5 ms·

It's likely the Special Edition Skyrim release which uses Fallout 4's engine.

eropple 10y ago
It could be, sure. Which has minimum specs well south of even the PS4, release date merely three years ago. I'm not saying it's a bad game. (Skyrim is the last Bethesda game I enjoyed--man, FO4 was bad.) But it is not really a benchmark in 2016. This is a higher-end Tegra. It's impressive-for-a-mobile-chip, but mobile chips still aren't really impressive. Maybe the base has additional GPU muscle or something, who knows. But the existence of a video-rendered Skyrim on-screen isn't really indicative of "graphical prowess" in the first place.
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  Is there any other console that can play Skyrim smoothly on the go? No, which is why this is impressive. We'll have to wait for the specs to be announced before we can confirm that the docked console is behind the rest.
  - eropple 10y ago
    Why limit it to "consoles"? An iPad could, depending on the desired render quality. The A9x is probably beefier than the Tegra in this, or is at least competitive. (edit: "Probably" is a strong word, given that this is coming out in early 2017, but at least in the ballpark.) Don't get me wrong, I think the device looks cool and I was already planning on buying one. But "playing Skyrim" just doesn't tell you anything, especially when the video on-screen is plastered there with After Effects. It's sloppy thinking to jump on that as meaningful anythings.
    - Cyph0n 10y ago
      I've yet to see an iPad game at the level of Skyrim. Yes, you could get the same graphics, but I doubt you could get one with such scale onto an iPad. I understand that the trailer is not meant to reflect the exact console. But remember that Bethesda is behind this, and so we have their seal of approval, so to speak.
      - eropple 10y ago
        I'm not saying the games exist on the iPad platform. I'm saying that the hardware is certainly competitive with this and so it's not some super-impressive thing that this is coming out with Skyrim. Like, we have this hardware already.
        Cyph0n 10y ago
        How do you know? Do you have some kind of inside information? All we know is that it's running on a Nvidia SoC.
        eropple 10y ago
        No inside information, but I can make some educated guesses? It's an nVidia Tegra-platform SoC in a mobile form factor, which limits its TDP. That it has a fan grille suggests that it can run a little hotter than a no-fan device like an iPad, but you're still fighting with battery life. Like, there's only so much you can do with that, plus the needs to keep costs down in order to be price-competitive with the PS4 and Xbox One. By "we have this hardware already", I was referring to how preposterously tight Apple has gotten with their A9x/A10 hardware in terms of CPU and GPU performance. It's still not as competitive versus Intel in general use cases as Apple wants you to think it is, but it is very, very good and is definitely no worse than "competitive" against nVidia's current Tegra line. I don't think I'm saying anything particularly shocking. And none of that's to say it can't be a good, satisfying device. I mean, Christ, I was playing my Vita this morning, and the chip at the heart of that is Frito-Lay. Just that the gamer conception of "power" really isn't...real? And that there are a lot of things that have to be considered in terms of that.
        Cyph0n 10y ago
        Fair enough. I'm honestly hoping that the base has some kind of GPU acceleration a la Surface Book. Otherwise, it's going to be treated the same way as the Wii U by third party devs.
- jbmorgado 10y ago
  Special edition Skyrim is coming out this month, 28th of October, on the PC, not 3 years ago.
  - eropple 10y ago
