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[Zathalus]

Funnily enough, I agree with the point about Audio. The initial presentation made 3D Audio sound like this super impressive thing and then the PS5 and XSX come out and it's basically Dolby Atmos. Way to overhype it.

 

[Hudo]

Aren't most great games "deliberately engineered" to take advantage of hardware? Plus is this generation over yet? You realize that this gen will go until 2028 right?

I don't know what you game on but you better believe Sony's 1st party will utilize the SSD and the custom I/O alot more going forward. In ways that will change game design.

All of that sounds like a threat, lmao. Well, I hope you're right. Wouldn't mind to see some gameplay invations from Sony!

 

[Three]

By essentially treating it like it's the invention of the century and gaming will never be the same. Reality is that except for some deliberately engineered titles like Ratchet & Clank (even that is arguable if you look at the PC version), it didn't make that much difference because game devs utilized and utilize RAM much more than offloading stuff onto an SSD. And w.r.t to loading times, it also didn't spark an evolution. In fact, old-ass cartridge-based console have significantly less or even no loading time.

It's fine if you put an SSD in you console, it's about time, too (should've been in PS4 already, imho). But don't go around in your marketing claiming like it's some miracle game changer. It isn't.

What exactly do you think cartridges used? Voodoo magic?

 

[A.Romero]

Now give me sony exec reaction to the series s.

"I don't even know who you are"


I think they weren't out of touch nor misleading (internally, lol). I think they do have access to the same tools but place bets in different architecture approaches but can't be completely sure how the environment will take them and what the actual results will be (as in how developers will take advantage or not). So Microsoft did bet on higher sustained clocks expecting to have higher performance but Cerny just designed a smarter architecture that has been paying better results.

What I'm saying is that there are unknown factors when they are desigining these machines and can't be completely sure about the results until they are actually in the wild. How developers prioritize multiplat development and how they take advantage of tools can make a difference.

When looking at the last decades of this industry I think it's kind of obvious that there are no sure bets. Microsoft did have the best machine with the OG Xbox for example but I think it was ahead of it's time in some aspects (like HD resolutions and real multichannel support) and ended up yielding unexpectedly disappointing results. I bet Kutaragi was sure his PS3 would take the world by storm but it took a great deal of effort and investment to rescue it after a very lackluster launch.

This stuff is what I love about the industry. I'm glad all of this stuff is being published.

 

[HeWhoWalks]

By essentially treating it like it's the invention of the century and gaming will never be the same. Reality is that except for some deliberately engineered titles like Ratchet & Clank (even that is arguable if you look at the PC version), it didn't make that much difference because game devs utilized and utilize RAM much more than offloading stuff onto an SSD. And w.r.t to loading times, it also didn't spark an evolution. In fact, old-ass cartridge-based console have significantly less or even no loading time.

It's fine if you put an SSD in you console, it's about time, too (should've been in PS4 already, imho). But don't go around in your marketing claiming like it's some miracle game changer. It isn't.

I don't recall any hyperbolic stuff like that. I remember the saying it would make loading infinitely faster than what we saw on PS4 and allow them to make things happen on the fly and that's what 1st Party games have shown.

If that's wrong, please show the receipts where these supposed astronomical claims were made by anyone in Sony's camp.

 

[JackMcGunns]

If they really did interally equate 10 v 12 TFLOPs = "clear performance advantage" then I'm actually not that surprised the difference between the two consoles doesn't show up to more than a negligble extent

Edit: By this I don't mean the compute is neglible, but equating TFLOPs to performance is kind of wierd when there are other factors involved such as API/tools(lol)/hardware customizations/etc

API/Tools, etc, is not a "hardware" advantage. Running the same tools under the same circumstances, the 12 TF machine would yield better results, that's why it's called theoretical performance. On the PC side of things, when you look at 2 AMD GPUs with the same architecture, one running 10TF and the other 12, the 12 TF will perform better, there's just no way around that, unfortunately in a closed box, that's not how things work and to be fair, MS seemed confident in their tools, so why assume PS5 would have the upper hand here? They did have the better tools during the 360 days, but Sony has come a long way, and in addition to coming a long way, developers are more familiar with the tried and true tools, whereas Series X introduced some new features in the API that requires some change in order to take full advantage of.

 

[Hudo]

What exactly do you think cartridges used? Voodoo magic?

