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[In Cold Blood]

As with every gen the console manufacturers talk about their secret sauce and by the end of the gen it mostly accounts for nothing.
With this gen now moving along, which of the sauces are of no real benefit, and which ones are yet to be utilised?

Sony told us about the power of the SSD. It would revolutionise game design. It would give us zero loading screens and times.
The GPU contained the amazing cache scrubbers which would make the GPU far more efficient.
On top of those amazing additions devs were also going to be able to use primitive shaders and the PS5 Geometry Engine.
As it stands we haven't had one game with a revolutionary design, no game utilising primitive shaders and the cache scrubbers are of little to no benefit.

Microsoft on the other hand waited for the full RDNA 2 feature set. The merging of RDNA 2 and DX12 Ultimate was a match made in heaven.
VRS was going to add mad extra frames with no loss of detail.
Mesh shaders were not only a generation ahead of the PS5 primitive shader tech, but it made dragons disappear behind walls.
We had the tech demo of Sampler Feedback Streaming which promised devs the ability to stream high level mips when needed. A force multiplier to the RAM pool.
Direct Storage is a revolutionary addition and let's not fucking forget the int8 and int4 lower precision ML addition to the XSX GPU that Sony didn't have.
Well, much like Sony mesh shaders haven't been used by any devs, the take up of Sampler Feedback Streaming is fucking zero and nothing is on the horizon with regards to ML

All joking aside, which of these secret sauces are actually going to deliver and which ones are just bullshit terms?

 

[GymWolf]

I'm still waiting for the second secret gpu inside xone and his ESRAM to show what the console is actually capable of.

 

[SJRB]

I don't really feel that there's anything overhyped about the SSD capabilities. The load times of games like Demon's Souls and Miles Morales are near-instant. Unfortunately most games don't fully utilize the capability, I guess because they're cross-gen or cross-console or just poorly optimized for whatever reason.

SSD is still a gamechanger in many cases though.

 

[DenchDeckard]

I hope we see the Cerny secret sauce this gen. So i am looking forward to seeing what you have explained in both your paragraphs, RDNA 3 will be out by the time these consoles have done anything outside of Flight Sim and plagues tale.

 

[nush]

Saturn games that used the audio chip for extra graphical calculations, wasn't a function used much though. I do think there were some Amiga games that used the disk drive controller chip in the same way.

 

[winjer]

Most studios don't have the capability to implement most of these features, either because of budget or because of technical expertise.
But at least UE5 has support for some of these features, like Mesh Shaders. And with wide adoption, it means a lot of games will support advanced features.

 

[GymWolf]

If everything from sony is gonna come to pc you better hope that the minimum requirements is gonna be an ssd as fast as the one inside ps5 or you can already forget all the stuff cerny said.

And if a super fast ssd is not required, then cerny just downright lied to us.

 

[RoadHazard]

SSD is definitely not secret sauce bullshit. It's a very real thing that can do things games built for HDDs never could, this is easy to understand just from the fact that it can literally load data 100x faster (more with proper compression). That's on PS5, Xbox maybe 50x, but still.

The reason we haven't seen much of it is that most games are still cross-gen, so they still have to be designed around those limitations. And even among those that aren't, they have still been built on a last-gen foundation so far. We do have some games with pretty much instant load times, which is very nice, but that's the simplest use case.

The question is if we will ever see it. PS5 exclusives seem like the most likely candidates for taking full advantage of these possibilities, but with all Sony games seemingly being slated for PC release sooner or later, can they build a game that DEMANDS that level of data throughput knowing that this is a rare thing on PC so far? I guess you could have lower texture settings etc to reduce throughput requirements for lower spec machines (the minimum requirement would still need to be a reasonably fast SSD though, HDDs need to be left behind), but yeah, we'll see.

 

[anothertech]

Dark silicon

 

[Rykan]

It's way too early to draw any conclusions. The vast majority of games are cross gen games.

 

[Hobbygaming]

These things take time. If we don't see more impressive stuff in 2023 or 2024 then you'd be right

I have a good feeling that we'll be very impressed

 

[Bonfires Down]

Cell processor. Only fully used by Sony developers. Everyone else sighed and did the bare minimum to get their games running on that pain in the ass.

