9 ms·

PS5 was almost twice as fast as the PS4 pro, yet we did not see the generational leap we saw with the previous major releases. It seems that we are the stage w

PS5 was almost twice as fast as the PS4 pro, yet we did not see the generational leap we saw with the previous major releases. It seems that we are the stage where incremental improvements in graphics will require exponentially more computing capability. Or the game engines have become super bloated. Edit: I stand corrected in previous cycles we had orders of magnitude improvement in FLOPS.

treyd 1y ago
> Or the game engines have become super bloated. "Bloated" might be the wrong word to describe it, but there's some reason to believe that the dominance of Unreal is holding performance back. I've seen several discussions about Unreal's default rendering pipeline being optimized for dynamic realtime photorealistic-ish lighting with complex moving scenes, since that's much of what Epic needs for Fortnite. But most games are not that and don't make remotely effective use of the compute available to them because Unreal hasn't been designed around those goals. TAA (temporal anti-aliasing) is an example of the kind of postprocessing effect that gamedevs are relying on to recover performance lost in unoptimized rendering pipelines, at the cost of introducing ghosting and loss of visual fidelity.
- mikepurvis 1y ago
  In principle, Epic's priorities for Unreal should be aligned to a lot of what we've seen in the PS3/4/5 generation as far as over-the-shoulder 3rd person action adventure games. I mean, look at Uncharted, Tomb Raider, Spider-Man, God of War, TLOU, HZD, Ghost of Tsushima, Control, Assassins Creed, Jedi Fallen Order / Survivor. Many of those games were not made in Unreal, but they're all stylistically well suited to what Unreal is doing.
  - kridsdale1 1y ago
    I agree. UE3 was made for Gears of War (pretty much) and as a result the components were there to make Mass Effect.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- babypuncher 1y ago
  TAA isn't a crutch being used to hold up poor performance, it's an optimization to give games anti-aliasing that doesn't suck. Your other options for AA are * Supersampling. Rendering the game at a higher resolution than the display and downscaling it. This is incredibly expensive. * MSAA. This samples ~~vertices~~surfaces more than once per pixel, smoothing over jaggies. This worked really well back before we started covering every surface with pixel shaders. Nowadays it just makes pushing triangles more expensive with very little visual benefit, because the pixel shaders are still done at 1x scale and thus still aliased. * Post-process AA (FXAA,SMAA, etc). These are a post-process shader applied to the whole screen after the scene has been fully rendered. They often just use a cheap edge detection algorithm and try to blur them. I've never seen one that was actually effective at producing a clean image, as they rarely catch all the edges and do almost nothing to alleviate shimmering. I've seen a lot of "tech" YouTubers try to claim TAA is a product of lazy developers, but not one of them has been able to demonstrate a viable alternative antialiasing solution that solves the same problem set with the same or better performance. Meanwhile TAA and its various derivatives like DLAA have only gotten better in the last 5 years, alleviating many of the problems TAA became notorious for in the latter '10s.
  - flohofwoe 1y ago
    Erm your description of MSAA isn't quite correct, it has nothing to do with vertices and doesn't increase vertex processing cost.. It's more similar to supersampling, but without the higher pixel shader cost (the pixel shader still only runs once per "display pixel", not once per "sample" like in supersampling). A pixel shader's output is written to multiple (typically 2, 4 or 8) samples, with a coverage mask deciding which samples are written (this coverage mask is all 1s inside a triangle and a combo of 1s and 0s along triangle edges). After rendering to the MSAA render target is complete, an MSAA resolve operation is performed which merges samples into pixels (and this gives you the smoothed triangle edges).
  - wtallis 1y ago