Yes and obviously human sacrifices.

I don't recall any hyperbolic stuff like that. I remember the saying it would make loading infinitely faster than what we saw on PS4 and allow them to make things happen on the fly and that's what 1st Party games have shown.

If that's wrong, please show the receipts where these supposed astronomical claims were made by anyone in Sony's camp.

Most of Sony's marketing on the technical side was talking about how amazing the SSD is (and the audio, which, to be fair, is pretty good).

 

[DeepEnigma]

Yes and obviously human sacrifices.


Most of Sony's marketing on the technical side was talking about how amazing the SSD is (and the audio, which, to be fair, is pretty good).

The SSD was and is amazing compared to the gen prior. I don't get the hang-up. They want people to know the advantages of upgrading their last gen tech. Having a dedicated decompression block is great to save CPU cycles as well. What's the issue?

 

[Pop]

Now give me sony exec reaction to the series s.

 

[HeWhoWalks]

Yes and obviously human sacrifices.


Most of Sony's marketing on the technical side was talking about how amazing the SSD is (and the audio, which, to be fair, is pretty good).

And, they were right. It was amazing for its time. They said it would...

A. Improve Game Design substantially.
B. Almost eradicate load times.
C. Allow for world switching on the fly.

Coupled with the I/O, all three of those things we've seen happen. It never went beyond that from Sony, which means you're looking for something that was never there.

 

[Hudo]

The SSD was and is amazing compared to the gen prior. I don't get the hang-up. They want people to know the advantages of upgrading their last gen tech. Having a dedicated decompression block is great to save CPU cycles as well. What's the issue?

No issues it's just not worth the hype Cerny et al. were trying to create. That's all. PS5 (and XSX) are solid, converative evolutions of their predecessor with overly exuberant marketing. That was and is my point. They are not technical marvels. And never were intended to be.

 

[Killjoy-NL]

Reality is that except for some deliberately engineered titles like Ratchet & Clank (even that is arguable if you look at the PC version), it didn't make that much difference because game devs utilized and utilize RAM much more than offloading stuff onto an SSD. And w.r.t to loading times, it also didn't spark an evolution. In fact, old-ass cartridge-based console have significantly less or even no loading time.

Isn't the whole point of the PS5 SSD - I/O architecture to load everything in real-time, reducing the need for RAM?

 

[DeepEnigma]

No issues it's just not worth the hype Cerny et al. were trying to create. That's all. PS5 (and XSX) are solid, converative evolutions of their predecessor with overly exuberant marketing. That was and is my point. They are not technical marvels. And never were intended to be.

Was worth it to me

The dedicated decompression block is a technical marvel, since nobody else was doing that prior. Especially at the price of the box for brand new tech.

 

[A.Romero]

Was worth it to me

The dedicated decompression block is a technical marvel, since nobody else was doing that prior. Especially at the price of the box for brand new tech.

Specially considering than even years later Direct Storage is still not widely implemented on PC, despite the flexibility the platform offers.

 

[NickFire]

No issues it's just not worth the hype Cerny et al. were trying to create. That's all. PS5 (and XSX) are solid, converative evolutions of their predecessor with overly exuberant marketing. That was and is my point. They are not technical marvels. And never were intended to be.

The SSD was absolutely worth the hype in the console sphere. The changes to load times has been the biggest consumer benefit to a new generation of consoles since they became online in earnest.

 

[Zathalus]

Specially considering than even years later Direct Storage is still not widely implemented on PC, despite the flexibility the platform offers.

Mostly because for the majority of games, it's simply not needed. If you compare PS5 vs PC games how many have a large difference in loading times?

 

[DeepEnigma]

Specially considering than even years later Direct Storage is still not widely implemented on PC, despite the flexibility the platform offers.

I would love for motherboard makers to adopt a decompression block in their IO. But then again, they would price gouge like a mofo.

 

[Hudo]

Isn't the whole point of the PS5 SSD - I/O architecture to load everything in real-time, reducing the need for RAM?

Was worth it to me

The dedicated decompression block is a technical marvel, since nobody else was doing that prior. Especially at the price of the box for brand new tech.

The SSD was absolutely worth the hype in the console sphere. The changes to load times has been the biggest consumer benefit to a new generation of consoles since they became online in earnest.