    "Release date three years ago" was referring to the PS4. Fallout 4's minimum specs on PC, even (i.e., not an optimized platform), are lower than the PS4-equivalents on that platform. I would expect a mobile device (and the Switch is on a Tegra platform, it's a mobile device), three years further down the line, to be able to be at least in the ballpark of "competitive", with allowances and restrictions (lowered draw distance, simplified shaders, maybe reduced texture size depending on the memory budget), with a machine packing a Radeon HD7870. My point is that re-engine'ing the game doesn't change the assets involved (stuff like texture quality or shader complexity has a pretty significant impact on performance), nor (necessarily) the visual effects involved. You could scale UE3 down to run on absolutely laughable hardware and games today still regularly support 640x480 and other silly things. Being "on an engine" means something only when you have hard hardware requirements, like requiring support for SM 4.0 or whatever.
    - paulmd 10y ago
      FO4/GameBryo has really weird hardware requirements in general that make it less conductive to mobile ports. It's super sensitive to single-threaded performance, it's super sensitive to memory bandwidth (very unusual for a game), it eats a whole bunch of GPU power in city areas, etc. Portables tend not to be known for those things. It also really prefers to be run on a SSD so it doesn't stutter when it's paging game-world cells in and out, although that could probably be tuned. I generally agree that you can probably stuff it into a portable with some compromises within the next couple years, sure. But I'm glad I'm not a Bethesda employee, that's going to suck and I think the compromises are going to be big. Re-engine'ing a game is a massive undertaking. There's a huge amount of work involved in porting mission systems and event triggers and so on between the two systems. I don't really think it's feasible, I'd see it as much more likely that they port the engine rather than porting the game to another engine (which AFAIK is what they did with Skyrim Special Edition). It's especially unlikely because Bethesda has put a huge amount of work into developer/world-building tooling for GameBryo. They have been on a single engine for almost 20 years now (since Morrowind) and it's going to be a tough sell to throw all that tooling and experience away, even with the engine making ominous creaking sounds (as the FO4 codebase clearly is doing). It clearly needs it though. Like, STALKER was playable on a laptop processor and iGPU ten years ago and the newer games are on par with FO4 visually in most ways. In many RPG senses it was even more flexible and more ambitious (A-Life was similar to Radiant AI). FO4 just runs like shit compared to how dated it looks and plays.
paulmd 10y ago
All of the TES and FO3/4 games have been using the same engine since Oblivion. Bethesda now calls their internal build of GameBryo "Creation Engine" but it's very much the same thing. I think you can actually still pull "GameBryo" out of the EXE using the Unix `strings` util, and you can definitely see it from the game data. So "ported to the FO4 engine" doesn't really mean much. It's like saying that Half-Life 2 has been ported to CS:GO's engine. Yeah, it's a more modern build of the engine but it's still the same engine and it's not going to look or run drastically different unless the assets are also revamped at the same time. Also, my personal opinion (from the outside) is that Bethesda doesn't seem to have done a good job maintaining their codebase. Fallout 4 still doesn't really look any better than Skyrim (the facial animations are especially terrible), it's quirky/buggy as hell (framerate-locked physics in 2016?) and it runs like shit even on high-end machines. An engine from a game released in 2006 shouldn't struggle to hold 50 fps at 1440p on a 780 Ti. TF2 gets slagged on a lot for its shitty codebase but it's nowhere near that bad.
- eropple 10y ago
  Morrowind was also built upon the same tech, IIRC.
- norea-armozel 10y ago
  I must be lucky because I never had issues with FO4 on my PC even with the crazy mods I've added.
  - paulmd 10y ago
    I did the same in FO3. Decent but not outstanding games on their own but really great once the modders get going. I really like loot-driven games with more realistic gun physics (more damage taken/given, high accuracy, etc). The base FO4's weapon/armor mod system is doing much better for me than FO3 did but I still am pining for variety. I've been meaning to restart FO4 with some mods. The performance issues were really terrible at launch. It's somewhat better now but it really prefers current-gen hardware and running from an SSD. It's really sensitive to memory bandwidth too.