 

[ItsGreat]

The sound capabilities were hyped to the high heavens before the latest gen consoles were released.

Seeing as the Unreal Engine already had directional sound created by years and years of hard work by the sound engineers it must have a been quite a slap in the face.

God knows what the engineers must think when the end user whacks their hard work though an end point sound processor like Dolby Atmos, Windows Sonic or other spatialisers.

 

[Bonfires Down]

The question is if we will ever see it. PS5 exclusives seem like the most likely candidates for taking full advantage of these possibilities, but with all Sony games seemingly being slated for PC release sooner or later, can they build a game that DEMANDS that level of data throughput knowing that this is a rare thing on PC so far? I guess you could have lower texture settings etc to reduce throughput requirements for lower spec machines (the minimum requirement would still need to be a reasonably fast SSD though, HDDs need to be left behind), but yeah, we'll see.

The ”lazy” way to do it on PC would be to simply require a lot of RAM and a decent SSD. I guess we’ll see what they do when Rift Apart comes to PC.

 

[RoadHazard]

The ”lazy” way to do it on PC would be to simply require a lot of RAM and a decent SSD. I guess we’ll see what they do when Rift Apart comes to PC.

That only works up to a certain limit. At some point you're gonna have to load more data (unless you have enough RAM to fit the entire game), and if this happens in a very dynamic and unpredictable way (which is something you CAN do with fast storage that you really couldn't with an HDD) you're gonna be screwed either way.

Rift Apart will probably work fine, at worst those portal travel "loading screens" will just be a bit longer. I'm thinking about things games haven't done at all yet.

 

[jufonuk]

Switch secret sauce seems to work. The whole docking and portable aspect. But the switch might have new ways of resign games or making them smoother. According to Switch sports

 

[TLZ]

Have you not downloaded more RAM yet?

 

[TrebleShot]

No. The actual next gen games R&C, Demons Souls, Returnal will need insane PC specs, you will see when Returnal launches on PC.
It’s not comparible and it never has been.

As discussed previously the secret sauce is closed architechture, low level API access, shared memory pool and SSD speed. It’s not just slap some high end gear together and off we go. Considering the power draw too, these consoles are incredibly well engineered and its not the hardware holding back the gen.

Lowest common denominator and return on investment are holding PS5 and XSX back. NOT hardware.

 

[Clear]

As a point of historical comparison the evolution of PS2 software is pretty on-point.

The PS2 hardware was the first system to really leverage co-processer function to massively improve performance. Without using the VU's it was physically impossible to drive the GS at close to capacity, so as developers got more familiar with parallelzing their engines visuals improved dramatically. If you consider that dev-cycles back then were generally below 2-years, you can see how many product cycles it took for this insight to filter through to product on the market.

Long story short it took roughly 3 years, or 1.5 product cycles. The first big examples coming towards the end of 2001, those being projects that likely began sometime in 1999 a year or so in advance of the hardware being launched.

If you consider modern dev-cycles are generally 3+ years, with a year lost for Covid on-top, its going to be awhile yet before we really start to see things. I'd say late 2023, 2024 seems about right.

 

[rodrigolfp]

Supercharged PC Architecture.

shared memory pool

This is so secret that it's still a secret to 8x and 16x AF and heavy/high res alpha effects.

 

[II_JumPeR_I]

I was hoping that the PS5 SSD would kill Cancer

 

[spons]

Just reminds me of Cell/PS3. Many multiplatform games performed worse on it than on 360, even though it was more powerful.
Probably due to the massive parallelization in software it needed to perform well, but what do I know.

 

[Punished Miku]

PS2 was supposed to be able to launch nuclear weapons if you hooked 4000 of them together. The secretest of all sauces. Remains unused to this day.

20 Years Later: How Concerns About Weaponized Consoles Almost Sunk the PS2

Before the PlayStation 5 arrives, let's remember the time gamers almost didn't experience the Sony PlayStation 2 because Japan felt it had military applications.

www.pcmag.com

 

[UnNamed]

Do you remember the Bezier curves on PS2? Worst shit ever.

