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Dirt 5 Technical Director: "I'm just not sure" on whether there is a significant power divide between PS5/XSX. Louds PS5's Smartshift! --Poll Inside.

After listening to this interview, are you more confused than before?


  • Total voters
    44
GamesOnDaily recently interviewed Dirt 5 Technical Director (David Springate) about the next-gen consoles and as a collective the interviewers threw a bunch of gotcha questions to get David to slip and confirm fanboy fantasies about XSX power or advantages... Needless to say David delivered, but not what Dealer_Gaming and company were expecting...

Timestamped.


In light of recent events and real-time face-off results however; this particular question leaves a lot of questions unanswered still on what seems like an endless debate for the time being...

Question: I am expecting the XSX to kind of go.. further than the PS5, like, as the gen goes on...can we talk about that... just the raw specs, that's, that's a big divide .That's a significant power divide no?

David
: It really does depend though. Let's go back to that scenario where 2 teams at AMD get split off. There is a conversation that's happening there between that team and the costumer (Sony or MS). Sony said, look, we want this thermal throttling thing (Smartshift). How far is it gonna push the hardware? Because now you've got so many hardware threads in CPU... you could churn through...as we learned on DIrt 5, you could churn through code really fast. And that leaves me with a lot of headroom to overclock the GPU and how much further is it gonna go, and the optimizations for that might be different because of the layouts of the CU on XSX in contrast, so umm.. I am just not sure. We're gonna have to wait and see.

(BTW this is the same interview where this particular developer debunks the idea of the Xbox Series X GDK being bad/poor/or whatever descriptive the fanboy narratives has it as - it's the prior question to this one if you want to listen to it - just rewind a bit).

==================
So, what do you think? Feel free to discuss.

Is Smartshift paying off for PS5?
Is the XSX more powerful, or you're just not sure anymore in light of recent events, real world results, and comments from devs?
Are you in wait and see mode?
Is this the end of the Teraflop?
 
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Dr Bass

Member
Sounds like he wants to say "No, that's not correct."

"it really does depend" when someone is suggesting one thing is an absolute truth is a way of disagreeing without stirring the pot or being confrontational.

It's been argued here before and it will be continually argued, but it sounds to me like Sony might have developed the better overall system for making games. "Masterpiece of system design" as stated by devs and all that ...

Also:

"They brought most of the tools over from XDK... in fact stability and speed improved a lot with GDK ... I'm very happy with it."

I guess that is that.
 
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sendit

Member
Is the XSX more powerful, or you're just not sure anymore in light of recent events, real world results, and comments from devs?

4wNrS9E.gif
 
Sounds like he wants to say "No, that's not correct."

"it really does depend" when someone is suggesting one thing is an absolute truth is a way of disagreeing without stirring the pot or being confrontational.

Yes I got that feeling too. I think all this dev commentary is really just making the wait for PS5 die shots a pain. Also, just as interesting would be CU comparisons to see if there is any particular differences between XSX CU's and PS5 CU's....
 
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assurdum

Banned
To be fair in another Twitter he replied "probably series X is more powerful" to another user.
 
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Must be a pretty fucking useless developer if he can't differentiate between system specs.

I think he's seeing performance differences not explainable by spec sheet reading and that's perhaps why he's apprehensive? The devil is always in the details...
 
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oldergamer

Member
"It depends" and "i don't know" makes total sense.

It could depend if you are making totally optimal code for that specific platform
If you are using all performance related features
It could depend on what code is ported from
It could depend on new ways to achieve the same results
It could depend on all sorts of factors outside the developers control

He is not a useless developer as he can't answer it. The fucking platforms just came out, they have had months with the dev environments in various incarnations. Sony and MS took different approaches, so it's harder to compare.
 
...

And that leaves me with a lot of headroom to overclock the GPU and how much further is it gonna go, and the optimizations for that might be different because of the layouts of the CU on XSX in contrast, so umm.. I am just not sure. We're gonna have to wait and see.
...
Seems to me he is talking about an architectural problem with the CUs on XSX. Maybe too much CUs per shader array so it's hard to keep them busy?
 

Greggy

Member
What do you expect a multiplat dev to say? Console A shits all over console B? Even youtube content makers have NDAs such as "Not allowed to show the console unboxing". Never mind devs who actually know the innards of the machine. They are forced to be diplomatic towards the manufactures, they are business partners.

I'm surprised by his definition of smartshift as "thermal throttling" when Cerny has explained multiple times that it's throttling on workload and not thermals.

He followed his "I'm not sure" with some hypothetical on optimisations that may be possible on the PS5 because of the smaller CU count and smartshift. The problem here is that it shouldn't be hypothetical for him. He just made a damn game for the thing. He should be able to be affirmative about whether the PS5's architecture allows for particular optimisations if that's the case. Hence why I think we watched a beautiful piece of question sidestepping and not much more.

Also possibly it's going to largely depend on developer skill and he just hasn't spent enough time with either system to know for sure.
 

Airbus Jr

Banned
"Not sure if theres a big power divide"

But that doesnt explain why dirt 5 graphics look like xbox one game on series x
 
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GamesOnDaily recently interviewed Dirt 5 Technical Director (David Springate) about the next-gen consoles and as a collective the interviewers threw a bunch of gotcha questions to get David to slip and confirm fanboy fantasies about XSX power or advantages... Needless to say David delivered, but not what Dealer_Gaming and company were expecting...

Timestamped.


In light of recent events and real-time face-off results however; this particular question leaves a lot of questions unanswered still on what seems like an endless debate for the time being...

Question: I am expecting the XSX to kind of go.. further than the PS5, like, as the gen goes on...can we talk about that... just the raw specs, that's, that's a big divide .That's a significant power divide no?

David
: It really does depend though. Let's go back to that scenario where 2 teams at AMD get split off. There is a conversation that's happening there between that team and the costumer (Sony or MS). Sony said, look, we want this thermal throttling thing (Smartshift). How far is it gonna push the hardware? Because now you've got so many hardware threads in CPU... you could churn through...as we learned on DIrt 5, you could churn through code really fast. And that leaves me with a lot of headroom to overclock the GPU and how much further is it gonna go, and the optimizations for that might be different because of the layouts of the CU on XSX in contrast, so umm.. I am just not sure. We're gonna have to wait and see.

(BTW this is the same interview where this particular developer debunks the idea of the Xbox Series X GDK being bad/poor/or whatever descriptive the fanboy narratives has it as - it's the prior question to this one if you want to listen to it - just rewind a bit).

==================
So, what do you think? Feel free to discuss.

Is Smartshift paying off for PS5?
Is the XSX more powerful, or you're just not sure anymore in light of recent events, real world results, and comments from devs?
Are you in wait and see mode?
Is this the end of the Teraflop?

Chorus Dev: TFLOPs Alone Aren’t of Much Use

Then you also have Crytek rendering engineer Ali Salehi making those comments on how its much easier to hit the theoretical peak of PS5 GPU as compared to Xbox Series X. There was a thread created on that a while ago so i'm sure you can find it if you searched through the forum.


Also this.
 
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A developer who wants to not piss off anyone.
We all see what happens if a dev speaks out against a console, they get smashed online, get death threats, delete their posts or tweets, and are never heard from again.
Only an idiot would go down that path nowadays.
 
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A developer who wants to not piss off anyone.
We all see what happens if a dev speaks out against a console, they get smashed online, get death threats, delete their posts or tweets, and are never heard from again.
Only an idiot would go down that path nowadays.
Yep. If I was in their position I'd do the same plus sleep with a shotgun next to my bed.

I have around 2000 hours in Call Of Duty so I consider myself rather good.
 
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