    > solves the same problem set with the same or better performance The games industry has spent the last decade adopting techniques that misleadingly inflate the simple, easily-quantified metrics of FPS and resolution, by sacrificing quality in ways that are harder to quantify. Until you have good metrics for quantifying the motion artifacts and blurring introduced by post-processing AA, upscaling, and temporal AA or frame generation, it's dishonest to claim that those techniques solve the same problem with better performance. They're giving you a worse image, and pointing to the FPS numbers as evidence that they're adequate is focusing on entirely the wrong side of the problem. That's not to say those techniques aren't sometimes the best available tradeoff, but it's wrong to straight-up ignore the downsides because they're hard to measure.
- gmueckl 1y ago
  This is a very one-sided perspective on things. Any precomputed solution to lighting comes with enormous drawbacks across the board. The game needs to ship the precomputed data when storage is usually already tight. The iteration cycle for artists and level designers suchs when lighting is precomputed - they almost never see accurate graphics for their work while they are iterating because rebaking takes time away from their work. Game design become restricted to those limitations, too. Can't even think of having the player randomly rearranging big things in a level (e.g. building or tearing down a house) because the engine can't do it. Who knows what clever game mechanics are never thought of because of these types of limitations? Fully dynamic interactive environments are liberating. Pursuing them in is the right thing to do.
  - andrekandre 1y ago
    > Fully dynamic interactive environments are liberating. Pursuing them in is the right thing to do. great video from digital foundry that goes into that (for doom: the dark ages) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed4vNNQwCDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed4vNNQwCDU
cwbriscoe 1y ago
A lot of the difference went into FPS rather than improved graphics.
- bentt 1y ago
  This is correct. Also, it speaks to what players actually value.
  - LikesPwsh 1y ago
    Also FPS just requires throwing more compute at it. Excessively high detail models require extra artist time too.
  - ThatMedicIsASpy 1y ago
    I have played through CP2077 with 40, 30 and 25 fps. A child doesn't care if Zelda runs with low FPS. The only thing I value is a consistent stream of frames on a console.
    - adamwk 1y ago
      When given a choice, most users prefer performance over higher fidelity
      - teamonkey 1y ago
        I would like to see the stats for that.
        jayd16 1y ago
        > "When asked to decide on a mode, players typically choose performance mode about three-quarters of the time, From PS5 Pro reveal https://youtu.be/X24BzyzQQ-8?t=172 https://youtu.be/X24BzyzQQ-8?t=172
        bzzzt 1y ago
silisili 1y ago
AFAIK, this generation has been widely slammed as a failure due to lack of new blockbuster games. Most things that came out were either for PS4, or remasters of said games. There have been a few decent sized games, but nothing at grand scale I can think of, until GTA6 next year.
- jayd16 1y ago
  There were the little details of a global pandemic and interest rates tearing through timelines and budgets.
pjmlp 1y ago
A reason was backwards compatibility, studios were already putting lots of money into PS4 and XBox One, thus PS5 and XBox X|S (two additional SKUs), were already too much. Don't forget one reason that studios tend to favour consoles has been regular hardware, and that is no longer the case. When middleware starts to be the option, it is relatively hard to have game features that are hardware specific.
- throwaway48476 1y ago
  Games budgets ballooned and it was not longer financially viable for single platform games.
vrighter 1y ago
twice as fast, but asked to render 4x the pixels. Do the math
- SlowTao 1y ago
  Well you see... I got nothing. The path nowadays is to use all kinds of upscaling and temporal detail junk that is actively recreating late 90s LCD blur. Cool. :(
cosmic_cheese 1y ago
Less effort going into optimization also plays a factor. On average games are a lot less optimized than they used to be. The expectation seems to be that hardware advances will fix deficiencies in performance. This doesn’t affect me too much since my backlog is long and by the time I play games, they’re old enough that current hardware trivializes them, but it’s disappointing nonetheless. It almost makes me wish for a good decade or so of performance stagnation to curb this behavior. Graphical fidelity is well past the point of diminishing returns at this point anyway.
- martinald 1y ago