 

[YCoCg]

The real "Secret Sauce" is down to how developers and tool makers can program for the hardware, sometimes all it takes is to think things through differently, approach with a different mindset, etc, to conquer hardware and squeeze the most out of it. The best examples of this that I can say to people isn't even from studios but from homebrew and porters, look at the homebrew and modding scene for SNES and Genesis/Mega Drive, we have people in their bedrooms doing better, more accurate ports of classic games, look at all the modded versions of things like Mortal Kombat, Final Fight, etc which run on actual hardware but just use a modern day mindset of coding to squeeze the absolute out of the hardware.

 

[Topher]

Cloud making Xbox One uber-powerful was probably my favorite secret sauce.

 

[Von Hugh]

Probably any and all of them.

 

[Ceallach]

Power Brick GPU lmao.

In the modern age where there isn't a ton of structural differences between consoles, unique featuresets are mostly irrelevant except for showpiece first party games. So you have to build your game to run well on the lowest spec machine you are launching on, which ends up being Series S usually, though there are certainly cases where that ends up being Switch. If you need to run on Switch, then you are limited in what featureset you can employ.

 

[I Master l]

PS4 GDDR5, Not that is was underutilised but most of the PS4 performance benefit over the xbox1 came
from better GPU, Cerny theory about more vram bandwidth is better than less vram bandwidth with very
fast eDRAM is not true now seeing AMD using the infinity cash and also Nvidia increasing the L2 cash by
massive amount in their new cards

 

[YeulEmeralda]

Maybe the secret sauce is real but developers don't bother using it?

 

[Bo_Hazem]

People tend to search for things to bitch about, which is fascinating. We're still not 100% committed to current gen, and I expect like 2024 is when we seriously see the benefit of making SSD mandatory for gaming and PC already way faster than PS5 with PCIe 5.0+.

 

[M1chl]

SSD and especially HW accelerated decoding are definitely not overhyped, being dev or being player.

Other well, let's just say that companies likes to take work of AMD as their own. Thus these features are already employed.

 

[Black_Stride]

Still waiting for the SSD and whatever secret sauce was in the PS5 design to completely change game design.

And dont even think about telling me there was no hype:
PSU compiled a bunch of all the 2020 hype into one article.
And thats not even all of it

PlayStation 5 Hype: All The Praise Developers Have Heaped Upon PS5 - PlayStation Universe

As the PlayStation 5 release date approaches, here is a catalog of all the praise that developers have heaped upon Sony's next generation console.

www.psu.com

Remember we were even told there stuff we dont know about the PS5 that makes it even better than how much betterer than we thought it was better:

Metro dev says he’s most excited for ‘unannounced’ PS5 / XSX features | VGC

Sony previously claimed it had yet to reveal PS5’s “bigger differences”…

www.videogameschronicle.com

 

[Filben]

guess we’ll see what they do when Rift Apart comes to PC.

I watched a video of someone explaining that Rift Apart would have worked even on PS3 (not with that fidelity and resolution of course but with the portals). Don't know how much there is to it, but looking at Deathloop, which was also advertised as only doable on next gen, I simply don't believe them. Deathloop did nothing that seemed too much for conventional HDDs.

Anyways, I'm just shy of trusting big devs and companies any ways.

 

[LordCBH]

The true secret sauce was the friends we made along the way

Spoiler

and the second GPU in the Xbox one.

 

[Gudji]

PS2 was supposed to be able to launch nuclear weapons if you hooked 4000 of them together. The secretest of all sauces. Remains unused to this day.

20 Years Later: How Concerns About Weaponized Consoles Almost Sunk the PS2

Before the PlayStation 5 arrives, let's remember the time gamers almost didn't experience the Sony PlayStation 2 because Japan felt it had military applications.

www.pcmag.com

Bet that's how Russia launches their nukes.

