7 ms·

Shorter load times is an attractive argument, but it doesn't matter when the #1 issue with current-gen consoles is how unoptimized most games are. The tradition

• look_lookatme 7y ago
  Yeah it's brutal. Even loading the Playstation Store takes wayyy too long on my original PS4. It's like it's doing an npm install every time I want to spend money...
  • lmilcin 7y ago
    I play Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled with my kids. I have calculated that you can spend only about 3/4 of the time actually playing the game if you don't play the same map every time, 1/4 is necessarily wasted looking at various loading screens. Pretty disappointing for a relatively simple game.
  • karatestomp 7y ago
    It’s a lot better than it wa on the PS3. In both cases I suspect the problem is that the store app is a webview wrapper for a “webapp”. Though in the PS4 I also suspect they’ve stuck webtech stuff all over the main menu and it only remains tolerably quick because the machine’s a beast.
  • scrumbledober 7y ago
    and then every menu tab on the left that you scroll through takes forever as well.
  • FridgeSeal 7y ago
    I have a theory that's more to do with their serverside/networking architecture than anything to do with the PS4 itself. Do you find it fails to work when you're most interested in buying something? Because that's how it goes with me, literally as soon as I'm like "oh yes I would like to buy that game" the store stops working completely.
  • kyuudou 7y ago
    Downloading updates for games has been a sore point with me, particularly when I get a new game. Oh great, 8 hours of downloads, so much for that instant gratification of playing it tonight... Same with ongoing updates. I replaced my original HD with a FireCuda which helps some but I feel like the PS online infrastructure is run on fractional T1s and Sun boxes or something
• jagger27 7y ago
  The big benefit of this generation is that with almost no porting effort PS4 and Xbox One games will run as they should given how much better Zen 2 and RDNA2 are than Jaguar and GCN.
• sumofi 7y ago
  I stopped playing Zelda on switch because of the loading times. It gets very frustrating when you try out a dungeon. I would replace my current switch in a blink of an eye if a new model with reduced loading time would come out
  • VHRanger 7y ago
    The annoying part of breath of the wild is how much a better experience you can get for it by emulating the game with CEMU. With a gaming computer you'll get 2k resolution and 60+fps easily. On switch you barely get 720p/30fps
    • peatmoss 7y ago
      Wow, I wish I’d known this. I bought the handheld-only Switch for BotW, and lamented not having an HD edition that ran with good frame rates.
    • 0-_-0 7y ago
      This is great, thank you for this piece of information!
  • brirec 7y ago
    An update a good few months ago decreased loading times pretty substantially. Not sure when you stopped playing, but I hardly notice it loading sometimes.
    • sumofi 7y ago
      Could easily be. I got it when it came out. Will have more time the next few weeks anyway.
  • wincy 7y ago
    Well, if you’ve got a good PC Cemu emulates the Wii U botw amazingly well.
    • 7y ago
• falcolas 7y ago
  Another problem that arises with the (small) SSD in the machine, games are getting up into the 200GB range. Specifically, the most recent call of duty title clocked in at around 175 GB. That means you'll be able to store maybe 4 AAA grade games on the SSD.
  • LeoTinnitus 7y ago
    That is my biggest problem with it too. Sony and MS need to crack down on that. We don't need 4k assets. We're not f'ing there yet. Quit making us all have to download them.
    • anthonypasq 7y ago
      ? A significant portion of Xbox One X games are native 4k
  • runevault 7y ago
    An interesting note from Mark Cerny's talk, a lot of games have multiple copies of data installed to keep locality when loading up say a region of the game world, with the way SSD reads work they won't have to do that anymore which should cut down sizes, though how much I don't know if they have figured out yet.
  • cma 7y ago
    I'm sure the SSD will get bigger on later revisions, and they are having support for expandable storage which should come down in price over the lifetime of the console.
    • falcolas 7y ago
      That was the promise for the last generation of consoles as well, and some of their generation-closing consoles still had small internal storage quantities; the launch PS4 had 500GB, and the latest PS4 Pro only has 1TB (about 150GB more than the PS5).
      • 7y ago
• DevKoala 7y ago
  I am a fan of the Switch too, but the Xbox One X offers the ability to use performance modes which reduce the resolution for better frame rate. Also, the arguably best game on Switch, Zelda: BOTW, drops in frame rate a lot.