Well, then fair enough. For me it wasn't anything special. The higher throughput between the APU and the SSD to the unified memory is nice, tho. But XSX has a similar mechanism. But again, the idea to have essentially DMA-like access from the GPU or CPU to some NVMe is not new technology. And the impression I got from marketing was that they were trying to sell this as some cutting edge shit. Which I found disingenuous. That's all.

 

[HeWhoWalks]

Well, then fair enough. For me it wasn't anything special. The higher throughput between the APU and the SSD to the unified memory is nice, tho. But XSX has a similar mechanism. But again, the idea to have essentially DMA-like access from the GPU or CPU to some NVMe is not new technology. And the impression I got from marketing was that they were trying to sell this as some cutting edge shit. Which I found disingenuous. That's all.

I still have yet to see any examples to your claims. No, a Cerny presentation doesn't work either. He sold what the SSD does, nothing more. Where did Sony promise more than we got... ?

 

[Hudo]

I still have yet to see any examples to your claims. No, a Cerny presentation doesn't work either. He sold what the SSD does, nothing more. Where did Sony promise more than we got... ?

I can only tell you from I my impression was that I got from the marketing and Cerny's technical talks. If you think that is me being disingenuous, that's alright.

I still think they promised more than what we got. I have yet to see games that present gameplay that make use of the "ultra fast SSD". Even Ratchet & Clank wasn't that impressive, you could do that also with some clever compression, caching and RAM utilization imho. But it most likely made the implementation a whole lot easier, which I am all for.

 

[HeWhoWalks]

I can only tell you from I my impression was that I got from the marketing and Cerny's technical talks. If you think that is me being disingenuous, that's alright.

I still think they promised more than what we got. I have yet to see games that present gameplay that make use of the "ultra fast SSD". Even Ratchet & Clank wasn't that impressive, you could do that also with some clever compression, caching and RAM utilization imho. But it most likely made the implementation a whole lot easier, which I am all for.

Cool. So, you misinterpreted what they said, but they didn't overpromise anything. I can live with that.

 

[Lysandros]

I think DF for all their faults made an excellent point about the PS5's SSD. Mark Cerny is not a hype or marketing man, he's an engineer, his job is to design a system based on developer needs and feedback. The biggest request from most developers was an SSD, so that's what he went for.

Now Sony chose to market it in their own way, but it's important to make it clear that the SSD and it's performance was a clear design and engineering choice, not a marketing one.

'Richard' made that (quite surprising coming from him in fact) comment much to Alex' chagrin, not 'DF'. John only kind of agreed. Tom only knows about teraflops and cataracts, and Oliver seems to be somewhat similar.

 

[Crayon]

Weirdly reads like someone blowing smoke. I don't know how you say that you were telling DF the teraflops were misleading, then go on right to say you have a clear advantage and all to someone internal. That second part should be the part you turn around and lie to the public with.

 

[A.Romero]

Mostly because for the majority of games, it's simply not needed. If you compare PS5 vs PC games how many have a large difference in loading times?

Yes, that's true but still, doesn't take away the fact that the PS5 has had it for a few years now. They are ahead of the curve in that aspect (even if it's out of need)

 

[Klosshufvud]

Weirdly reads like someone blowing smoke. I don't know how you say that you were telling DF the teraflops were misleading, then go on right to say you have a clear advantage and all to someone internal. That second part should be the part you turn around and lie to the public with.

I think you're reading into a poorly worded sentence wrong. It makes more sense that he says they made a point with DF that Teraflops do matter. I remember a video DF did that did compare "wide and slow" (SX) versus "narrow and fast" (PS5) with the former games having clear performance advantage. IMO I would give that sentence benefit of the doubt since there is a difference between 12TF and 9TF when comparing the same exact GPU.

 

[TheThreadsThatBindUs]

Microsoft themselves say they made that same argument to Digital Foundry. But they still emphasize that they have a clear performance advantage 12 v 10 in terms of teraflops against PS5. Which they do. 12 vs 10 is a clear advantage and they would be stupid not to advertise that.

To be clear, and this is where I agree with Bernoulli , TFLOPs is not the metric of performance for a console GPU.

TFLOPs, and in this case it's single precision floating point operations per second, are a measure of maximum theoretical vector math throughput. It's only of many other metrics, e.g. pixel fillrate, cache bandwidth etc, etc., that collectively describe overall GPU performance.

