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The real excitement will come when it does not require a new $3000 graphics card to run on the home PC I already spent $1500 on... The price of keeping up with

The real excitement will come when it does not require a new $3000 graphics card to run on the home PC I already spent $1500 on... The price of keeping up with every new enhancement on PC is directly linked to each new engine update, but somehow game releases can be "optimized" for gameplay on ~3 year old consoles... Also why I haven't bought any new PC games since GTA5.

MillenialMan 5y ago
GPUs are $3000 because of Bitcoin, not Unreal Engine.
kibibu 5y ago
The demo runs on consoles.
cercatrova 5y ago
This is a console demo, not a PC demo (unfortunately or fortunately, however you want to look at it). It runs on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S which cost 500 USD.
- wincy 5y ago
  The PS5 is $500 if you can find it, there's been shortages for over a year, the effective price is $900 on Ebay where you can actually get one without waiting.
  - cercatrova 5y ago
    You can get one off r/hardwareswap for MSRP usually and is delivered within a few days
  - theaeolist 5y ago
    This is so true, yet so totally besides the point.
  - satysin 5y ago
    I managed to get two, a digital (€400) and a Blu-ray model (€500) a few weeks ago from Carrefour here in [redacted]. It is a bit of a pain having to monitor stock drops but most online stores have a queue system in place as well as purchase limits to try and make life harder for people that buy up every console they have to just put them on eBay at twice the price. A colleague of my wife managed to get a PS5 in a fnac store a few weeks ago as well. Just went in randomly and asked and they had them in stock. Only a few and they sell out quick so was just luck in that instance but if you put in a little effort you can get one in a week or two (depending on stock allocation of course) without having to pay over the MRSP.
dougmwne 5y ago
And that is the super exciting, mind blowing thing about this, this ran on the Xbox Series X/PS5! In fact, it even runs on then Xbox Series S with a small visual downgrade, which is the cheap version with 1/3 the GPU power of the Series X (at 4 tflops, it is perhaps very roughly equivalent to a GTX 1060 from 2016). This is a triumph of software, not hardware. I imagine you should be getting a lot of use still out of your current rig.
- h0l0cube 5y ago
  > This is a triumph of software, not hardware Purpose built gaming hardware has significant advantages over a typical PC. Modern consoles have SoC designs with incredible bandwidth between CPU/GPU/RAM that you simply can't have on upgradable form factors. The closest thing in the general purpose computing world are the M1 family of SoC MacBooks. UMA on the M1 in particular could be harnessed to have physics and graphics geometry in sync with each other without the penalty of bus transport - so things like high-detail deformable environments become much more feasible. But again, even these machines are geared towards general purpose computing, not graphics.
  - ses1984 5y ago
    Do you really need that much bandwidth between cpu and gpu? On a pc the the gpu has its own memory and the memory bandwidth of for example a 3070 is greater than the memory bandwidth of Xbox. Would this demo not run on a pc? I understand that pc hardware is more expensive but it was also my understanding that performance ceiling is actually much higher than consoles, especially after the next gen of pc hardware comes out after a console release. It’s hard to tell how much more expensive a pc is because of console manufacturers’ loss leader accounting.
    - wongarsu 5y ago
      CPU and GPU are good at different tasks, but transferring any amount of data across the PCI bus is pretty expensive, forcing you to use both in a suboptimal way. If you have fast enough data transfer between them then you can do SIMD-like tasks much faster on the GPU, while doing a lot of tasks that naturally involve branching faster on the CPU, using whichever processor is faster and has spare capacity instead of whichever has the data.
vvanders 5y ago
One of the advantages of fixed hardware is you can tune for that hardware directly. We used to bake content and design code with specific cache line sizes in mind. If you know you have a fixed memory budget for graphics/sound/etc you can make specific tradeoffs on where you spend that budget. PCs until recently did not have UMA and so you were bound by bus speeds(although this applied to some consoles too but you could exploit it if you knew how, ex: stream audio data from graphics memory and long as you stayed under the total bus bandwidth you got extra memory for the system if you needed it).
- Jyaif 5y ago
  > One of the advantages of fixed hardware is you can tune for that hardware directly With UE5, it's the engine that tunes the rendering quality for the HW available.
ehnto 5y ago
I have found I don't update my PC for years but the games just keep looking better. A lot of newer techniques, Raytracing excluded, seem to be much more efficient at making good looking models without much geometry. It's all shaders, decals and image maps. Running a 1080p monitor helped that alot. I recently upgraded to a 1440p, and it has cost me frames no doubt.
- avereveard 5y ago
  > Raytracing excluded about that - screen space ray tracing has been around a while, and even if you miss little things (no diffusion from lights off screen or behind a shade) the resulting eyecandy is often enough to trick people mind even if it's not physically correct... and three generation older hardware is more than enough to run that.