  • missosoup 7y ago
    Which is to say that xbox/ps5 have basically become branded PCs, and the switch is basically a branded Android SoC. Consoles don't really make sense as a concept anymore. The only remaining appeal is their DRM capability for publishers.
    • DevKoala 7y ago
      They do make sense to me and others. My pc is a tool, and my consoles are toys. I need the physical separation.
      • missosoup 7y ago
        You can build a gaming PC in the same form factor as the new xbox using nothing but off the shelf components and have a separate device that can play a larger gamut of games on higher settings. I'm not sure how anyone can dispute that the new xbox and play station are anything other than slightly customised branded PC builds that offer no physical advantages over the real thing, only marketing ones like DRM and exclusive releases.
        • bhaak 7y ago
          Or you can walk over to the store, put down a few green pieces of paper, be back at home and play the games without worrying about CPU frequencies, graphic card speed, or motherboard compatibilities.
        • scarejunba 7y ago
          My friends will come over for 4 hours on a Sunday. I will spend no more than 10 minutes when they're here figuring out controllers. I will spend no more than 15 minutes at any point ahead of time to keep things working. When they come over, the thing we want to spend most of our time doing is 2 v 2 FIFA. If I spend 30 mins doing anything here, we're losing precious time. If I spend 60 mins debugging, I'm just not going to do it. I'll even take a zero probability of fixing if it means a lower probability of failure of any sort (even recoverable).
• throwaway123x2 7y ago
  The Crash Bandicoot CTR game that's a remake of a PS1 game takes anywhere between 2 and 5 minutes to start up on my Xbox One. It's absolutely ridiculous.
  • scrumbledober 7y ago
    wow it loads waaaay faster than that on my PS4
  • tenebrisalietum 7y ago
    that's funny when games would load faster on the original C64 with a 1541 than today.
  • ccktlmazeltov 7y ago
    I have the PS4 and I hate how long it takes for games and menus and all of that stuff to transition. I just want my N64 back.
• daemin 7y ago
  The current gen hardware is over 6 years old, and when writing for it you can definitely feel its age. Modern PC hardware even at the lower end is so much better and easier to deal with. Also you are forced to make the game run on the lowest specification of any console version, so that means the least powerful machine of all the consoles of this generation. For a low end PC system we are talking about having 8 cores, 16GB of ram, a decent video card, and an SSD usually or at least a disk capable of 100+ MB/s. Also the platform is pretty easy to develop for and release on. For a console you get 5 or 6 cores to use, each of which is not as good as a modern CPU core, 8GB of shared ram, and a disk where you have to handle being only able to read from it at 30MB/s. You also have to deal with the black box of vendor tools, that don't necessarily work easily. So the whole team ends up spending a lot of time actually optimising the game to actually run on these underpowered and lowest spec'd consoles. Removing extra details, downgrading graphics, culling data, compressing, managing memory, just so it can run at 30fps.
  • zokier 7y ago
    > The current gen hardware is over 6 years old, and when writing for it you can definitely feel its age But it is also very much a known quantity and games should be designed to take that into account. Arguably it should be easier to write games that hit 60fps today than it was 6 years ago.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • daemin 7y ago
      If you want to make the same game now that you would have released 5 years ago, sure. But games have become way more complex in that time, and the expectations of players have grown considerably. So you end up having to put more content in, more features and more data. The disk and memory become a bottleneck and you need to write and optimise some pretty complex systems to be able to handle that well. PC Hardware has actually advanced since that time as well, so the artists have now more power to create better looking and feeling things in their tools, which means more data to process and get into the game. Also designers will often surprise you as a programmer with the features and creative solutions to problems. They don't really think and design the same way a programmer would, and don't really design for the system hardware (except for the input/output devices of it).
• anthonypasq 7y ago
  I'm really bummed that this absolute nonsense is also prevalent on hackernews. Low framerates are almost always completely unrelated to optimization. I can make a horribly optimized version of Tetris that still runs at 144hz on modern hardware. Likewise, I can write a perfectly optimized game that still runs at 20fps on modern consoles. Framerates are determined by how much the developer wants to push graphical fidelity/AI etc.