 

[NickFire]

I don't really feel that there's anything overhyped about the SSD capabilities. The load times of games like Demon's Souls and Miles Morales are near-instant. Unfortunately most games don't fully utilize the capability, I guess because they're cross-gen or cross-console or just poorly optimized for whatever reason.

SSD is still a gamechanger in many cases though.

SSD is unquestionably a game changer for consoles. Even old games load much faster in my experience.

 

[Pelta88]

"DX12" and the "Power Of The Cloud."

 

[MadchesterManc]

Did that cloud based destruction shown at the beginning of last gen ever come to fruition with Crackdown 3? Can't recall when I tried it on PC.

I watched a video of someone explaining that Rift Apart would have worked even on PS3 (not with that fidelity and resolution of course but with the portals). Don't know how much there is to it, but looking at Deathloop, which was also advertised as only doable on next gen, I simply don't believe them. Deathloop did nothing that seemed too much for conventional HDDs.

Anyways, I'm just shy of trusting big devs and companies any ways.

That's kind of the point with Rift Apart. It's not that portals weren't possible before, we had Portal on PS3/x360/PC after all, just the assets and amount of data being moved. From what I recall Rift Apart can be doing something like 2-3GB/s with a portal transition, which you aren't going to be able to do without spending several seconds loading on a 150MB/s HDD or even 550MB/s SATA SSD - unless you're running the whole game in RAM I guess.

 

[In Cold Blood]

I'm still waiting for the second secret gpu inside xone and his ESRAM to show what the console is actually capable of.

You see people were looking for the extra GPU in the power brick, when it was actually in the cloud.

 

[In Cold Blood]

I don't really feel that there's anything overhyped about the SSD capabilities. The load times of games like Demon's Souls and Miles Morales are near-instant. Unfortunately most games don't fully utilize the capability, I guess because they're cross-gen or cross-console or just poorly optimized for whatever reason.

SSD is still a gamechanger in many cases though.

Outside of loading times, the SSDs in both consoles were going to allow devs to revolutionise game design. Well, a qtr of the way into this gen and there isn't one game who's design is any different what would be done on the previous gen. Even the rifts in R&C were done in fortnite on tradition HDDs in the previous generations.
There is no game announced that fits the revolutionary tag.
So what's the issue?
Game engines need to be changed to take account of the SSDs?
Game devs need to open their minds and move away from traditional game designs?
Or were SSDs not really going to do what they were trying to hype them to do?

 

[damiank]

Blast processing

 

[In Cold Blood]

Most studios don't have the capability to implement most of these features, either because of budget or because of technical expertise.
But at least UE5 has support for some of these features, like Mesh Shaders. And with wide adoption, it means a lot of games will support advanced features.

This is why I really want to see what Turn 10 and Playground can do with the new Forzatech engine. They say it's been totally redeveloped to take advantage of Mesh Shaders, VRS, SFS, XVA etc, and if we remember it was Turn 10 and Playground that were experimenting with ML to upgrade textures in Forza games.
If say Fable and FMS are just another game then I am sad.

 

[MidGenRefresh]

The only secret sauce is devs optimising their code. Consoles are basically PCs now.

 

[Morrie’s wig shop]

My PlayStation 2 launching nukes…

 

[March Climber]

Out of the many threads complaining about PS5/XSX, this thread is going to age the worst. Trying your hardest to downplay the impact of the SSDs in both is a mistake. Or a troll. But hopefully just a mistake.

 

[ToTTenTranz]

Cloud making Xbox One uber-powerful was probably my favorite secret sauce.

Any day now.

 

[Robb]

I think all of what has been promised will turn out to be great in the end.

In my experience the ‘secret sauce’ stuff usually comes from baseless speculation from the hardcore fans. Like that the Ps5 SSD would be some kind of miracle compared to everything else, when SSD’s have already been a thing since forever.

 

[Gp1]

PS2- Emotion Engine, VU0/VU1, Toy Story graphics, etc
PS3- The power and omnipresence of Cell chips, Blu Ray etc.
Xbox One - eSram against gddr5 on ps4
PS5- The power of NVME

The list is huge and we always fall for it.

 

[anothertech]

Sun Tse art of war