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Microsoft Engineers Helping Get Baldur's Gate 3 Split-Screen Working on Xbox Series S
- Thread starter Musilla
- Start date
Are you going anywhere with these questions or just grasping because you lack familiarity with the subject? Balders Gate 3 is a turn based RPG that runs on a 970. Its not a high performance game.
Razvedka
Banned
Oh man I didn't even make the Starfield connection. Hadn't occurred to me what concessions may have had to been made there. Hopefully.. Few?
As for the OP, yeah. No surprise. This was a big deal several years ago with high profile people (e.g. Engine devs @ ID just prior to MS acquision, and others) ringing the alarm bell. Alot of people chose to interpret this through the lens of optimism. I believe the Series S will prove to be a problem which worsens with time.
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DeepEnigma
Gold Member
Well, if they can get it to run on a 970, and engineers needed to be sent, seems there might be something more than "blame Larian."
James Sawyer Ford
Member
Really feels like a massive miscalculation and blunder on the part of Phil Spencer
I really don't think Phil is a great strategy guy. He's more of a desperate "hail mary" kind of guy, and it shows. This strategy tried to pincer Sony. They end up getting a worse performing premium console, and a lower spec console that significantly hampers teams and adds far more complexity than what was needed. And it really hasn't improved their console position. Consumers will pay up for products they want. It's no longer a cost-at-all-cost game.
I dunno....I really wish Microsoft and Sony could work out their console differences, get GamePass on Playstation in exchange for Microsoft getting out of the console game completely.
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
I haven't followed BG3 religiously, but from what I've seen, it does not seem like an overly ambitious game for it to cause this kind of an issue.
Ah well, hopefully it gets sorted out sooner rather than later.
Ah well, hopefully it gets sorted out sooner rather than later.
The Pleasure
Member
I tried, but i got a blue screen saying that the operating system needs to be reinstalled.
Larian isn't known for its optimization and performance. If the game releases on series S with coop after MS provides tech support then it probably was a Larian problem.
Topher
Gold Member
fatmarco
Member
It's not.
That engine is just full of technical debt, and they're adding layers upon layers of more code, content and complexity to it in Starfield. While I guess they've had 8 years to make improvements, I don't think Bethesda have ever prioritised flawless framerates over game complexity and graphical fidelity.
Put it like this, I guarantee the game won't even be a consistent 30 fps on Series X.
You might be right. No way for me to know for sure. But I’m still suspicious. If they ever clarify whats in and not in their parity requirements would be cool.
fatmarco
Member
Yeah I'd like to see those too. I think in Baldur's Gates case its a combination of the Series S's technical limitations making it harder and a developer with limited resources/ capabilities to do the engineering work.
That being said, people should actually want them to get it running on Series S because the performance would then improve on PS5 and PC in the process. I imagine though, because its such a low use feature, they wouldn't generally spend that much time working on really optimising it if they weren't forced to, so these Microsoft engineers are actually a positive regardless of whether they get it to work on Series S or not.
It would be ridiculous for a game to skip the Xbox consoles entirely for a feature that less than 5 percent of players will use though.
ShadowLag
Member
For every player viewport (aka "screen"), you're rendering the game another time from an additional camera's point of view.
In 2-player that's 2x the stuff being rendered, in 4-player that's 4x, etc... this tanks framerate unless handled well. Some tricks to make sure this doesn't become a problem on a weaker machine are to lower the resolution of each player's scene, force the game into lower graphics quality settings, and even cap the FPS to a lower number while in splitscreen - maybe even a combination of all 3.
Depending on the level of freedom the game implements, each player could also move very far away from the other player(s) resulting in more of the game's level being required to exist in RAM at one time. If the game is optimized so that, for example, only assets within 50 meters of a player need to be loaded at any given moment, you've got a problem when player 2 jumps into the game and runs 50 meters or more away from player 1. All of the assets around player 2 that player 1 doesn't need, now need to be loaded in addition to everything required for player 1, and it only gets worse with each additional player. If not dealt with, this can lead to maxing out your RAM budget and either tanking performance further or just not being able to run at all.
There are optimization tricks for the RAM issue, such as forcing the game into super-low quality asset mode (models, animations, textures, audio files, etc.) during split-screen so the same assets won't fill up your available RAM completely, or just simply don't allow players to wander past a certain distance from each other.
On top of that you've got the increased CPU cost incurred by each player, depending on the complexity of the game logic and physics going on around each one.