  We have had a decade of performance stagnation. Compare PS1 with PS3 (just over 10 years apart). PS1: 0.03 GFLOPS (approx given it didn't really do FLOPS per se) PS3: 230 GFLOPS Nearly 1000x faster. Now compare PS4 with PS5 pro (also just over 10 years apart): PS4: ~2TFLOPS PS5 Pro: ~33.5TFLOPS Bit over 10x faster. So the speed of improvement has fallen dramatically. Arguably you could say the real drop in optimization happened in that PS1 -> PS3 era - everything went from hand optimized assembly code to running (generally) higher level languages and using abstrated graphics frameworks like DirectX and OpenGL. Just noone noticed because we had 1000x the compute to make up for it :) Consoles/games got hit hard by first crypto and now AI needing GPUs. I suspect if it wasn't for that we'd have vastly cheaper and vastly faster gaming GPUs, but when you were making boatloads of cash off crypto miners and then AI I suspect the rate of progress fell dramatically for gaming at least (most of the the innovation I suspect went more into high VRAM/memory controllers and datacentre scale interconnects).
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    Yeah there’s been a drop off for sure. Clearly it hasn’t been steep enough for game studios to not lean on anyway, though. One potential forcing factor may be the rise of iGPUs, which have become powerful enough to play many titles well while remaining dramatically more affordable than their discrete counterparts (and sometimes not carrying crippling VRAM limits to boot), as well as the growing sector of PC handhelds like the Steam Deck. It’s not difficult to imagine that iGPUs will come to dominate the PC gaming sphere, and if that happens it’ll be financial suicide to not make sure your game plays reasonably well on such hardware.
ErneX 1y ago
GTA VI is going to be a showcase on these consoles.
teamonkey 1y ago
This article shows how great a leap there was between previous console generations. https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/console-gpu-power-compared-ranking-systems-by-flop/2900-1334/ https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/console-gpu-power-compared-...
CoolGuySteve 1y ago
The current generation has a massive leap in storage speed but games need to be architected to stream that much data into RAM. Cyberpunk is a good example of a game that straddled the in between, many of it's performance problems on the PS4 were due to constrained serialization speed. Nanite and games like FF16 and Death Stranding 2 do a good job of drawing complex geometry and textures that wouldn't be possible on the previous generation
- Vilian 1y ago
  Nanite is actively hurting performance
  - teamonkey 1y ago
    Nanite has a performance overhead for simple scenes but will render large, complex scenes with high-quality models much more efficiently, providing a faster and more stable framerate. It’s also completely optional in Unreal 5. You use it if it’s better. Many published UE5 games don’t use it.
  - CoolGuySteve 1y ago
    Well yeah, features that push the graphics card typically incur performance hits.
ryao 1y ago
This is the result of an industry wide problem where technology just is not moving forward as quickly as it used to move. Dennard scaling is dead. Moore’s law is also dead for SRAM and IO logic. It is barely clinging to life for compute logic, but the costs are skyrocketing as each die shrink happens. The result is that we are getting anemic improvements. This issue is visible in Nvidia’s graphics offerings too. They are not improving from generation to generation like they did in the past, despite Nvidia turning as many knobs as they could to higher values to keep the party going (e.g. power, die area, price, etcetera).
- timschmidt 1y ago
  Jim Keller disagrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Hardware improvements only matter to the extent software is actually able to make use of them.
    - timschmidt 1y ago
      And? Software is getting more sophisticated and capable too. First time I switched an iter to a par_iter in Rust and saw the loop spawn as many threads as I have logical cores felt like magic. Writing multi-threaded code used to be challenging.
      - pjmlp 1y ago
        Now make that multi-threaded code exhaust a 32 core desktop system, all the time, not only at peak execution. As brownie points, keep the GPU busy as well, beyond twirling its fingers while keeping the GUI desktop going. Even more points if the CPU happens to have a NPU or integrated FPGA, and you manage to also keep them going alongside those 32 cores, and GPU.
Izikiel43 1y ago
The big jump between 4 and 5 was the NVME SSD and hardware decompression IMO. Load times in a regular PS5 are non existent compared to a PS4, that's the big generational jump. For graphics, I agree it looks like diminishing returns.