So to refer to a TFLOPs advantage as a "performance" advantage is incorrect on every level. It's not even a real-world measure of actual GPU vector math performance. It's a maximum theoretical rating which in practice will never be achieved.

So no, TF do not equal performance. There is no such thing as TF performance as a sub-category either, because you'd have to measure a GPUs actual utilization to come up with a number for this, and that's not practically done.

So using TF and the word "performance" interchangeably in a statement is wholly incorrect and actually embarrassing for someone like MS chief hardware engineer to be doing.

It's a gaffe... plain and simple.

 

[midnightAI]

I think you're reading into a poorly worded sentence wrong. It makes more sense that he says they made a point with DF that Teraflops do matter. I remember a video DF did that did compare "wide and slow" (SX) versus "narrow and fast" (PS5) with the former games having clear performance advantage. IMO I would give that sentence benefit of the doubt since there is a difference between 12TF and 9TF when comparing the same exact GPU.

10.28

 

[shamoomoo]

I think you're reading into a poorly worded sentence wrong. It makes more sense that he says they made a point with DF that Teraflops do matter. I remember a video DF did that did compare "wide and slow" (SX) versus "narrow and fast" (PS5) with the former games having clear performance advantage. IMO I would give that sentence benefit of the doubt since there is a difference between 12TF and 9TF when comparing the same exact GPU.

That's mostly true for PC components,the biggest advantage the Series X has over the PS5 is memory bandwidth at 10GBs and texture filtrate/ray tracing with the latter being theoretical given the hardware specs.

Most interviews about the difference between the PS5 and Series X was ease of use and how realistic would it be to reach their theoretical performance specs.

 

[Mahavastu]

Now give me sony exec reaction to the series s.

I guess that the rumours about the Series S were the reason for introducing the Digital Edition.
Of course the DE was unable to beat the Series S in price, but the price difference was now "small enough" that it didn't matter enough to lure people to the Series S

 

[Crayon]

I think you're reading into a poorly worded sentence wrong. It makes more sense that he says they made a point with DF that Teraflops do matter. I remember a video DF did that did compare "wide and slow" (SX) versus "narrow and fast" (PS5) with the former games having clear performance advantage. IMO I would give that sentence benefit of the doubt since there is a difference between 12TF and 9TF when comparing the same exact GPU.

Still doesn't add up to me. That df comparison and this snippet from the execs both seem to show understanding that was not exceeding the average forum-goer. I'm reading it again to make sure, though:

[Cerny] emphasized that GPU teraflops and CU is not a good measurement of performance. We made this same point with Digital Foundry, but we do have a clear performance advantage (12 v 10),”

I don't see a lot of room in there for the read where these two sentences are consitent with each other. I would say that's ambiguous if I'm being charitable. This sounds like someone reassuring their boss that they succeeded and made a better console. There is no mention of any chance that the ps5 performs equal or better. Either they knew there was a chance and were ommiting it to blow smoke up someone's ass, or they really had no idea because they are incompetant or maybe even beleiving fud coming from somewhere in their own marketing department.

As for df's dodgey science there, that seemed like something a random no-comentary yt gpu comparison video would do. I think they were huffing the same hopium that this exec was. That exec who was being overly optimistic for one reason or another. Seems like terraflops get more or less predictive depending on what's convenient.

 

[DeepEnigma]

I guess that the rumours about the Series S were the reason for introducing the Digital Edition.
Of course the DE was unable to beat the Series S in price, but the price difference was now "small enough" that it didn't matter enough to lure people to the Series S

The digital edition was more than likely in the cards from the very beginning based on the symmetry of the design alone.

They also produced far, far less. I would guess the splits are 80/20 in favor of the standard more expensive version. And that is being generous.

 

[Gamer79]

AT the microsoft office

 

[cireza]

The dedicated decompression block is a technical marvel

I can't stop thinking about that decompression block all the time when I game on PS5.

 

[DeepEnigma]

I can't stop thinking about that decompression block all the time when I game on PS5.

Conversations do have context, if you actually follow them.

 

[cireza]

Conversations do have context, if you actually follow them.

Then just so you know, I agree with Hudo about this discussion. I find these SSD discussions totally overblown, but I guess that's only normal for someone developing games and streaming content directly from the ROM on 35 years old hardware. What a revolution SSDs are !

