a level of interactivity never seen before , amazing draw distance and complex AI that will make a city filled with believable npcs

3 years later and we still have texture pop in , zombie AI , interactivity with the evnvironment is at a minimum in 90% of games , especially AAA games , level design is as simplistic as it has been previous gen

where are all those improvements ?
 

Silver Wattle

Gold Member
The CPU and SSD are great this gen, we used to have awful low end CPU that was bad even for laptops and old ass HDD's.
They aren't a silver bullet, but they have damn sure made a big difference.
 

b0uncyfr0

Member
Well, you're not wrong.

All it takes is someone to make something truly NG, then everyone rushes to get on the train. Noone's been brave enough to do it cause it takes time, money and frankly gamers are still paying top dollar for shitty last/current gen games. There is almost no incentive.
 
Probably proves the point most people don’t know what they’re talking about then? I don’t see why these advancements wouldn’t be taken advantage of, why have new tech if you ain’t utilise it.
 

Guilty_AI

Member
Those definitely improve the experience. Problem are the people who were expecting some sort of mind blowing super innovative way to play games.

The way they were going to be used was always going to be the obvious ones.
CPU for higher fps, SSD for short loading times (and the occasional portal and fast travel for pr), and cut corners during development (if you ever wondered why so many of these games don't look much better than last gen despite still not performing satisfactorily, this is probably why)
 
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T4keD0wN

Member
The SSD talk was funny and exposed just how gullible and uninformed some people are (who cares about sequential speeds? lmao).
The CPU should allow for that, but were stuck with unreal engine which cant even fully utilise 2 cores so most of that power is useless.
 

TheDreadLord

Gold Member
Dude, wake up. All the buzzwords Sony came up at the PS5 launch have already been debunked. It is a CPU and SSD as any other you can find on PC for some time now. It is though a huge improvement over the previous gen with its old laptop parts.
 

nemiroff

Gold Member
A layer of truth (or a future truth) pumped up and used as a thick layer of marketing.. Sony isn't the only one but they've been remarkably good at it for a long time. That's also partly due to having a large core of tech-oriented devotees (I've been there, still there, I understand the excitement) to work the dough.
 
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nkarafo

Member
I also remember how the PS5 would have no loading times at all.

It was so funny watching all the fanboys believing and overhyping that bullshit.
 

nemiroff

Gold Member
Well console only gamers will finally get teardown thanks to the upgraded CPU's, so that's something.
Yeah, and Teardown is also heavily dependent on RT (don't know the implementation details tho), so it'll be interesting to see how much is retained at what framerate.
 
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It was marketing bullshit that everyone fell for.

Consoles getting SSDs (finally) was huge. Going from a 5400rpm HDD to a PCIE4 NVMe SSD is a big step up. Going from a HDD to a basic SATA3 SSD is a significant step up on its own but you're then totally skipping PCIE3 NVME and straight to PCIE4. I don't know what a 5400rpm drive can do but I remember my SATA3 SSD having like 500MB/s speeds. PCIE4 NVMe can do up to about 7.6GB/s. The stock drive in a PS5 is 5.5GB/s i think and even that is much faster than an old SATA3 drive.

A Zen2 CPU was impressive at the time when it was announced because PC only got Zen2 CPUs in mid 2019 but of course consoles never launched for another ~16 months or whatever so by the time they came out Zen 2 was old news. PC was already on Zen 3 when PS5/XSX launched. We're on Zen 4 now.

Both consoles now use old dated technology. PC is on Zen 4, GPUs with ~80TF, cheap 64GB memory, PCIE 5 which supports SSD speeds of up to ~14-15GB/s.
 
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GHG

Member
I also remember how the PS5 would have no loading times at all.

It doesn't in games that have correct utilisation. Rift apart doesn't have any loading screens at all. Same with Demon's souls, it's literally a fog fade for about a second.

But you'd actually need to have played some games on the platform for yourself to know this.

Yeah, and Teardown is also heavily dependent on RT (don't know the implementation details tho), so it'll be interesting to see how much is retained at what framerate.

Based on how it used to run on my 2070 super, I'm betting on 30fps if they want to run it at anything higher than 1080p.
 
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nkarafo

Member
It doesn't in games that have correct utilisation. Rift apart doesn't have any loading screens at all. Same with Demon's souls, it's literally a fog fade for about a second.

But you'd actually need to have played some games on the platform for yourself to know this.

You can eliminate or hide loading times on any platform, despite having an SSD or or even an HDD at all.

It depends on the developer and how they code/design their games. Hardware helps but it's a software issue as well.

You mentioned two games in the entire library. Maybe there are three more? But did you really believed the console itself would eliminate the loading times as a whole, just because Sony said so? Did you trust every single developer would code their games so they don't have loading times at all just because there is an SSD?

Yeah, that's what i thought. Gullible fans are gullible.
 
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GHG

Member
You can eliminate or hide loading times on any platform, despite having an SSD or or even an HDD at all.

This is outright false. As a first step the ability to transfer and process assets at speed is required at a hardware level.

You mentioned two games in the entire library. Maybe there are three more? But did you really believed the console itself would eliminate the loading times as a whole, just because Sony said so? Did you trust every single developer would code their games so they don't have loading times at all?

I didn't "believe" anything. The reality is that is can and has been done, despite what you want to believe because of whatever insecurities you might have.

Taking that into consideration the issue is a developer utilisation one rather than an issue of capability.
 
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rofif

Can’t Git Gud
There are less improvements because developers make games like if it was a weak pc rather than bespoke console.and they often target many systems.

That said there really are no loading times
 
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ungalo

Member
It's good at launch. But when it takes 5 years for a game to really take advantage of that hardware, it becomes not so good in the end.
 