treyd 1y ago

> Or the game engines have become super bloated. "Bloated" might be the wrong word to describe it, but there's some reason to believe that the dominance of Unreal is holding performance back. I've seen several discussions about Unreal's default rendering pipeline being optimized for dynamic realtime photorealistic-ish lighting with complex moving scenes, since that's much of what Epic needs for Fortnite. But most games are not that and don't make remotely effective use of the compute available to them because Unreal hasn't been designed around those goals. TAA (temporal anti-aliasing) is an example of the kind of postprocessing effect that gamedevs are relying on to recover performance lost in unoptimized rendering pipelines, at the cost of introducing ghosting and loss of visual fidelity.

mikepurvis 1y ago
In principle, Epic's priorities for Unreal should be aligned to a lot of what we've seen in the PS3/4/5 generation as far as over-the-shoulder 3rd person action adventure games. I mean, look at Uncharted, Tomb Raider, Spider-Man, God of War, TLOU, HZD, Ghost of Tsushima, Control, Assassins Creed, Jedi Fallen Order / Survivor. Many of those games were not made in Unreal, but they're all stylistically well suited to what Unreal is doing.
- kridsdale1 1y ago
  I agree. UE3 was made for Gears of War (pretty much) and as a result the components were there to make Mass Effect.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
babypuncher 1y ago
TAA isn't a crutch being used to hold up poor performance, it's an optimization to give games anti-aliasing that doesn't suck. Your other options for AA are * Supersampling. Rendering the game at a higher resolution than the display and downscaling it. This is incredibly expensive. * MSAA. This samples ~~vertices~~surfaces more than once per pixel, smoothing over jaggies. This worked really well back before we started covering every surface with pixel shaders. Nowadays it just makes pushing triangles more expensive with very little visual benefit, because the pixel shaders are still done at 1x scale and thus still aliased. * Post-process AA (FXAA,SMAA, etc). These are a post-process shader applied to the whole screen after the scene has been fully rendered. They often just use a cheap edge detection algorithm and try to blur them. I've never seen one that was actually effective at producing a clean image, as they rarely catch all the edges and do almost nothing to alleviate shimmering. I've seen a lot of "tech" YouTubers try to claim TAA is a product of lazy developers, but not one of them has been able to demonstrate a viable alternative antialiasing solution that solves the same problem set with the same or better performance. Meanwhile TAA and its various derivatives like DLAA have only gotten better in the last 5 years, alleviating many of the problems TAA became notorious for in the latter '10s.
- flohofwoe 1y ago
  Erm your description of MSAA isn't quite correct, it has nothing to do with vertices and doesn't increase vertex processing cost.. It's more similar to supersampling, but without the higher pixel shader cost (the pixel shader still only runs once per "display pixel", not once per "sample" like in supersampling). A pixel shader's output is written to multiple (typically 2, 4 or 8) samples, with a coverage mask deciding which samples are written (this coverage mask is all 1s inside a triangle and a combo of 1s and 0s along triangle edges). After rendering to the MSAA render target is complete, an MSAA resolve operation is performed which merges samples into pixels (and this gives you the smoothed triangle edges).
- wtallis 1y ago
  > solves the same problem set with the same or better performance The games industry has spent the last decade adopting techniques that misleadingly inflate the simple, easily-quantified metrics of FPS and resolution, by sacrificing quality in ways that are harder to quantify. Until you have good metrics for quantifying the motion artifacts and blurring introduced by post-processing AA, upscaling, and temporal AA or frame generation, it's dishonest to claim that those techniques solve the same problem with better performance. They're giving you a worse image, and pointing to the FPS numbers as evidence that they're adequate is focusing on entirely the wrong side of the problem. That's not to say those techniques aren't sometimes the best available tradeoff, but it's wrong to straight-up ignore the downsides because they're hard to measure.
gmueckl 1y ago
This is a very one-sided perspective on things. Any precomputed solution to lighting comes with enormous drawbacks across the board. The game needs to ship the precomputed data when storage is usually already tight. The iteration cycle for artists and level designers suchs when lighting is precomputed - they almost never see accurate graphics for their work while they are iterating because rebaking takes time away from their work. Game design become restricted to those limitations, too. Can't even think of having the player randomly rearranging big things in a level (e.g. building or tearing down a house) because the engine can't do it. Who knows what clever game mechanics are never thought of because of these types of limitations? Fully dynamic interactive environments are liberating. Pursuing them in is the right thing to do.
- andrekandre 1y ago
  > Fully dynamic interactive environments are liberating. Pursuing them in is the right thing to do. great video from digital foundry that goes into that (for doom: the dark ages) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed4vNNQwCDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed4vNNQwCDU

cwbriscoe 1y ago

A lot of the difference went into FPS rather than improved graphics.

bentt 1y ago
This is correct. Also, it speaks to what players actually value.
- LikesPwsh 1y ago
  Also FPS just requires throwing more compute at it. Excessively high detail models require extra artist time too.
- ThatMedicIsASpy 1y ago
  I have played through CP2077 with 40, 30 and 25 fps. A child doesn't care if Zelda runs with low FPS. The only thing I value is a consistent stream of frames on a console.
  - adamwk 1y ago
    When given a choice, most users prefer performance over higher fidelity
    - teamonkey 1y ago
      I would like to see the stats for that.
      - jayd16 1y ago
        > "When asked to decide on a mode, players typically choose performance mode about three-quarters of the time, From PS5 Pro reveal https://youtu.be/X24BzyzQQ-8?t=172 https://youtu.be/X24BzyzQQ-8?t=172
        bzzzt 1y ago

silisili 1y ago

AFAIK, this generation has been widely slammed as a failure due to lack of new blockbuster games. Most things that came out were either for PS4, or remasters of said games. There have been a few decent sized games, but nothing at grand scale I can think of, until GTA6 next year.

jayd16 1y ago
There were the little details of a global pandemic and interest rates tearing through timelines and budgets.

pjmlp 1y ago

A reason was backwards compatibility, studios were already putting lots of money into PS4 and XBox One, thus PS5 and XBox X|S (two additional SKUs), were already too much. Don't forget one reason that studios tend to favour consoles has been regular hardware, and that is no longer the case. When middleware starts to be the option, it is relatively hard to have game features that are hardware specific.

throwaway48476 1y ago
Games budgets ballooned and it was not longer financially viable for single platform games.