It's entirely solvable on any machine if you care about it enough; most games with split screen modes are making sacrifices somewhere in either the visual/audio fidelity of the game or the game design itself and we've still had fun with them for all these years.
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Razvedka
Banned
I want Microsoft gone for good, but someone else needs to step in to compete with Sony. I dunno who that'd be, maybe Apple? But someone.
mrcroket
Member
It's more like needing organic eggs from happy, well-loved hens to make a passable omelet.
DenchDeckard
Moderated wildly
This is what MS should be and should have been doing with series s from rhe beginning.
Make a console like the s and you need ninjas ready to go and help studios out.
Hopefully they get it working ASAP and get it out soon.
Make a console like the s and you need ninjas ready to go and help studios out.
Hopefully they get it working ASAP and get it out soon.
Maybe try visiting the thread where they said they were having issues:
Before Sony fans get carried away, it will most definitely come to Xbox
The game isn't even out of Early Access yet and no doubt Sony splashed some money to get the attention on them. We'll probably start getting more platform info later this year when it's out of Early Access.
Jez Corden did as pointed out by Mr Moose:
SenjutsuSage as pointed out by Spitfire098:
Ain't no way bruh...
Not sure what I liked on Twitter to get this conspiracy theory dude on my timeline
Did you miss the talking points at the time or were you just not following the issue before?
Fabieter
Member
It would look really bad for Microsoft if they went for this. People just blammed Larian instead of Microsoft. Win win.
Ah yes, the Halo infinite plan, wait...
Also holding back other consoles for MS' weaker box shouldn't be a thing, at least that's what a half dozen xbox fans kept chirping. Now we're encouraging it?
Guilty_AI
Member
The way the game works, its important to keep a lot of the enviroment loaded in, cause you can pan the camera around since it has isometric view, not to mention these enviroments themselves can be quite big or dense. The game has a lot of logic running under the hood, you can basically talk to and permanently kill every NPC you see, even animals. You can have one character inside turn-based combat logic while the other is still walking around doing stuff on the other side of the map.
Then the last act of the game takes place in the city of Baldurs Gate, which is very novigrad-like in terms of busyness and density, and according to devs the same level of interactivity will remain even there. That is certain to punish the CPU and RAM of the poor series S having to run 2 character instances of that place.
On those notes:
i'd honestly put this game's ambition on the level of Starfield. Its basically a modern Skyrim, with The Witcher 3 presentation and traditional crpg levels of mechanical depth.
From their latest update:
For comparison, Skyrim has 10 races (which already includes subraces) and around 100 spells. The first act alone of BG3 (the one out in EA) has around 46k lines of dialogue, thats 3/4 as much as the entirety of Skyrim which has 60k.
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I only saw people using it for console warring. Thanks for the posts. I just get a bit tired of the series s is holding games back. Especially considering the ps3 generation. Yes, it will require effort. But it’s not holding anything back.
There are plenty of games where there is a 60 fps mode on Series X only. Framerate, just like resolution (and graphics settings) is not part of the 'features parity'.
Feel Like I'm On 42
Member
Feel Like I'm On 42
Member
I've owned every generation of Xbox consoles. Why would you even question that based on my post?
If you're a Series X owner and don't feel the least bit angered at the way this console is being treated then there is something wrong with you.
foamdino
Member
Anyone with any software engineering experience could tell right from the start that the S was going to be an issue. You program such that the S is the baseline and then add minor upgrades for the X. Given MS stance on feature parity, all your features have to be possible on the S - that is a limitation, no matter how you cut it. The sw engineers themselves will have one view, but I think it's probably worse to be a game designer being told by your technical peers "you have to cut this great feature because we don't have the ram budget and we must have parity between the S and the X"
If you have the choice of deciding to skip the mess of developing for the S and the X (and no Visual Studio good as it is, doesn't solve issues such as too little ram), then I'm pretty sure this is the calculation dev teams are making - skip Series S|X dev concentrate on PS5 (oh and Sony actually help out with engineering as part of an exclusive deal - sign me up).
As the cross-gen titles fade away and the teams concentrate on current-gen, I wonder how many teams are now working out the financial hit it would take to skip developing for S|X.
If you have the choice of deciding to skip the mess of developing for the S and the X (and no Visual Studio good as it is, doesn't solve issues such as too little ram), then I'm pretty sure this is the calculation dev teams are making - skip Series S|X dev concentrate on PS5 (oh and Sony actually help out with engineering as part of an exclusive deal - sign me up).
As the cross-gen titles fade away and the teams concentrate on current-gen, I wonder how many teams are now working out the financial hit it would take to skip developing for S|X.