The onus is on the devs to actually correctly utilize the new features (not to mention the large amount of games that have been cross-gen so far), and also SSD has been amazing, loading screens being way reduced (both in length and frequency). It was never going to be an instantaneous "flip of the switch" like some people thought, but the improvements have been and will continue to come, games take a long time to make now, even now most AAA games released in 2023 and maybe even 2024 were likely started before the devs were 100% certain on the specs of the new consoles (especially non-first party). It will be a gradual increase as more devs start to implement features and learn how to take advantage of the new features
 
As others have said, the reality is that most games are multi-format so most developers do not really make the best use of the hardware available.

We've seen some great games on PS5 that make proper use of the hardware - Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and Spider-Man: Miles Morales spring to mind - with ultra fast loading times and no texture pop in but those are exclusives so the developers don't have to worry about running them on lots of different platforms or hardware.

On PC the situation is even worse because while technologies like Direct Storage exist for fast loading of data, almost no developers are using it meaning that most PC games typically have slower loading times than the PS5 in multi-format releases and ports from PS5 have to be specifically coded to use the CPU, increasing the system requirements needed, since they do not have access to decompression hardware such as the PS5's Kraken.
 
I also remember how the PS5 would have no loading times at all.

It was so funny watching all the fanboys believing and overhyping that bullshit.
Unfortunately so many people took that as literal. Obviously its not even possible to have 0 loading times. The game has to load from storage in order to play it. But what the presenters was referring to was loading times in game, which is almost non existent in PS5 games.
 

radewagon

Member
When the specs of the consoles revealed all the gaming sites , journalists , tech experts were saying that the ssd and cpu are the biggest upgrade and they will allow developers for detailed worlds with a level of interactivity never seen before , amazing draw distance and complex AI that will make a city filled with believable npcs

3 years later and we still have texture pop in , zombie AI , interactivity with the evnvironment is at a minimum in 90% of games , especially AAA games , level design is as simplistic as it has been previous gen

where are all those improvements ?
Pretend, I suppose, that the limiting factor these days is no longer the hardware. I mean, obviously it still is ONE OF the limiting factors but not THE limiting factor as was traditionally the case. All those things you mention take time, effort, and desire.

Time: Is it worth the time to implement (insert idea here)? Doing so could push the game back significantly or simply divert time away from something more important.

Effort: Is it worth the effort to implement (insert idea here)? Maybe the effort required wouldn't justify the outcome. Especially if it diverts efforts away from something more important.

Desire: Do the developers have a desire to (insert idea here)? Maybe the desire simply isn't there to take the time and effort needed to implement something that takes away from the core of what the game is trying to do. For example, now that TOTK is out, many are decrying the lack of interactivity in other open world games as though those games would somehow be better by adding more physics-based shenanigans.

TLDR; Just because you can, doesn't mean you should or even want to.
 

nkarafo

Member
This is outright false.

Masking/eliminating loading times in software level is being done forever. Metroid Prime was famous for it, as an example.

Again, hardware helps, makes it far easier for the developer. But if the dev doesn't care, they can have any alien technology you can give them, the loading times will be there.
 

Gaiff

SBI’s Resident Gaslighter
The technology is no longer the bottleneck. Now it's time, resources, and budget.
 

Zuzu

Member
The quality of life improvements that the SSD has made to the consoles is massive (loading times, quick resume etc.), but yes, currently there doesn't seem to be many gameplay design changes that have been introduced due to the SSD.
 
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Ozzie666

Member
The quality of life improvements that the SSD has made to the consoles is massive (loading times, quick resume etc.), but yes, currently there doesn't seem to be many gameplay design changes that have been introduced due to the SSD.
A lot of those changes are pretty massive for developers though. Less assets on the disc, not worried about duplicating assets for quicker seek/load times.
Overall load times are much more pleasant for sure.
 

Skifi28

Member
These shows really bring out the best in people. Looking forward to an entire week of doom and gloom over nothing.
 

Robb

Gold Member
The “magic SSD” talks before the consoles launched were hilarious. As if PC’s hadn’t used SSD’s for ages.

I think most people could see through the b/s though. Stuff like instant loading and and quick resume are still great features.
 
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Robbinhood

Banned
SSDs absolutely lived up to the bill, the quality of life improvement on these 2 second load times is worth the price of admission alone. Absolute game changer. After seeing how fast you can swing in Spiderman 2, again it definitely lived up to the hype. And its doing it with much higher res assets.
 
I wanted less load time and got exactly that. Rift Apart feels like the old days of popping in a cartridge to play without waiting. It's fucking fabulous. Contrast that with playing FH5 on the Xbox one with my sister where you could go make a breakfast waiting for that to load up.
 
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Tsaki

Member
This is outright false. As a first step the ability to transfer and process assets at speed is required at a hardware level.



I didn't "believe" anything. The reality is that is can and has been done, despite what you want to believe because of whatever insecurities you might have.

Taking that into consideration the issue is a developer utilisation one rather than an issue of capability.
"B-but Titanfall 2 had that corridor. See? It could be done back then!"
The tech illiteracy seems to be at an all time high.
 
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GHG

Member
Masking/eliminating loading times in software level is being done forever. Metroid Prime was famous for it, as an example.

Again, hardware helps, makes it far easier for the developer. But if the dev doesn't care, they can have any alien technology you can give them, the loading times will be there.

Whats being done now isn't "masking", it's not necessary and this is even demonstrated in PC games that utilise direct storage like Forspoken when paired with a fast nvme. So again, it's a developer issue, and judging by the state that games are releasing in these days, especially on PC, they don't seem to care about much.
 
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Sethbacca

Member
Bringing back cartridge level load times has been probably my favorite part of the entire generation. Waiting for PS4 titles to load at this point feels like an eternity.
 
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