vrighter 1y ago

twice as fast, but asked to render 4x the pixels. Do the math

SlowTao 1y ago
Well you see... I got nothing. The path nowadays is to use all kinds of upscaling and temporal detail junk that is actively recreating late 90s LCD blur. Cool. :(

cosmic_cheese 1y ago

Less effort going into optimization also plays a factor. On average games are a lot less optimized than they used to be. The expectation seems to be that hardware advances will fix deficiencies in performance. This doesn’t affect me too much since my backlog is long and by the time I play games, they’re old enough that current hardware trivializes them, but it’s disappointing nonetheless. It almost makes me wish for a good decade or so of performance stagnation to curb this behavior. Graphical fidelity is well past the point of diminishing returns at this point anyway.

martinald 1y ago
We have had a decade of performance stagnation. Compare PS1 with PS3 (just over 10 years apart). PS1: 0.03 GFLOPS (approx given it didn't really do FLOPS per se) PS3: 230 GFLOPS Nearly 1000x faster. Now compare PS4 with PS5 pro (also just over 10 years apart): PS4: ~2TFLOPS PS5 Pro: ~33.5TFLOPS Bit over 10x faster. So the speed of improvement has fallen dramatically. Arguably you could say the real drop in optimization happened in that PS1 -> PS3 era - everything went from hand optimized assembly code to running (generally) higher level languages and using abstrated graphics frameworks like DirectX and OpenGL. Just noone noticed because we had 1000x the compute to make up for it :) Consoles/games got hit hard by first crypto and now AI needing GPUs. I suspect if it wasn't for that we'd have vastly cheaper and vastly faster gaming GPUs, but when you were making boatloads of cash off crypto miners and then AI I suspect the rate of progress fell dramatically for gaming at least (most of the the innovation I suspect went more into high VRAM/memory controllers and datacentre scale interconnects).
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  Yeah there’s been a drop off for sure. Clearly it hasn’t been steep enough for game studios to not lean on anyway, though. One potential forcing factor may be the rise of iGPUs, which have become powerful enough to play many titles well while remaining dramatically more affordable than their discrete counterparts (and sometimes not carrying crippling VRAM limits to boot), as well as the growing sector of PC handhelds like the Steam Deck. It’s not difficult to imagine that iGPUs will come to dominate the PC gaming sphere, and if that happens it’ll be financial suicide to not make sure your game plays reasonably well on such hardware.

ErneX 1y ago

GTA VI is going to be a showcase on these consoles.

teamonkey 1y ago

This article shows how great a leap there was between previous console generations. https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/console-gpu-power-compared-ranking-systems-by-flop/2900-1334/ https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/console-gpu-power-compared-...

CoolGuySteve 1y ago

The current generation has a massive leap in storage speed but games need to be architected to stream that much data into RAM. Cyberpunk is a good example of a game that straddled the in between, many of it's performance problems on the PS4 were due to constrained serialization speed. Nanite and games like FF16 and Death Stranding 2 do a good job of drawing complex geometry and textures that wouldn't be possible on the previous generation

Vilian 1y ago
Nanite is actively hurting performance
- teamonkey 1y ago
  Nanite has a performance overhead for simple scenes but will render large, complex scenes with high-quality models much more efficiently, providing a faster and more stable framerate. It’s also completely optional in Unreal 5. You use it if it’s better. Many published UE5 games don’t use it.
- CoolGuySteve 1y ago
  Well yeah, features that push the graphics card typically incur performance hits.

ryao 1y ago

This is the result of an industry wide problem where technology just is not moving forward as quickly as it used to move. Dennard scaling is dead. Moore’s law is also dead for SRAM and IO logic. It is barely clinging to life for compute logic, but the costs are skyrocketing as each die shrink happens. The result is that we are getting anemic improvements. This issue is visible in Nvidia’s graphics offerings too. They are not improving from generation to generation like they did in the past, despite Nvidia turning as many knobs as they could to higher values to keep the party going (e.g. power, die area, price, etcetera).

timschmidt 1y ago
Jim Keller disagrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Hardware improvements only matter to the extent software is actually able to make use of them.
  - timschmidt 1y ago
    And? Software is getting more sophisticated and capable too. First time I switched an iter to a par_iter in Rust and saw the loop spawn as many threads as I have logical cores felt like magic. Writing multi-threaded code used to be challenging.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Now make that multi-threaded code exhaust a 32 core desktop system, all the time, not only at peak execution. As brownie points, keep the GPU busy as well, beyond twirling its fingers while keeping the GUI desktop going. Even more points if the CPU happens to have a NPU or integrated FPGA, and you manage to also keep them going alongside those 32 cores, and GPU.

Izikiel43 1y ago

The big jump between 4 and 5 was the NVME SSD and hardware decompression IMO. Load times in a regular PS5 are non existent compared to a PS4, that's the big generational jump. For graphics, I agree it looks like diminishing returns.