It could be, sure. Which has minimum specs well south of even the PS4, release date merely three years ago. I'm not saying it's a bad game. (Skyrim is the last Bethesda game I enjoyed--man, FO4 was bad.) But it is not really a benchmark in 2016. This is a higher-end Tegra. It's impressive-for-a-mobile-chip, but mobile chips still aren't really impressive. Maybe the base has additional GPU muscle or something, who knows. But the existence of a video-rendered Skyrim on-screen isn't really indicative of "graphical prowess" in the first place.

Cyph0n 10y ago
Is there any other console that can play Skyrim smoothly on the go? No, which is why this is impressive. We'll have to wait for the specs to be announced before we can confirm that the docked console is behind the rest.
- eropple 10y ago
  Why limit it to "consoles"? An iPad could, depending on the desired render quality. The A9x is probably beefier than the Tegra in this, or is at least competitive. (edit: "Probably" is a strong word, given that this is coming out in early 2017, but at least in the ballpark.) Don't get me wrong, I think the device looks cool and I was already planning on buying one. But "playing Skyrim" just doesn't tell you anything, especially when the video on-screen is plastered there with After Effects. It's sloppy thinking to jump on that as meaningful anythings.
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    I've yet to see an iPad game at the level of Skyrim. Yes, you could get the same graphics, but I doubt you could get one with such scale onto an iPad. I understand that the trailer is not meant to reflect the exact console. But remember that Bethesda is behind this, and so we have their seal of approval, so to speak.
    - eropple 10y ago
      I'm not saying the games exist on the iPad platform. I'm saying that the hardware is certainly competitive with this and so it's not some super-impressive thing that this is coming out with Skyrim. Like, we have this hardware already.
      - Cyph0n 10y ago
        How do you know? Do you have some kind of inside information? All we know is that it's running on a Nvidia SoC.
        eropple 10y ago
        No inside information, but I can make some educated guesses? It's an nVidia Tegra-platform SoC in a mobile form factor, which limits its TDP. That it has a fan grille suggests that it can run a little hotter than a no-fan device like an iPad, but you're still fighting with battery life. Like, there's only so much you can do with that, plus the needs to keep costs down in order to be price-competitive with the PS4 and Xbox One. By "we have this hardware already", I was referring to how preposterously tight Apple has gotten with their A9x/A10 hardware in terms of CPU and GPU performance. It's still not as competitive versus Intel in general use cases as Apple wants you to think it is, but it is very, very good and is definitely no worse than "competitive" against nVidia's current Tegra line. I don't think I'm saying anything particularly shocking. And none of that's to say it can't be a good, satisfying device. I mean, Christ, I was playing my Vita this morning, and the chip at the heart of that is Frito-Lay. Just that the gamer conception of "power" really isn't...real? And that there are a lot of things that have to be considered in terms of that.
        Cyph0n 10y ago
        Fair enough. I'm honestly hoping that the base has some kind of GPU acceleration a la Surface Book. Otherwise, it's going to be treated the same way as the Wii U by third party devs.
jbmorgado 10y ago
Special edition Skyrim is coming out this month, 28th of October, on the PC, not 3 years ago.
- eropple 10y ago
  "Release date three years ago" was referring to the PS4. Fallout 4's minimum specs on PC, even (i.e., not an optimized platform), are lower than the PS4-equivalents on that platform. I would expect a mobile device (and the Switch is on a Tegra platform, it's a mobile device), three years further down the line, to be able to be at least in the ballpark of "competitive", with allowances and restrictions (lowered draw distance, simplified shaders, maybe reduced texture size depending on the memory budget), with a machine packing a Radeon HD7870. My point is that re-engine'ing the game doesn't change the assets involved (stuff like texture quality or shader complexity has a pretty significant impact on performance), nor (necessarily) the visual effects involved. You could scale UE3 down to run on absolutely laughable hardware and games today still regularly support 640x480 and other silly things. Being "on an engine" means something only when you have hard hardware requirements, like requiring support for SM 4.0 or whatever.
  - paulmd 10y ago
    FO4/GameBryo has really weird hardware requirements in general that make it less conductive to mobile ports. It's super sensitive to single-threaded performance, it's super sensitive to memory bandwidth (very unusual for a game), it eats a whole bunch of GPU power in city areas, etc. Portables tend not to be known for those things. It also really prefers to be run on a SSD so it doesn't stutter when it's paging game-world cells in and out, although that could probably be tuned. I generally agree that you can probably stuff it into a portable with some compromises within the next couple years, sure. But I'm glad I'm not a Bethesda employee, that's going to suck and I think the compromises are going to be big. Re-engine'ing a game is a massive undertaking. There's a huge amount of work involved in porting mission systems and event triggers and so on between the two systems. I don't really think it's feasible, I'd see it as much more likely that they port the engine rather than porting the game to another engine (which AFAIK is what they did with Skyrim Special Edition). It's especially unlikely because Bethesda has put a huge amount of work into developer/world-building tooling for GameBryo. They have been on a single engine for almost 20 years now (since Morrowind) and it's going to be a tough sell to throw all that tooling and experience away, even with the engine making ominous creaking sounds (as the FO4 codebase clearly is doing). It clearly needs it though. Like, STALKER was playable on a laptop processor and iGPU ten years ago and the newer games are on par with FO4 visually in most ways. In many RPG senses it was even more flexible and more ambitious (A-Life was similar to Radiant AI). FO4 just runs like shit compared to how dated it looks and plays.

paulmd 10y ago

All of the TES and FO3/4 games have been using the same engine since Oblivion. Bethesda now calls their internal build of GameBryo "Creation Engine" but it's very much the same thing. I think you can actually still pull "GameBryo" out of the EXE using the Unix `strings` util, and you can definitely see it from the game data. So "ported to the FO4 engine" doesn't really mean much. It's like saying that Half-Life 2 has been ported to CS:GO's engine. Yeah, it's a more modern build of the engine but it's still the same engine and it's not going to look or run drastically different unless the assets are also revamped at the same time. Also, my personal opinion (from the outside) is that Bethesda doesn't seem to have done a good job maintaining their codebase. Fallout 4 still doesn't really look any better than Skyrim (the facial animations are especially terrible), it's quirky/buggy as hell (framerate-locked physics in 2016?) and it runs like shit even on high-end machines. An engine from a game released in 2006 shouldn't struggle to hold 50 fps at 1440p on a 780 Ti. TF2 gets slagged on a lot for its shitty codebase but it's nowhere near that bad.

eropple 10y ago
Morrowind was also built upon the same tech, IIRC.
norea-armozel 10y ago
I must be lucky because I never had issues with FO4 on my PC even with the crazy mods I've added.
- paulmd 10y ago
  I did the same in FO3. Decent but not outstanding games on their own but really great once the modders get going. I really like loot-driven games with more realistic gun physics (more damage taken/given, high accuracy, etc). The base FO4's weapon/armor mod system is doing much better for me than FO3 did but I still am pining for variety. I've been meaning to restart FO4 with some mods. The performance issues were really terrible at launch. It's somewhat better now but it really prefers current-gen hardware and running from an SSD. It's really sensitive to memory bandwidth too.