Unknown Soldier
Member
Why Larian didn't just remove split screen from XSeX to solve the problem is unknown. If they demand feature parity, just remove features that the XSeS has issues with?
Rykan
Member
There is no connection there. Series S and Series X don't need to have frame rate parity. The parity clause only counts for gameplay & features. Not resolution and frame rate. There are several games that only run at 30 on Series S and 60 on series X.
Starfield is most likely CPU bound, which is the one aspect of the design that is identical in both Series X and S.
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They would need to remove it from PS5 too because MS demands feature parity on releases and they didn’t want to compromise by removing features.
In Cold Blood
Banned
It's about time the ATG got out there and showed devs how to exploit their boxes.
Stare-Bear
Banned
Just download more power from the cloud…
Fredrik
Member
Lol that would not work out like you think it will. Gamepass would be worse, because Sony won’t allow it to compete with their regularly sold games, we would end up seeing timed exclusivity on the same platform, store exclusives, and no day 1 games. And at that point, why would we want it?
I like Gamepass because I don’t have to buy games. I’m still at 0 bought games on Xbox this generation. Gamepass without day 1 games would turn it into a LTTP service.
Silent Viper
Banned
Who said that they were paid by Sony?
Source of such news. They confirmed it since dayone that Xbox version delayed due to technical reasons. Ign and all even covered.
You post source of your such claims. It looks like you just trying to start some shit.
Silent Viper
Banned
Bro everyone here is expert game designer and analyst. They know the truth. So dont bother lol
James Sawyer Ford
Member
If GamePass was a Microsoft first party service only, im sure they’d find an arrangement. That’s the end goal anyway, they don’t want to be cutting third party content deals which is why they have a goal for so many acquisitions
Fredrik
Member
Think this through properly. Sony don’t even allow day 1 games from their own studios on their own subscription service. Why would they allow MS to have their service there with day 1 games? It would create a scenario where Sony would seem greedy, on their own platform. And why would anyone who like Gamepass want only MS 1st party games there? The service would be worse.
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supernova8
Banned
I do wonder how Microsoft came to the conclusion that they, not having anywhere near a dominant market share, could get all developers/publishers to split their resources (allocated for Xbox) between Series S and X when they only have to work toward one target when it comes to PS5 (which is selling way more anyway).
James Sawyer Ford
Member
Sony would get a 30% cut of GP revenue
They’d rather have MS games on their platform than not have them at all
Fredrik
Member
Won’t happen. This would be the ultimate trojan horse for MS, that’s how you create monopoly, they would instantly rule the gaming subscription world and the only thing left would be Nintendo platforms (which won’t happen, same reason as with Sony) and mobile (which won’t happen either).
Lex Tenebris
Neo Member
I'm no engineer but I don't think your estimates are correct. Split screen doesn't need double power or ram, if that was true even ps5 would have problems. Resolution for every wievport is half the normal resolution or even less if there are borders to keep aspect ratio. Texture are lower resolution and there are less object on screen, probably they will use lod levels differently, giving priority to those with lover details. You also think of memory usage like the old paradigm, preload an amount of textures in ram so far textures are always available in a radius, but with new consoles and their ssd and software functionality they need less textures in ram, so the ram usage it's definitely higher than solo, but not way much. There is indeed more ram used for buffers but again, they are not full fat as resolution and textures for every view port are at best half of single player. If Larian coded the game to use vram like there is a mechanical hdd then it all their fault.
There will be an higher overhead, especially on the cpu side, but SS cpu is on par with series x and ps5, so that's not the problem.
So as said, if they will manage to make it work with the help of MS team, then the problem are the developers, for money, time or inexperience. If they fail, let's hope someone talk about this so we can analyse what happened and then eventually blame the hardware.
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Fabieter
Member
Split screen kills the series s. it is ambitious to have this kinda rpg fully playable in coop.
01011001
Banned
it will have splitscreen on PC, so I wonder how low end PCs will handle this
Lucifers Beard
Member
Nope, I’ll be playing split screen with my wife. We frequently play couch coop games, especially if we have friends come over! Developers should continue to support this moving forward.
I might be the only one that plays split screen lol
Fabieter
Member
It may work, maybe not anyway it isn't forced to work that's a big difference. You can tweak alot by youself to make it work on pc. And you have more ram to work with. Minimum requirements is 4gb vram and 8gb memory.
MatrixReloaded101
Member
The new Xbox won’t be out until 2028 so just think about the road ahead for Xbox this gen with devs having to deal with the series s…