 

[DeepEnigma]

Then just so you know, I agree with Hudo about this discussion. I find these SSD discussions totally overblown, but I guess that's only normal for someone developing games and streaming content directly from the ROM on 35 years old hardware. What a revolution SSDs are !

 

[StueyDuck]

I thought Phil Spencer said Sony isn't competition

 

[cireza]

Oh fuck, I had actually read the discussion and have an opinion about it. So now it is "Who gives a shit" territory then ? Never change.

 

[DeepEnigma]

Oh fuck, I had actually read the discussion and have an opinion about it. So now it is "Who gives a shit" territory then ? Never change.

Nobody gives a shit about this part,

but I guess that's only normal for someone developing games and streaming content directly from the ROM on 35 years old hardware.

 

[cireza]

Nobody gives a shit about this part,

Developers were streaming content from ROM and decompressing on the fly decades ago. Be impressed by the exact same feature in 2023 if you want, I find this funny at best. Technology has been moving forward by regressing in many aspects and it has now become a fight to recover what has been lost. Be ignorant of it if you want.

 

[DeepEnigma]

Developers were streaming content from ROM and decompressing on the fly decades ago. Be impressed by the exact same feature in 2023 if you want, I find this funny at best. Technology has been moving forward by regressing in many aspects and it has now become a fight to recover what has been lost. Be ignorant of it if you want.

We know how ROMs work. This is still impressive for not having to have oversized and overprized ROMs. Pushing much larger assets 100 fold in the same or in some cases, even faster than ROMs of the past.

Nobody is ignorant, cunt.

 

[THE DUCK]

majority of the games runs better on PS5 nowadays, Microsoft must feel very dumb now.

Receipts? And not just cherry picked games.

From what I've seen it's been fairly even overall.

 

[Lysandros]

That's mostly true for PC components,the biggest advantage the Series X has over the PS5 is memory bandwidth at 10GBs and texture filtrate/ray tracing with the latter being theoretical given the hardware specs.

The most important thing to not ever forget in this context is that PS5 GPU has as many advantages over the XSX one in other metrics/facets even including the whole V/RAM pool. Essential parity in performance was foreseeable from the beginning. The argument for declaring XSX as the 'more powerful' console was always as strong as the one stating that PS5 is the more powerful system.

 

[X-Wing]

They talk a lot, they discuss a lot, they promise a lot. In the end they can't carry their own weight because they don't understand the industry. If it wasn't for virtually infinite cash, offering content at loss and buying out the industry to starve the competition out of content they wouldn't be here anymore. Fuck them.

 

[Crayon]

It's funny how some of these statements are identical to how Internet warriors used them. I'm curious to know which of the two groups came with it first.

"Variable clocks vs. sustained rates."
"3D audio is similar"
"SSD expandable storage is similar"
"12 vs. 10 advantage"

It's such a tight feedback loop now that I don't think even they know. I swear these execs are going on what the fandom was saying more than the other way around. It's a total reality distortion field and it's been killing them ever since they started off last gen thinking they had already won and it was time to start squeezing people.

 

[onQ123]

So, even MS themselves talked about Tflops not being a good metric (with DF as well), despite xbox fanboys using it as the end-all argument at the time.

Funny that.

Yes they talked about it when the PS4 had the TF advantage over Xbox One

 

[NickFire]

Yes they talked about it when the PS4 had the TF advantage over Xbox One

That was a completely different situation though and nothing they said back then applies now. Don't forget that Xbox One has the power of the cloud to make up for the missing flops. PS5 does not have a single cloud to help it bridge the gap. If the console doesn't have any clouds at all, then of course flops matter.

 

[itsjustJEFF]

My biggest takeaway from this... these guys are way batter at redacting than PlayStation/Sony. If it were PlayStation/Sony we'd have the whole story.

 

[I Love Rock 'n' Roll]

This is so much Sega 97 in spirit minus the. great 1st-party games!

 

[DeepEnigma]

That was a completely different situation though and nothing they said back then applies now. Don't forget that Xbox One has the power of the cloud to make up for the missing flops. PS5 does not have a single cloud to help it bridge the gap. If the console doesn't have any clouds at all, then of course flops matter.

Xbox One: Microsoft Claims that Cloud Computing Can Provide Power of 3 Xbox Ones, 32 Xbox 360s

www.dualshockers.com