  • celeritascelery 7y ago
    > Low framerates are almost always completely unrelated to optimization. I would be interested to see a source on this.
  • leppr 7y ago
    > Framerates are determined by how much the developer wants to push graphical fidelity/AI etc. Framerates are determined by how much the console has to process before it can display a frame. Apart from possibly setting an upper bound, FPS is a variable developers do not directly control. The issue I am pointing is unintentional drops in framerate caused by game events. A developer can spend time testing their game, and tailoring the amount of processing each possible configuration of events and objects require so that at any one time, it doesn't exceed the processing budget allowed by the target framerate. That is optimization. If you do not do it, the framerate will be essentially random.
  • Arelius 7y ago
    If you are trying to fight nonsense, please don't promote additional nonsense. Generally, in game development, the term "optimization" refers to the holistic process around getting the game performing at speed, be it compiler optimization options, SIMD-ification, or even adjusting texture resolution (graphical fidelity) or AI parameters. It often starts with profiling, and identifying bottlenecks, and focusing on what can be done to get the game to perform within spec. Optimization is entirely about context, so, while I generally agree with your comment about Tetris, I'd say your second example is "poorly optimized" by definition. As to your comment about being determined by how much the developer wants to push... Yes, aiming for higher fidelity will use more resource, it's hardly every simply the "developer's wants" that determine the performance of a particular title, instead performance ends up being the end result of thousands of tiny decisions and elements that contribute to the final experience.
• MarioMan 7y ago
  >As things are now, flagship games on the PS4/Xbox One struggle to stay at 30FPS, frequently dropping to 20FPS or less, without the option to reduce graphics quality or resolution PC gamers have. Developers are doing what they can here, but the average game that has these sorts of drops is dealing with limited CPU resources, budgeted around a 30FPS target. Especially on consoles like Xbox One X (due to its powerful GPU but limited CPU), it becomes evident that, on average, resolution and graphics cuts have little effect on performance in these situations. The only mitigation is to build your game with a higher frame rate target in mind from the start, requiring serious compromises to things like simulation complexity, for instance. PS5 and Xbox Series X have a good chance of pushing past this limit. Current generation consoles are using aged laptop-grade CPUs while the upcoming console generation features desktop-grade Zen 2 processors at surprisingly high clock rates.
• jayd16 7y ago
  Switch is a weird case because plugged in its 1080p and in handheld mode it runs at 720p.
• sgift 7y ago
  > Shorter load times is an attractive argument, Visible shorter loading times are not the main effect. Cernys talk was enlightening. A big part of level design is making sure that the player doesn't move so fast that the hardware cannot deliver the assets any more. So, you get corners and corner, and elevators and whatever tricks dev use just to make sure they can load the next part of the level fast enough without showing a loading screen. If a game can request assets and they are almost instantly you don't have to redesign levels again and again because "yes, this looks the way we want, but the hardware isn't fast enough". For me the interesting question is if developers will use the playstation specific options. For playstation exclusives it's a given, but for multi platform releases there probably won't be different levels for playstation vs pc/xbox, so much of it could be wasted. Same for all the other things. Doesn't help much if the controller has six levels of priority if game devs don't use them because PC has only two.
  • Avamander 7y ago
    The talk for those interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph8LyNIT9sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph8LyNIT9sg I found it really quite interesting, even if I don't game on consoles primarily.
• CodeArtisan 7y ago
  It was actually worst with older games; For example, games such as Goldeneye64, Perfect dark or Zelda ocarina of time were running at a mere 21 FPS (19 on PAL!)
  • p1necone 7y ago
    N64 was the worst of that gen by far in terms of frame rate though, a lot (maybe a majority?) of ps1 and saturn games ran at a solid 30 or 60fps.
  • orloffm 7y ago
    Would be interesting to compare the effective latency though. Switch adds a few tens of milliseconds to input, so 60 FPS on it may feel worse than 21 FPS on N64.
• Grazester 7y ago
  Which games are these that are optimized for the switch that play so much worse on the other consoles? DFRetro usually does game comparisons and the switches games are always worse with a much lower resolution. Hell Doom Eternal targeting 60fps on the Xbox and PS4.