Differences that are easily overcome by Xbox VRR support. Best way to play on console.
Problem is not everyone's screen supports VRR, in fact most don't. And gamers shouldn't need to rely on a feature outside of the game's own optimizations to make it playable in a tolerable way (i.e no screen-tearing).
It's a bit weird seeing how some other cross-gen multiplats like NBA 2K1 aren't having these kind of differences between the PS5 and Series X versions, so it does bring into question Ubisoft's dev environment and pipeline surrounding both platforms. Do they have up-to-date Series devkits with Gamecore or not? When did they get them? Do they have different teams handling the two versions? If so, is one team prioritizing the PS5 edition (i.e is that team being given more budget and manpower to work with)?
The latter I would expect not to be the case since MS has marketing rights with Valhalla IIRC, but if that's the case then why did MS not provide better technical support to Ubisoft (assuming Ubisoft may've had outdated devkits)? Is the fact several of their 1P studios cleaning up 343i's mess something of a reason?
In any case, there's clearly some things around the SDK MS need to fix and iron out pronto. If this persists a pretty bad narrative surrounding their hardware may start to form and it'll be extremely difficult for them to shake it off. They might need a demonstration of Hellblade II (as one example) running real-time on Series X sooner rather than later just to shut these kind of things down, regardless of how that makes Ubisoft look here (because if such a demo were to pop up then the consensus would just shift to Ubisoft being lazy and not having the means to optimize for Series X which would kind of reflect badly on them. This is all complicated stuffs :S).
Dev tools are bad!
Game is not optimised!
We had 2 games so far its not looking good for the 12tf rdna 2 console. The 9tf rdna 1.5 console is beating it, screams bottle neck if u ask me.
Dev tools: Even insiders have been saying for months that Xbox SDKs were lagging behind. More information has come out more or less confirming this, as the Gamecore SDK (which is what MS have been retooling the devkit package into) has been running late.
Comparatively, Sony's PS5 SDK has basically been described by several devs as a "supercharged PS4 devkit", as in the APIs are very similar and the dev environment similarly the same. Combined with them finalizing their specs earlier, that's given devs more time to focus on optimizations, which leads into...
Optimizations: Well if the above is true, then it's a bit hard to argue that the game is not optimized. I would say it's not fully optimized on either platform tbh, but it's probably even less optimized on Series X since there are circumstances surrounding its SDK the PS5 hasn't had to deal with.
It's not an excuse to refer to these two things as factors when they go hand-in-hand and are seemingly true based on what we've seen in terms of information. Also it's worth noting that these are just two cross-gen multiplat games. DMC5 in particular, with odd framerate drops but in terms of visual detail is at least on par with the PS5 one if not better, going by the DF analysis. Other multiplat games like NBA 2K1 and DiRT 5 are running on par between the two systems with the expected bits of additional small details on Series X (and at least in NBA 2K1's case, virtually identical load times).
From my understanding Sony could have hit 10.23TFs and have fixed clocks. But in order to do that would mean more CUs and lower clocks. For whatever reason they decided against that and chose to go with a narrow and fast design.
The main reasons were costs and ensuring BC for PS4 and PS4 Pro games. The next-smallest design they could've chosen was 48 CUs. But the costs for the APU would've gone up a lot as a result, and they wanted to distribute those costs in other areas and try making up any performance losses through developing the variable frequency implementation...
...which btw AMD are leveraging for their Ryzen & RDNA2 GPUs in a very similar setup, which is almost precisely the feature Cerny hinted about at Road to PS5 being brought into the PC space as a "successful collaboration". For a bit I thought this would also include cache scrubbers but I just rewatching part of Road to PS5 today and Cerny mentions the Cache Coherency Engines are present in order to inform the GPU of stale data in the I/O caches and then have the GPU selectively purge those bits and replace them with new data.
That pretty much rules out the cache scrubbers having any role in the Infinity Cache, as the way he describes it, the cache scrubbers are in multiples split up among parts of the GPU (likely per-CU), I would assume either at the L0$ or more likely L1$. IC deals with the L2$ level; it's still theoretically possible cache scrubbers might be there but then that wouldn't really fall on the GPU "hardware" itself anymore but rather some HBCC block on the GPU to access data off the SSD through the DirectStorage implementation AMD talked about at their presentation.
Also while rewatching the presentation (or a part of it) today I caught this line:
If it takes about half a second to load, that's about 4 GB of compressed data to load. That sounds about right for next-gen
This is what Mark Cerny mentioned when describing just-in-time streaming of asset data, and it sticks out because this is what he figures is good enough for "next-gen" gaming. Which would mean that a drive offering raw bandwidth of, say, 1 GB/s to 2 GB/s (the former being highest lossy compression ratio of 3.99:1, the latter being typical lossless compression ratio of 2:1) should be capable of the same thing so many people have been attempting to claim only a drive as fast as PS5's or even Series X's/S's (being half the speed of Sony's) would be able to do.
And I bring up the latter in particular because at least for data loading, with the recent firmware patch on PS4 we've been seeing some of those games, on that system (with its SATA II interface) loading pretty much on par with BC title load times on PS5 and Series X, which was supposed to be seemingly impossible. Welp
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DeepEnigma
is faster than me!
Riky , what you got for us this new time.