MillenialMan 5y ago

GPUs are $3000 because of Bitcoin, not Unreal Engine.

kibibu 5y ago

The demo runs on consoles.

cercatrova 5y ago

This is a console demo, not a PC demo (unfortunately or fortunately, however you want to look at it). It runs on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S which cost 500 USD.

wincy 5y ago
The PS5 is $500 if you can find it, there's been shortages for over a year, the effective price is $900 on Ebay where you can actually get one without waiting.
- cercatrova 5y ago
  You can get one off r/hardwareswap for MSRP usually and is delivered within a few days
- theaeolist 5y ago
  This is so true, yet so totally besides the point.
- satysin 5y ago
  I managed to get two, a digital (€400) and a Blu-ray model (€500) a few weeks ago from Carrefour here in [redacted]. It is a bit of a pain having to monitor stock drops but most online stores have a queue system in place as well as purchase limits to try and make life harder for people that buy up every console they have to just put them on eBay at twice the price. A colleague of my wife managed to get a PS5 in a fnac store a few weeks ago as well. Just went in randomly and asked and they had them in stock. Only a few and they sell out quick so was just luck in that instance but if you put in a little effort you can get one in a week or two (depending on stock allocation of course) without having to pay over the MRSP.

dougmwne 5y ago

And that is the super exciting, mind blowing thing about this, this ran on the Xbox Series X/PS5! In fact, it even runs on then Xbox Series S with a small visual downgrade, which is the cheap version with 1/3 the GPU power of the Series X (at 4 tflops, it is perhaps very roughly equivalent to a GTX 1060 from 2016). This is a triumph of software, not hardware. I imagine you should be getting a lot of use still out of your current rig.

h0l0cube 5y ago
> This is a triumph of software, not hardware Purpose built gaming hardware has significant advantages over a typical PC. Modern consoles have SoC designs with incredible bandwidth between CPU/GPU/RAM that you simply can't have on upgradable form factors. The closest thing in the general purpose computing world are the M1 family of SoC MacBooks. UMA on the M1 in particular could be harnessed to have physics and graphics geometry in sync with each other without the penalty of bus transport - so things like high-detail deformable environments become much more feasible. But again, even these machines are geared towards general purpose computing, not graphics.
- ses1984 5y ago
  Do you really need that much bandwidth between cpu and gpu? On a pc the the gpu has its own memory and the memory bandwidth of for example a 3070 is greater than the memory bandwidth of Xbox. Would this demo not run on a pc? I understand that pc hardware is more expensive but it was also my understanding that performance ceiling is actually much higher than consoles, especially after the next gen of pc hardware comes out after a console release. It’s hard to tell how much more expensive a pc is because of console manufacturers’ loss leader accounting.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    CPU and GPU are good at different tasks, but transferring any amount of data across the PCI bus is pretty expensive, forcing you to use both in a suboptimal way. If you have fast enough data transfer between them then you can do SIMD-like tasks much faster on the GPU, while doing a lot of tasks that naturally involve branching faster on the CPU, using whichever processor is faster and has spare capacity instead of whichever has the data.

vvanders 5y ago

One of the advantages of fixed hardware is you can tune for that hardware directly. We used to bake content and design code with specific cache line sizes in mind. If you know you have a fixed memory budget for graphics/sound/etc you can make specific tradeoffs on where you spend that budget. PCs until recently did not have UMA and so you were bound by bus speeds(although this applied to some consoles too but you could exploit it if you knew how, ex: stream audio data from graphics memory and long as you stayed under the total bus bandwidth you got extra memory for the system if you needed it).

Jyaif 5y ago
> One of the advantages of fixed hardware is you can tune for that hardware directly With UE5, it's the engine that tunes the rendering quality for the HW available.

ehnto 5y ago

I have found I don't update my PC for years but the games just keep looking better. A lot of newer techniques, Raytracing excluded, seem to be much more efficient at making good looking models without much geometry. It's all shaders, decals and image maps. Running a 1080p monitor helped that alot. I recently upgraded to a 1440p, and it has cost me frames no doubt.

avereveard 5y ago
> Raytracing excluded about that - screen space ray tracing has been around a while, and even if you miss little things (no diffusion from lights off screen or behind a shade) the resulting eyecandy is often enough to trick people mind even if it's not physically correct... and three generation older hardware is more than enough to run that.